Posted by bookofjoe 1 day ago
Ok, so 100 people can all drive to the store, or one delivery truck can drive to everyone's house. (Ignoring the packaging waste for a second,) I suspect delivery of single items cuts back significantly on trips to the store.
When I worked from the office, centralized retail was very convenient and hardly added any driving. If you work from home, the opposite is true.
The next revolution would be to standardize reusable packaging, that same daily delivery truck could bring that back. But only government could make that happen.
Realistically you aren't going to reach more than 250k skus within a 20 minute walk of your home, and probably less. Even this is very heavily biased towards using retail space instead of space for anything else (homes, restaurants, parks, offices). You can only build up to add more space within a 20 minute walk so much, because traveling vertically takes time.
With only 250k skus, you're still ordering from outside of walking distance often for items. This is much less variety then the average consumer is use to. Now, you have a dense area with lots of people and lots of business all needing goods brought in and waste brought. It's doable, but requires the right planned infrastructure, and people start trying to optimize the last mile with ideas like package lockers.
EDIT: It's probably possible to reach 250k if you heavily lean on books/cds/dvds with only a few copies each. The actual daily items you'd expect a store to keep in stock (and thus need more inventory of each sku) end up just consuming a lot of space.
I don't even consider those when shopping online.
But there is the added complication of weight. I can’t buy food for a week without driving there. Nor can I go and buy a TV by just walking to the hardware store.
And again, more limited space.
I commute by walking (1h per day) and typically avoid the car when possible, but for groceries there’s just no way I’d go back to walking to and fro.
I'd grab one of those except for the fact that I don't have a sidewalk connecting me to the grocery store. Totes end up working better for me as a result.
> Nor can I go and buy a TV by just walking to the hardware store.
Do you buy a TV more than once every 5-10 years? You can rent a small van or whatever.
Sure I could buy two or three different types of keyboards within walking distance, but none of them used my favorite mechanical switches. I was constantly facing choices where I would either need to travel by vehicle to a speciality store (train, bus or car), or I would order the item in. Judging by the flow of packages into my multi-residential building others were facing the same choice.
I went to that grocery store twice yesterday (picked up a bag of popcorn and a bottle of water to go to the movies, then later some potatoes and sour cream for dinner). I'm going in a few minutes to get eggs for lunch. So three times in the last 24 hours :-)
It means my fridge can be smaller because I don't need to keep as much in there. It means it is really easy to shop whatever is on sale - I have two grocery stores near me. I rarely have vegetables that go bad because I can just buy the stuff I need. I can just stop on the way home from work if I'm working the day shift.
I did this for a while when I lived in the states, too, in a small town. I had a similar experience, but it was far less convenient and really only doable because I was in such a small town and lived alone.
If your events are regular, then you don't need to do the research each time either; and it becomes maybe an extra five or ten minutes.
Price conscious buyers will opt to drive to the bigger, farther away store because it has more variety, and the essentials are cheaper.
I know I do this.
Part of this is overregulation, with zoning and planning departments enacting policies that make smaller retail spaces less attractive to builders and owners, leading to a low supply, and allowing egregious rent for well located small retail.
Yes, economies of scale likely mean that larger businesses can afford lower prices, but smaller businesses also get to avoid some costs (no large administrative corporate departments necessary for a one-location bodega), so the prices probably don't need to be as far apart as they are.
Robinson-Patman is terrible law that’s more or less impossible to enforce equitably. So it hasn’t been.
Aldi and Lidl carry ~2-3k SKUs. A regular grocery will carry maybe 20k. In places where enough of these are built close to where people actually live you don’t ever need to touch the car for shopping. Small shopping centers (those that also have a something like a small book store) will add a few more thousands. A requirement of 250k SKUs in a 20min walking distance is going in the territory of once in a year or more purchases.
I think I drove to do groceries a handful of times in the last 10 years. I have multiple chains close enough that I can always walk, I can buy smaller batches and always have fresh food rather than a truckload to last a whole week but be stale by the end. Self checkouts and the abundance of stores means I have almost 0 wait time.
It can work but it has to be designed properly, and people need to change their habits a bit. Like not expecting hundreds of thousands of SKUs 10 min away at all times (which implies a huge store, so far from where people live).
Lidl also has this interesting approach that they rotate some assortment. You can't find everything all the time. But once you realize that certain things periodically come back, you pick them up when they are in stock to make sure you have them at home. It is not as convenient, but if you make it a habit, it is a very minor disadvantage.
But as you say the 20k SKUs premium stores stock aren’t a necessity. They drive up the costs for the store and the price for the buyer all so the buyer has the feeling they bought something different, when many brands are anyway the same product under different labels.
The premium store 3 minutes from my home stocks 30 types of mineral water. Aldi and Lidl stock maybe 3 of those 30. That’s what 99% of people buy anyway.
And this is ignoring the possibility of ordering less time sensitive specialty goods to a relevant store, where they can arrive on an existing shipment and share an errand with whatever else you might want from that store.
As another point of comparison: Costco themselves say[2] that they have about 4k SKUs, and state that most supermarkets have about 30k SKUs.
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Anecdotally, I can find just about everything I want, in terms of consumables, at Kroger.
Sometimes I walk over to the bodega instead. They don't have much for inventory outside of beer/smokes/soda, and their selection of actual food is both limited and expensive. But it's only a block away, so...
[1]: https://www.foodindustry.com/articles/the-largest-supermarke...
I think people are underestimating the variety of products that are available.
Its not that the ideas are bad or wholly wrong, but their is a sizeable contingent of followers who believe that walkable living is a silver bullet that fixes everything. Everything.
