Re:Amazon’s New Competitive Advantage: Putting Its Own Produ...
by michaelmrose on Monday June 08, 2020 @07:07PM
(#23461764)
The pickers are collecting entire lists of items 1 item for n people is basically the same as n items for 1 person and any given distribution of items. Trucks are dispersed with entire loads full of goods generally going in the same direction. No additional resources are logically wasted until we discuss the last mile where it goes out for delivery and even that is aggregated with many packages to be delivered in the same general area.
In order to discover how much waste there is in ordering 1 thing one day and one the next you have to determine exactly how the route would have differed in each case. Given the delivery truck would probably still have been in your town anyway lets imagine for the sake of argument that it drives an additional half mile each way. If we try to imagine the net effect of lots of extra packages lets say all the extra packages in the truck caused a net of 100 miles of travel divided 100 ways. So lets imagine a net cost of 2 miles of travel. So the person probably wasted the equivalent of 1/5 of a gallon of gas.
More efficient delivery trucks which fedex and ups are rolling out will make a difference. This relies on a few parties that will directly benefit from doing so. Totally going to happen.
Less packaging by actually putting more than one thing in the same exterior packing would make a difference. This relies on a few parties who would benefit slightly. This might in theory happen.
Batching orders instead of ordering item A when you actually need it and item B when you need it doesn't matter much and would be difficult to do. It requires millions of people to think ahead and always order things before they need them. This will NEVER happen.
The people complaining about shipping waste are addressing a legitimate problem that actually could be solved. Your statement is akin to the people that say why do we need to work on problem foo while their are still children starving in Africa. It's true their are and we ought to do something but in the meanwhile we can still do other things to.
In order to discover how much waste there is in ordering 1 thing one day and one the next you have to determine exactly how the route would have differed in each case. Given the delivery truck would probably still have been in your town anyway lets imagine for the sake of argument that it drives an additional half mile each way. If we try to imagine the net effect of lots of extra packages lets say all the extra packages in the truck caused a net of 100 miles of travel divided 100 ways. So lets imagine a net cost of 2 miles of travel. So the person probably wasted the equivalent of 1/5 of a gallon of gas.
More efficient delivery trucks which fedex and ups are rolling out will make a difference. This relies on a few parties that will directly benefit from doing so. Totally going to happen.
Less packaging by actually putting more than one thing in the same exterior packing would make a difference. This relies on a few parties who would benefit slightly. This might in theory happen.
Batching orders instead of ordering item A when you actually need it and item B when you need it doesn't matter much and would be difficult to do. It requires millions of people to think ahead and always order things before they need them. This will NEVER happen.
The people complaining about shipping waste are addressing a legitimate problem that actually could be solved. Your statement is akin to the people that say why do we need to work on problem foo while their are still children starving in Africa. It's true their are and we ought to do something but in the meanwhile we can still do other things to.