One of the reasons I quitted Amazon Prime was ecology.
My neighborhood is plagued with Amazon delivery vans.
They are everywhere, double parked, which makes traffic a mess in a place that used to be a quiet neigborhood.
I am sure Amazon has no idea about how many CO2 they emit, since most of them are freelance contractors.
But since they don't pay much, they have no low emission vehicles, and makes the rest of the people emit more CO2 since they double park everywhere.
Having N people drive to your neighborhood could be more efficient than M people driving to the store individually if M >> N. So now when you want something you drive to the store? How is that better?
I think the key difference is that in the absence of fast delivery, when you need something, you'll just wait a bit until you have more things to buy. So you'll do one trip to the store for 10 items. Plus you'll go to other places on the way (and meet people but that's another aspect).
So the real number is not M but M // 10.
So i'd say fast delivery indeed increases the number of trips, since it enables people to be lazier and just order whenever they need something.
Does it really matter if the delivery driver is going to be on your street anyway? Or put another way, imagine you live on a street with 10 households. On average, one household might drive to store each day to pick up 10 items. Isn't it nearly the same efficiency if one person drives from the store to your street once a day to make deliveries to some / all of the households?
I just quit my prime over this news. I was not really buying much from Amazon, I have a list of stuff I need and when it gets big enough I go get it all from local stores so support them. I was kind of keeping prime for the TV and because of their eco pledge. Now that’s gone. I’m not longer a customer, and I couldn’t care less about it.
It's funny because, if anything, this post highlights the futility of consumer-level actions. One corporate action can have the effect of all individual actions of thousands of people over their entire lifetime.
I somewhat understand the nihilism at play here, but it's not like those trucks exist absent consumer demand. They aren't driving around for fun!
It doesn't matter that you are not giving the company money anymore, until enough people independently make that decision and then it starts mattering. This is a thing that happens in every economic sphere.
On the other hand, consumers have little control over businesses. I'd be fine with eco friendly delivery, eg more wait time to minimize trips in the neighborhood, electric cars, etc. Most of the time I'm sitting on a full online cart for days, and removing stuff I don't really need until I'm happy with the order: I can wait.