So to someone who happens to fall into contact with an evangelist, they sit and listen for a few minutes, and then come away like they just learned who the real God is. Any societal or personal illness you can think of, the Church of Fuckcars has a confident and surface level "makes sense" answer.
It’s almost like the AI answering “should I walk or drive to the nearest carwash”. Sure I can walk, I just can’t complete the grocery shopping lol.
And then there’s heavier things to carry (drinks).
If you live in a dense environment where you don’t need a car because walking and transit cover your normal life, recouping that much money often more than pays for the higher cost per square foot of building space.
Statistically, a large amount of that is beyond what they need most of the time (whether size, quality, or range).
30% of New Yorkers spend > 50% of their income on rent.
My point was that’s a bit less than the median suburbanite here spends on housing and cars combined. That doesn’t mean either option can’t be improved but that these comparisons should compare the whole lifestyle cost. Otherwise you’re making the same mistake Americans do saying they pay much less in taxes than Europeans without including the additional spending we make for healthcare, college, childcare, etc.
Cam you elaborate on the strawman you seem to have constructed?
Even environment aside, from a purely self-interested perspective, I would much prefer it to dealing with the recycling Amazon deliveries entail.
One problem with the bins for normal items is that rarely will they be packed to the brim. I imagine the overall item density would drop significantly if they started using standardized bins instead of appropriately sized boxes for the items.
And once they do so they'll have solved two big problems! :)
So they were optimizing for something, but it definitely wasn’t packaging efficiency.
Another amusing one was when they packed a somewhat delicate pantry food item in a paper envelope. It arrived thoroughly crushed, exactly as one would expect.
I think this would have been much less likely to happen without the envelope, since whoever packed the truck would intuitively pack the tube vertically.
Results would doubtless be different if they were optimizing for minimal environmental impact or produced waste.
Breakage results.
So this seems like a pretty solved problem. Of course you have to be home to receive the cooled products. There are some startups that sell cooled boxes that delivery persons can open with a code to put stuff in but they are not popular. Since Covid people tend to be at home more often than before.
They’d slice cold cuts in New Jersey, and have USPS bring it to upstate NY and deliver before 8AM. There would literally be a mail van with two orders in it.
I will note like the other person though that I often get like "just one thing in a box that's clearly too big"
... I see someone else has posted this elsewhere in the comment thread. Eh, I might as well post this anyway, because it's confirmation from a different source.
Except: The hypothetical perfectly-packed 53' trailer that leaves the originating warehouse is not the same trailer that delivers stuff to my doorstep. Things get sorted and re-sorted as they move along. It ultimately becomes random instead of optimized, and these random giant boxes take up a lot of space in local delivery vehicles.
Besides, the exceptions can be too exceptional to support any notion of it being deliberate.
It's difficult to describe the biggest box I've ever gotten from Amazon, except to say that it was too big to fit onto the seat of the recliner by the door where I usually put these things. I've received full-size, assembled, 1990s tower PCs in smaller boxes.
Inside of that exceptional box was just 3 ethernet cables, each 1 foot long, that cost me less than $1 each. That whole box could have been a brown paper envelope.
Plus, I seem to recall that they also optimize by giving the driver a route to follow and planning the boxes to be packed in order, so that only one row is being emptied at a time. I know my UPS driver friend has told me UPS does this, and it's an obvious optimization so I'm sure Amazon does it too.
The funniest thing I remember though is that the totes weren't optimized for the size of some of the products available very well - if you put a frozen pizza in it, it sat diagonally, and without enough room to really put anything above or below it. You order four frozen pizzas, and you're allocating many cubic meters of apartment space for them until the next time you order.
[0] https://flexcontainer.com/product/insulated-molded-container...
It’s been a long time. Very plausible that we did get the ones with the styrofoam sometimes and I just don’t remember. I know we got the cooler bag sometime.
I'm not sure how true this is, nor how reasonable it sounds since I don't know what the inside of an Amazon delivery truck looks like, but it sounds like the sort of thing that could be true in some circumstances.
And if I'm wrong about my source, the other person who I could possibly have heard it from is my friend who works at Amazon. As a sysadmin managing a small part of AWS, not in delivery — but he would also be in a position to know.
Either way, I believe that's correct, that the oversized boxes are that size because they were being used as filler in the truck. The algorithm calculates the planned truck packing based on what items are going to be transported together (going to the same city therefore in the same truck), then picks out the box size that each item should go into. And most of them will be correctly sized, but in each row either zero or one (or possibly more in some cases) will be oversized.
https://www.leevalley.com/en-us/reuse-your-shippable-boxes
(at their physical stores)
You'd think Amazon could to that at one of their physical partners' locations.
FWIW most Amazon packages I get nowadays are just heavy paper anyways.
How I would imagine this work if there was will (I don’t think there is)… there are online grocery delivery services that do this already, it’s not that complicated.
You get your stuff delivered in a reusable bag. They charge you 1 dollar for the bag. Next time you have something delivered, you give the bags back and you’ll get your money back.
The implied time synchronicity also sounds like a nightmare. Taiwan does timed trash collection (you have to throw the bag into a garbage truck when it comes playing Fur Elise at 7pm) and there's a reason it hasn't spread.
I just think this is overcomplicating matters instead of just making the package generically disposable, which seems to be what's happening anyways.
The amount of optimization and process improvements required to 'beat that' will be enormous, like infrastructural change enormous.
Your car is very useful an generalized and adaptable.
So are you.
Only you know what you really want, the nuances of comparison, seeing things real, returning them.
Economies of scale work extremely well for Costco.
'Home Delivery' is the operational argument that does not work very well.
