Batching deliveries could result in massive energy savings. Right now, Amazon's vans tend to hop around neighborhoods (at least that's what their delivery tracker shows me). If deliveries were batched, the delivery density would be much higher, reducing the distance a single vehicle would have to travel to empty a full load of packages.

Absolutely - imagine if there was a system where you had one delivery a week which consisted of all the items from all the shopping you'd done, instead of piecemeal deliveries throughout the week. The savings could be immense, but I can't imagine such a system being popular.

Amazon provides this already: https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=17928921011

Sorry, I wasn't clear - I meant across all delivery services, not just Amazon.

It'd be interesting to see how many people actually use that option to consolidate a significant amount of items on Amazon, though.

You're picking a rather particular example. Most people don't live within 15 miles of an Amazon distribution center. To pick my particular example for contrast, I'm also relatively close to an Amazon facility, but it's still over an hour away by car. And I imagine that, for most people who drive to get around, the nearest big box store is close to their route home from work.

There's also an unstated major premise that packages never come from any further away than the nearest Amazon distribution facility. I suspect that the truth is rather far from that. It at least isn't true for me - I kept an eye on my Prime orders from last year, and 1/3 - 1/2 of the things I ordered originated from a more distant Amazon warehouse, and getting it to me within 2 days involved burning a whole mess of jet fuel. I suspect that the GHG emissions from doing that end up being a massive portion of Amazon's overall pollution.

> Most people don't live within 15 miles of an Amazon distribution center

May not have a huge impact on your overall point, but bump that number up to maybe 20 miles and I actually would bet that the majority of Americans at least do live that close to an Amazon distribution center

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amazon_locations#Fulfi...

Yes, this is all about speed/efficiency tradeoffs in long haul shipping between rail, highway, and flight. It's hard to say what fraction of Amazon orders aren't stored in delivery distance of your house but it's probably most of them.