If there were a hyper standard for mailboxes and automated delivery for tons of things - and - everyone bought into the same delivery standard, aka robots to the same warehouses, bringing multiple items to people on the same street - then that starts to work out, but we're a long ways away from that.
Home Delivery - in most situations - is effectively a first world luxury.
FYI - meal delivery depends on loopholes on migration, healthcare, work permits, working conditions that if they were all closed and up to standard - would make it just to costly in many situations.
Unless you meant it's a luxury only in the first world, which I could get behind, especially food delivery.
I still remember living in a large suburb in India (not in the city; people had cars). We sat down for dinner and I asked if they had any ketchup. The host picked up the phone, spoke for 10 seconds, and 5 minutes later a boy knocked on the door with nothing but a single bottle in his hand. There wasn't even a grocery store close to the house that I could see.
Never living in any top-rated US cities have I seen anything close to that.
Home delivery in the U.S. is expensive because the labor cost is expensive, and because population is generally more spread out geographically. Cities in China and India have home delivery with much lower cost. But with the advance of robot technology, maybe not too far in future home delivery in U.S. could have lower cost too.
The comments here always blow me away by how totally out of touch with the rest of the world many posters are. No, home delivery is not a luxury, it just works really poorly in your country.
India is going through a 15 minute or less delivery boom right now. It's gotten so popular that the government is asking companies to not promise 10 minutes because that would endanger drivers.
The standard is China is 30 minutes home delivery.
It has nothing to do with loopholes on anything. Just someone managed to convince you that what you've got is better than what exists out there already.
Not sure about India but delivery in China has everything to do with loopholes.
No health care and social security for most, and for the few who have the company artificially fake income for tax evasion.
Working conditions are the usual 12~14 hours a day with 2~4 days off a month.
The electric bike they are riding are dangerously over-limits and categorizes as motorcycles, which are actually banned in most big cities. Of the few that allow it, Shanghai for example, you need to pay ~$70k for registration alone.
In the US the situation is better but not free from problems, for example the first job for a lot of the illegal immigrants who can not speak English is package sorting with similar working schedule, but at least it pays good enough.
Yes, home delivery is a luxury, and it 'does not work' in India - it's only evidence of an utterly broken system.
It's a sign of radical inefficiency and economic failure that labour is being used for those kinds of things because it's extremely unproductive.
"It has nothing to do with loopholes on anything. "
--> it's entirely about 'loopholes' <---
Food delivery is not 'efficient' in India - it's the least efficient process imaginable - that can only work because 'loopholes' - marginal cost of labour is cheap aka no rights, no standards, high unemployment, low wages, externalizations and corruption, sketchy taxation, safety, social insurance, healthcare, emissions, food safety etc.
The only place in the world where 'Food Delivery Works' - is for rich people in First World countries.
That is the only scenario in which labour, rights, wages, taxation, non-corruption safety etc. are all met and the 'comparative value' (aka price) still works out.
That's it - the top 10% in the Denmark etc. can have their food delivered in a way that is 'economically efficient' (maybe >10% for some things) - aka those are the only people 'willing to pay a true fair market price when all of the externalizations are built into the model'.
We're making some progress with automation, probably China are leaders there but it's still not closed to automated and won't be because the marginal cost of labour is still low.
What actually works is delivery of multiple orders to a semi-central location for last-mile pick-up by the customers. In a sense, this is what restaurants and grocery stores are. But to retain the variety, readiness, etc. of delivery, obviously some new solution must come around.
For the person getting the item, it is [extremely] productive.
This assumes folks get deliveries on the same day and largely only from Amazon. And that we cannot build more walkable / bike able infrastructure.
I order amazon on average once every 3 weeks. My mother (who has full time career and is under 60 years old) has never used amazon. Other members of my family also seem to rarely use amazon.
Also, having an order arriving every other day is incredibly wasteful.
If feels like there are Amazon households that get a delivery every or every other day and non-Amazon households that order 1-5 times a year (if that) and batch their purchases from other retailers (physical or online). That's the genius of Amazon. Those that use them, use them a lot.
I can say for certainty that Amazon delivers to my block every day. Adding 1 extra package is definitely more energy saving than me driving to Costco for the same thing.
In the city, I used to see multiple Amazon delivery trucks per day. On the rural road I now live on (dead end road with fewer than 30 households), USPS does most of the Amazon delivery, but this is somehow enough people that we see FedEx and/or UPS drive by pretty much every day in addition to USPS obviously driving by six days a week.
Given that they're also visiting the neighboring roads, it's definitely enough for an economy of scale.
When all the compilers format your hard disk, programming has negative externalities.
When all the candidates are flesh-eating bacteria, democracy has negative externalities.
I can write implications with false premises too!
Others have mentioned the parking lot sizes. If we wanted the best of both worlds, we could have online shopping at Costco with curbside delivery. There has to be a warehouse somewhere which means there are trucks/trains/planes moving goods around regardless. Even Amazon builds warehouses closer to where things need to end up eventually to optimize costs. You are comparing apples to oranges.
Finally, Costco delivers if you really don't want to leave your house. Now we are back to the same model but with far more flexibility.
But yeah the wrong day, and it's 30m at least.
(I have two good sized panniers and can end up with ~$150 of foodstuffs packed well in them no problem. More often than not, I get less than that and add more stops to the trip to pick up from 3-4 places while out. And I get my exercise while I'm at it.)
Prevents wasting money on things I don't need, and makes the trip quick.
I don't know which of us is the more common scenario. What other sorts of things are you doing in the area when you go to Costo? I simply don't have that many things I have to drive for, so I don't have other errands to combine with my bulk good pickups.
Yes, via a service called Instacart.
You can transform anything the Amazon last-mile model if you want to.
In and out in 30 minutes at most. But I've done the same thing at Ikea. You can just go there for the meatballs! You don't have to buy furniture too!
I have never spent more than 30 minutes inside a Costco.
Do you want an 18-wheeler truck to do your curb-side deliveries? Or a personal train?
So you still have to go to the store but it can be an in-and-out if everything works.
From a cars-on-the-road and fuel expenditure perspective, the latter sounds better.
If Amazon customers ordered like Costco shoppers, the Amazon model might very well be better. But they don't, so it isn't.
These are only comparable in an academic business model comparison, in reality, these are different retailers selling different things and consumers behave differently depending on context of what they’re buying. A lot of people want low cost on food, meanwhile, they’ll spend superficially on disposable plastic junk with very little practical value. I’m taking about the American consumer specifically when I say everyone.
We’re usually to “blame”. We don’t do coordinated orders in our household. We have 3 people ordering individually and I know I sometimes place multiple orders per day. But, I’d expect that shouldn’t matter and they’d notice all these orders with the same address could be put on the same delivery truck. Instead, it seems they just process orders as first in first out.
They have recently added a feature in the delivery options if I already have a pending delivery it will say “add to your Tuesday delivery” or similar, which I’m likely to choose. For a while they really wanted me to use an “Amazon day”, which would be like picking Tuesday as the day of the week my deliveries would come on. I specifically pay for Prime to have fast delivery so I don’t understand why they ever thought I’d go for that.
One truck per delivery service
Fedex/UPS cost for a single package is roughly ~$13.95 (this was ~5 years ago when I was working in ecommerce) and even if Amazon was getting a huge discount from them for the volume they do, it was still probably nowhere near $1/package.
It’s equivalent to “I should live in your house for free because the marginal cost is practically zero”
Costco usually tests suppliers' packaging and logistics for products at their ExAmerica warehouses before deciding on exporting that vendor's product to NAM.
This is how Costco became the largest alcohol exporter in Europe, why most frozen fish at Costco is soured from Iceland, and how Chinese, Japanese, and Korean goods and vendors are tested before selling at Costcos with large Asian American populations.
On the other end of the spectrum, the notorious (in the Bay Area) Sunnyvale Costco actually demolished a nearby restaurant just to expand the parking lot.
In lieu of Costco, my family buys all of the big and non-perishable stuff at a giant discount supermarket that's closer to the edge of town, or at least it was until other stuff got built up around it. But we try to minimize the number of trips.
It results in fewer miles driven and more being done per mile driven. Each parking space gets more done per parking space. There's less retail worker overhead and the people that do work are paid better and have a higher quality of life.
The goal is to avoid the car-centric lifestyle, not to optimise it. Maybe that is a totally utopian idea in the us, though.
Your SUV with a Costco haul is probably driving less distance per person and carrying MORE per person while being a smaller more efficient vehicle.
Amortizing fuel per item or distance per item I'm betting the personal vehicle wins while also being better able to deliver perishable/frozen items.
(also the likes of Amazon are terrible to employees in order to make margin while Costco is the opposite)
Amazon goes to great lengths to make purchasing exceedingly easy and fast. And with Prime, customers can buy a single, low-priced item with no shipping costs, cf. the Costco requirement to buy in bulk quantities. As one would expect, this convenience and facilitation leads to more purchases. It also results in more packaging, more waste, more emissions, etc.
This was detailed in a 2024 Netflix documentary that interviewed a former Amazon VP who was fired for her environmental activism
https://www.netflix.com/title/81554996
She disclosed, brace yourself, that Amazon encourages people to buy stuff they do not need
https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/former-amazon-employee-b...
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/29/amazon-settles-with-employee...
Unlike Costco, Amazon does not disclose data on its environmental impact, e.g., carbon emissions. It's possible Amazon's impact is less than Costco's, Costco's data shows its impact is relatively severe, but if that were true, then why not share the data
Is driving to a warehouse, retrieving items in bulk, paying for them and driving the items home, i.e., offline shopping, as easy as placing an order on Amazon
Of course some HN reply will say "yes", implying that the former Amazon VP's story is false
Let the reader decide who to beileve
Anyway, my 55 gallon drum of mayonnaise is starting to go bad, got to make a run.
And how Costco can never be relied on having the same item outside of those core products every time you go to the store? Better buy it now since next month they may no longer have it and you need to wait 6mo before you see it again - if ever.
That’s on purpose to induce you to wander the store more and “discover” items for impulse purchasing.
Costco absolutely optimizes as much as it can to induce impulse buys. Pretending they don’t is a weird take. Amazon might make it more frictionless, but every retailer out there is doing this sort of thing. I kind of prefer amazons way of doing it since it doesn’t introduce friction to my buying experience and waste my time.
Costco is also world renowned as a meme for peak American style consumerism. I say this as an executive member who also buys a lot off Amazon. They are just yin and yang of the retailer experience. I don’t really see one as more evil or better than the other - just totally opposite business models.
How full are those Amazon trucks, and how many deliveries are they each making on their route? If those Amazon trucks are all full, and are making deliveries constantly along their routes, than more trucks doesn't mean less efficiency.
They aren't optimizing for "fewest truck trips to the block", they are optimizing for total cost. As long as we price in all the externalities properly (which we don't, but we could and should), then Amazon is going to be strongly incentivized to create the most efficient delivery schedule.
That may include many trucks running to the same location, or it may not. You can't tell which will be most resource efficient just by observing.
Right but a truck could be full of not 100 packages for 100 houses, but 100 packages for 70 houses. Both are full, but one will require fewer miles driven, hence be more (fuel/environmental impact) efficient (not necessarily time efficient).
They presort regionally and the trucks at the delivery stations are loaded with assigned containers/pouches of packages. It doesn’t make sense to hold a truck for a pouch and doesn’t really save anything to have ground covered twice.
They do other stuff too. They schlep heavy stuff on UPS, and hazardous or liquids usually go USPS.
Whether you see that statement and read it as "obviously the delivery truck is better" or "obviously, going myself is better" is going to be primarily based on how far away from Costco you live, and how much you buy when you go.
I live a bit more than a mile away from Costco. I often buy 25-60 items, for each of the about weekly trips. There's enough large items that a normal delivery truck that could safely navigate and stop often in residential areas would have no change of fitting 100 people's purchases into it in a way to be easily offloaded (just the toilet paper and paper toweling would take up significant space). It's much less wasteful on almost all metrics for me to go to Costco. That's before we get into the fact that most of what I'm buying is produce and other food stuffs I wouldn't want shipped for worry they would spend longer than I wanted out of refrigeration.
If I lived an hour away that calculation turns out entirely differently, at least as long as there's enough people close by with purchases to gain efficiencies of travel.
Either we can view single-packaged items as a gap in the goods procurement process, or we remove the means (Amazon) and view it as a forcing function to not have single-packaged items since a certain % of 100 people will start batching before they drive to the store.
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/mystery-amazon-pa...
I saw commentary from a garment designer that there is enough clothing currently unused on earth to clothe the entire next six generations even if we completely stopped all production now.
At least in person people can try the stuff on and ensure it fits.
I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying it averages out to being better or worse.
Weight of a typical car: 4,000 lbs.
Weight of a typical delivery drone: 80 lbs.
Typical drone payload: 5 lbs.
5 mile drone delivery: ~2 kWh
5 mile car delivery: ~100 kWh
Tesla uses something like 15kWh per 100km, so 5 mile drive is something like 1.1kWh
Amazon's biggest benefit is that anything can be sold there. So now more problems in my life could have a solutions I can buy.
As for the delivery? There are more efficient ways to send deliveries. People can pickup deliveries at work or the gas station on their way home.
People don't care. How is that Amazon's fault?
They do a form of cherry picking the easy high volume stuff, and let other retailers deal with the harder more expensive low volume products.
Certainly useful to optimize their bit of the supply chain, but they only can really account for maybe a quarter of the food items we eat, which accounts for a third or maybe half of total product volume any given month. The rest needs to come from additional store runs or Amazon.
Amazon is also specifically incentivized to be efficient at scale, it impacts their bottom line to the point where they care about the shape of their vehicles. Individuals don't operate on the same scale so these sort of micro-optimizations don't happen.
I honestly can imagine that Costco is overall more efficient than Amazon, especially for people who do shop at Costco. If there's no Costco closeby, its more likely that the individual humans will shop elsewhere or somewhere more convenient.
there are people who regularly go out of their way to drive to their favorite store for like 1-2 special items, people bring their dogs along on trips for companionship and leave them sitting in an air conditioned idling car while they shop
individuals are irrationally inefficient in dozens of ways that large businesses root out, for better or worse
No one is driving an hour out of their way for groceries.
And even the F150 truck example: if they are driving 30 miles to work, but 10 miles to Costco and 25 miles to home (Costco being 5 miles out of the way.), that F150 going 5 extra miles is more efficient than a Prius driving 25 miles from a Costco to their home.
Integrating routes throughout the day that matches your driving habits is a basic adulting task that everyone does, and has reasonably high efficiency.
> that F150 going 5 extra miles is more efficient than a Prius driving 25 miles from a Costco to their home.
but that's not what's happening, Amazon isn't driving a Prius to your individual home then back to the warehouse... it's driving to a hundred people on an algorithmically optimized route. They do this because efficiency at scale makes them more profit.
Individual people make inefficient preferential decisions all the time, because the incentive to measure and improve these things is too low to bother on an individual scale.
The vast majority of those Amazon packages are for one thing. When the inefficient pickup truck comes back with a whole weeks worth of $200+ groceries, that further increases the efficiency of the home buyer.
It's unlikely that a daily commuter would go to Costco for just one gallon of milk or a few batteries. But I know from my Amazon deliveries that single items are delivered all the time.
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Anyone grabbing just some extra milk or toothpaste is likely grabbing it at an even more convenient store, like 7-11 (mostly because you can't buy one toothpaste at Costco lol).
Non-perishables are fine on a single-unit purchase because again, they're not just going to your house, they're going to dozens in your area every single day.
I know where you're coming from, but there's a reason this whole model exists, and it's not because it costs more.
Costco shoppers buy a lot at a time. Because Costco forces you to buy 4 tubes of Toothpaste, 24 eggs (or 60 eggs), minimum 1 gallon of milk (no half gallons or pints), and like 20 lbs of rice / 10kg for the Europeans who havent been here and like 3000 meters of plastic wrap.
For Costco, the efficiency is the shear size of the shopping carts and shear mass of the goods sold at a time.
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You literally can't buy only one bar of soap or one toothbrush like you can from Amazon.com or other stores. There's efficiency here because of simple mass.
In contrast, I can look out and see the Amazon packages in my neighbors doors. It's all single items across the neighborhood.
So it's more like 100 people drive to Costco, and they each buy 20 items and drive home. Or one Amazon delivery truck makes 1000 separate deliveries over the span of a week, because those 100 people made 10 different orders each, only ordering 2 items at a time. (I've even run into the situation where two separate Amazon orders made on the same day [because I forgot something in the first order] will arrive two days later, on two separate trucks, at two different times of the day.)
This part bears repeating in a different way: if I go to Costco and get 20 items, I drive there and back once, on one day. If I order like people typically do on Amazon for those same items, I have a truck/van visiting my address 5-10 times on a bunch of days over the span of two weeks.
Frankly, this goes for food delivery, too.
In a society where everybody is already driving to school, work, food, shopping medical appointments, gas stations, kids sports, etc this is just a marginal additional trip for the consumer.
Having redundant logistics companies (USPS, FedEx, UPS, DHL, Amazon, WalMart, Uber, etc) all making deliveries optimizing for something other than _minimum distance traveled_ means they aren’t optimizing for the same thing the consumer would.
Also, there is the game theory aspect. When a consumer mentally thinks they can just make a $5 purchase on Amazon and get it delivered the next day “for free”, they are less likely to take care to shop in bulk / batch their purchases. Nobody goes to CostCo for a $5 trip (except for the weirdos who go there just for the hot dog / pizza lunch). I personally don’t like the hassle of CostCo for less than a $200 shopping trip.
That said, I don't think this particular comment has the flavor, tone, or message I'd expect, and it does seem to be a genuine HN poster.
Closest Costco is 1 hour on a bus or 22 minutes/9 miles driving. The Wegman's that delivers to me is 40 minutes/26 miles driving, all for a like 10-20% fee on every item. Honestly I'm surprised more people don't use it considering how much time they waste going to these places, and how much more they spend by walking through the stores in person. Sometimes I'll get the receipt and the price will be more than what I paid after delivery fee/tip.
I'm sad the 80$ for 100$ Instacart giftcard deal at Costco is gone. And the $2 off scheduled delivery. At least uber eats/doordash/walmart+/whole foods keeps this market competitive. Wonder how much trader joe's would make if they turned on deliveries?
I live in Spain now and over here we have Mercadona as a "low cost market" and they do basically the same thing - limited selection of mostly in-house brands.
At first I was stlightly annoyed by it but over time it turned out that it's kinda preferred way -- indeed I waste less time hunting for The Brand and just The Item I need. And most of the time quality is on pair (or better) while costing less…
A clever person solves a problem; a wise person avoids it.
I think it holds a lot of truth in engineering.
Could you just place 3 different orders to 3 different vendors? Sure.
Could you just drive to the grocery for 2 bananas and then to Costco for the big discounted paper wipes? Sure.
But likely you will not. Which is why Amazon pulls a Trillion in revenue.
So since I'm 100% definitely going to the grocery store for produce, at minimum, this whole concept fails. May as well pick up the ziploc bags and paper towels as well while I'm there.
I’m not so sure their retail piece is the part that’s making them big money.
Retail has famously razor thin margins.
But their cash flow came in handy when AWS needed 300B in cash for gpus. Nobody could lend them that amount.
My point wasn’t that they don’t do a lot of volume; it’s that their retail business is not what’s driving their profit, and I don’t believe it’s growing.
I wouldn’t be surprised (though have not looked) if DoorDash (with DashMart), Uber Eats (which does more than just food), and Instacart have eaten significantly into Amazon’s revenue by solving the “get it to me” problem even faster.
If you do 2 deliveries per hour (like Uber Eats / door dash), you pay essentially $5/order (assuming a super low us wage of $10/hour and no equipment cost/ gas).
So no in the US, Amazon is not threatened by such delivery services.
Now if you go to China, the equation flips. Which is why Amazon failed completely.
The only order I did for temu, everything arrived completely DOA
Return policy is also pain free. You can pretty much return anything you don't like. Just take it back.
They used to have amazingly generous return policy for electronics. Since some people abused it, bit tighter now.
For me, Costco has good prices, an excellent return policy, and reliably excellent quality. I don't need 15 choices of peanut butter, just a few (smooth and chunky, natural and sugary) good ones.
I also appreciate that Costco employees are always busy, but they seem positive and friendly. Most Costcos I go to, I look for the board that highlights long-term employees. The one nearest me has 8-10 people who have been there for 30 years or longer.
As the article said, Costco pays higher hourly wages than most other people. They also provide extended health benefits (in Canada, so basic health is already covered), paid sick days, paid vacation days (one woman I talked to had been working there for 25 years and had six weeks of annual vacation!), and more.
A wise person knows when to avoid a problem and when to solve it.
It is resolved personally, which is valuable, but most of these things have a larger footprint than that making it a kind of self-prioritizing mindset. There’s some kind of math to the decision involving how much effort, how much personal or short term benefit, how much communal or long term cost. But the math isn’t neutral. So basically choosing to avoid problems is going to correlate with personally better and communally worse. The clever person might be doing the solving, making sacrifices for broader good, and is sabotaged.
They even rebated $100 because it got scuffed during installation :-)
I am not sure if costco's model could allow it but especially for amazon, if they tried to do it or make it their USP like furniture.com, then I can imagine a very different outcome for it overall.
There was also a company I think who spent hundreds of millions of dollars (IIRC) in creating a large grocery website with buying large warehouses then and basically losing a ton of money. That business also failed quite drastically.
Another fun fact: when Amazon was first established, one of the largest loopholes that they had used which one can argue was why they were able to exist in the first place was that although they had selected book for Amazon because books are somewhat centralized (barnes and nobles essentially) but I think that the b&n warehouses required 10 books to be ordered each time.
So within the start, what they did was found out there was 1 book which was consistently out of stock. so they would order 1 book which the customer had ordered and then 9 of those other books. I imagine that if it might not have been for this as well, it might've been hard in the start.
There was also the fact that Barnes and nobles created their website and everyone thought that Amazon would basically die. Logic sort of suggests that it should've.
My conclusion is that Retail works in strange ways and timing matters a lot.
Also there are so many little facts within the book and it might be one of the fastest reads that I had of a book but the dot com bubble does feel quite similar to AI bubble IMO.
Here is a graph that I was making of a very limited connection graph of companies during the dot com bubble. https://files.catbox.moe/xdcxuy.png
I think that i have gone a bit too afar from my original comment but I sometimes like to chat and share bits of knowledge that I know and then I can't resist myself! :-D
I thought for sure you were going to mention USPS “media” rates which allowed Amazon to ship books very cheaply.
Probably thinking of HomeGrocer or WebVan (which bought out the former and then went bankrupt too)
> (which bought out the former and then went bankrupt too)
ironic, does make you think if the clock has reached full circle in terms of bubbles but there are just so many similarities within the dot com bubble and AI bubble(TM) which are just so hard to ignore.
Not only are prices good, but if i lose my remote or need a shovel for the winter or whatever in 2000 im going to a store for that, that 15m of my time each way+parking+less choice.
Lets say i make $50 an hour, and lets say i value my free time at my working rate (i'd argue most people by definition value it more or they'd be working more hours).
Saving me 10m in the store 15m of driving both ways and 2-3m of transit is worth more than most items i purchase.
Amazons solved the last mile problem by having one vehicle bring each item to each home so its marginal cost of delivery is the distance between each home instead of the round trip between home and return that a customer has.
The more items you buy at one store the less valuable this is, which is part of why costco is well served by having such large product sizes.
It's the opposite for me. The walk to the store, screwing around in the aisles, dragging my dog into the dressing room, the walk home enjoying the sunset, those things mean so much more than cracking open a box I found on my stoop.
[0] - https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-shoppers-richer-than-...
[1] - https://www.businessinsider.com/how-costco-sams-club-shopper...
Okay you like Tailwind because you seem to think “p-2” is better than specifying “padding: 2rem;” because when it comes time to tinker with things you don’t want to understand CSS, you want to play with Tailwind.
What is the challenge in downloading class names into a style directory?
Then you didn’t understand my point, because it didn’t make or break a project. Making or breaking a project wasn’t my point.
Who works with Tailwind? The dev writing code or the product person demanding that Tailwind be used in code they’ll never maintain or even look at?
Wow, what a great quote!I think that this combined with "there is no free lunch" explains a lot of thing (IMO)
(I like to write and once I write, I like to send it free on the internet in the spirit of how older internet must've originally intended but if you wish to read the TLDR it is: Be wise in selecting the problems to be clever at!)
I think that this holds a lot within career-making as well, in terms of deciding what career that you want. For example, I think that sometimes I get hyper-focused on a topic and basically dig the weeds and every information about a particular topic. My recent obsession was with the dot com bubble and supply chains.
but at the same time I think that although its just good thinking about it and gives me more breath of knowledge which helps me form a more nuanced person, but that doesn't mean that for every interest that I have, I have to become the expert or a genuine professional career at it.
Some problems are worth the risk/tradeoff when thought from short term but they quickly become really painful over the long term whereas other problems are more fulfilling long term but really hurt short term and there is a balance within the middle which I have selected which is what's know as CS :-D
I am a somewhat frugal guy and my philosophy has always been of do it yourself but reading about supply chains makes me realize just how interconnected we are. A toilet making company in Japan is an irreplacable component within the AI industry (They make the ceramics sheets on which the wafers are built and they are the only company that have the genuine expertise, patent and skills for doing so and they aren't alone and there are many many companies within such thing)
and even a single aluminim screw-esque component could take like 4-5 turns from australia (mining) -> iceland (cheaper energy) -> China (making proper aluminum bars) -> Vietnam (cheaper labour than China so China itself is offshoring it) -> Back to China.
All while a software engineer from say India/America/Europe is making the website and handling the customer service and taking ad decisions/marketing while another MNC (Amazon) ships it to your doorsteps, a company can be formed anywhere nationwide, and the product could be gone to LATAM.
Basically, although I have gotten on a tangent, my main point is that not every problem has to be solved by you. the world has lots of money in every fields as its just soo interconnected and as such you should decide on the problems which are best worth your time, your expertise and your interests hopefully and tackling that problem and maybe even being clever at that! and being wise in avoiding many of other problems.
Be wise in selecting the problems to be clever at! but to be wise on selecting the problems you want to be clever at, you should be aware of other problems in the first place so its good to analyze more problems, though it could very well be a justification that I might provide myself when I am studying supply chains and the humble container, I also find it interesting how the concepts of containers become so intuitive once you know it in modern shipping and then we applied that same concept AGAIN in Docker/podman but before that time, we were none the "wiser" :-D
Indeed:
* Short opening hours
* checking the membership card at the entrance
* cell phone salesmen inside
* item locations change randomly
* items randomly disappear for weeks at a time, as if Leonid Brezhnev was in charge of restocking
* waiting at the exit for someone to check your receipt
* for a while, they'd check your receipt at the self-checkout and then check it again at the exit
* 1970s level IT, inaccurate inventory information
Walmart, on the other hand, is the absolute pinnacle of shitty shopper behavior. People being rude, pushy, completely oblivious standing in the middle of the aisle, etc. At least in my area, Costco attracts a different kind of clientele.
My average food waste from a Costco trip is significantly lower than other grocery stores.
Other stores (Target, Walmart, etc) will let you look up the item's aisle in their app and be considerate of your time.
I used to work right across the st from one and would spend most of my shift looking out at their parking lot and you could see it get more packed throughout the day, thin out a little bit in the early afternoon and then slowly drain towards closing.
It's always least crowded right at open and then an hour (? or maybe two?) later they open for the "regular" people and once that's the case, it fills quickly.
Hah. It’s such a PITA that Costco includes an hour earlier entry on the top tier membership.
I often see people cruising around still looking for parking while I already managed: to park, walk to the storefront, get myself a hot dog, eat my hot dog, grab a cart.
Where are the employees? There are so few employees (other than cashier) on the ground in a football field sized warehouse. Good luck finding someone if you have a question
It still exists in select locations in some countries, but are more exotic experiences than anything else. Shopping for weeks of groceries at a time is IMHO crazy niche, it requires a level of isolation and buying power that is seldom combined.
Our situation is pretty common; it's just a normal grocery store in effect for lots of people. The weird stereotype of Costco shoppers driving for miles to buy huge carts of food just doesn't line up with the typical case for my area.
Haven't had Amazon Prime for 2+ years and don't miss it, but would definitely miss my Costco membership.
Sadly this is not the case anymore these days.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/us-retail-giant-costco-s...
[1] - https://maps.app.goo.gl/?link=https://www.google.com/maps/@1...
In Florida, driving up through Georgia, the billboard advertisements start 200 miles away.
Truly shocking thing is that it’s genuinely high quality (considering the venue) and reasonably priced. It’s exactly the sort of product American capitalism is supposed to produce, but almost never does.
There are lots of videos on YouTube.
There's even a billboard 979 miles away in Arizona: https://stock.adobe.com/images/eloy-az-nov-23-2024-buc-ee-s-...
Happy Independence Day!
Having now lived a few years in the Netherlands, I much more prefer the ability to cycle/walk by one of the myriad of grocery stores in my day to day area and grab what I need for todays dinner.
Here membership is unusual in that it isn't technically open to everyone, it's business and certain professions: https://www.costco.co.uk/membership but in reality anyone who wants to join can find a way.
Also no mention in the article of non-food. In UK Costco is known for special offers on electrical and white good and more. And cheap car tyres iirc
In the UK not everyone drives like USA and Costco's are few and far between, so that limits who shops there. So a niche player compared to the Supermarkets for consumer shopping.
And people also have smaller homes compared to USA and smaller families maybe (or smaller portion sizes...!), and Costco here is more geared towards selling in bulk, and to corner shops and other small businesses. It's more of a hybrid Wholesaler.
Price Club, a Costco predecessor was the same way.
In the early 1990s, Walmart (Sam's Club) wanted to merge with Costco. Costco said no and merged with Price Club.
I ordered a dishwasher from Costco UK last week.
> According to the Costco U.K. website, memberships to those stores are only available to certain groups of people. Since the store is classified as a wholesaler, this complies with the U.K.'s wholesale store laws. These dictate that wholesale stores are only accessible to those working for select business sectors.
[1] https://www.thedailymeal.com/1483679/costco-uk-membership-re...
Not long ago I was in a Five Guys in France. There was a sign saying that by law free refills are not allowed, please scan the qr code to fill your cup. I guess there was a qr code on the receipt, I don't know, as far as I can tell there was no enforcement and people just kept filing up their drinks like true Americans. Let freedom ring, I guess.
https://www.gov.uk/countersigning-passport-applications/acce...
Reminiscent of Borges' list: https://thewhippet.org/the-whippet-134-those-that-tremble/
For me, I'll join a friend who has a membership from time to time, but I'll only get chicken breasts, a rotisserie, maybe frozen fruit if the price is competitive, and... soap; everything else is just noise and/or extra calories that I wouldn't have bought anywhere else but happens to fit in the industrial-size cart and usually isn't a substantially better price, or it's just not a good offering. I could buy greek Yogurt cups, but really I don't want that brand or the lemon or lime ones, so I'm paying marginally less to enjoy half of them. I could buy salsa, but unless it's a party, I have no need for a year's supply. It's just a lot and it's probably kind of agreeable. Also the blankets, they're alright.
The small selection of things I get are the few items—as the probably AI author suggests—that I'd either buy anyway in smaller quantities or just don't have opinions about. The one time I actually did have a membership, I'd find myself working backwards from it to justify to expense. I let Costco borrow my money and to get it back I'd need to exploit their good deals, but ultimately they just made a killing off of me filling my cart with arbitrary bullshit stuff.
This is not reflective of the Costco shoppers I know and the place Costco fits in their lives.
Bi-Rite and Erewhon or Citarella and Eataly are not Costco competitors.
To understand the appeal of Costco to suburban families, you have to understand their caloric needs. Costco is the best solution if you need to buy 48 eggs and 4 gallons of milk a week along with 8lbs of chicken, 4lbs of turkey, and pounds of broccoli, green beans, spinach, sweet potatoes, onions accompanied with apples, peaches, mangos, avocados, blueberries, strawberries and oranges.
I don’t need “a varied sense of taste” to budget and do simple math to determine the membership is worth it.
Babies don’t need “a varied sense of taste” to use diapers purchased from Costco in bulk at a great price.
Do I lack a “varied sense of taste” when I buy ingredients from Costco, like chicken thighs and rice and eggs and olive oil, and cook them at home?
Honestly I wouldn't say Costco is terribly convenient, other than the limited selection.
Everything else I'd rather get from my local grocery stores.
the lack of choices for similar products is a huge plus for me - speeds up the shopping process considerably, and their curation is pretty good
