Yeah, this argument falls flat on it's face. Of course it's more complex than that.

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.

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Supermancho 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

In the US, most people don't their shopping near the office. In Renton (commute into Seattle), it was commute to and from, then optionally local grocery stores to and from. WFH has dramatically reduced our driving which is a bonus over time saved.

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newaccountman2 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I could imagine Amazon incentivizing reusable containers on their own TBH. If I was living in a house and not an apartment, I could easily imagine putting the Amazon bins back out so the next time I get a delivery, they take those, and we are constantly cycling bins back and forth.

Even environment aside, from a purely self-interested perspective, I would much prefer it to dealing with the recycling Amazon deliveries entail.

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dpark 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Amazon did that with an earlier version of their grocery delivery service. I assume the cost and logistics of managing and cleaning the bins just wasn’t worth it because their grocery service delivers in paper bags now.

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.

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MikeTheGreat 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well, if there's one company on Earth that's both incentivized to find an algorithm to efficient pack stuff into their shipping bins and also well-financed enough to actually figure out a good linear or quadratic-time algorithm to do so, it's definitely Amazon.

And once they do so they'll have solved two big problems! :)

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SllX 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They might have the ability to do so. The motivation? Well let me put it this way: I tried Amazon’s grocery delivery service, and stopped using it because everything—everything—kept arriving in its own individual bag regardless of whether it made any sense, so it was just a bunch of bags I had to carry upstairs. That bags also had no handles.

So they were optimizing for something, but it definitely wasn’t packaging efficiency.

	▲	dpark 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Optimizing for dollar cost. Human time costs more than the extra packaging. Results would doubtless be different if they were optimizing for minimal environmental impact or produced waste.

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kjellsbells an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I see what you did there. Touché.

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newaccountman2 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

OIC.

I will note like the other person though that I often get like "just one thing in a box that's clearly too big"

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scrame 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I quite often get inappropriately sized boxes.

	▲	danudey 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I remember reading somewhere that the boxes are not sized to the items they contain, but to a combination of 'items they contain' and 'space we need the box to take up on the truck'; i.e. if you have five items of one unit size in a six-unit-wide truck they will slide around (and potentially get damaged, fall over, etc), but if you put one of those items in a two-unit-size box then the boxes will not slide around, meaning that while the box is inefficiently sized in isolation it is optimally sized in a logistical context. 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.
	▲	dpark 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I do too, but also sometimes the boxes are the correct size. With standardized bins I imagine they would rarely be reasonable.

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llbbdd 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I used this service before it rolled out widely and these boxes were a mixed bag. On one hand they worked really well, they were essentially insulated hard totes with styrofoam lining and often had dry ice in them for anything that needed to be kept cold. On the other hand, I lived in an apartment, so storing 3-4 totes for a week or more was a real chore.

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.

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dpark 2 hours ago | parent [-]

They must have been using different crates for you (different region or perhaps era). For me they were standard plastic bins[1] with a separate “cold bag” inside for frozen stuff. No actual styrofoam I recall, although this was also over 10 years ago so I could be misremembering.

[1] https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/S-9745G

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llbbdd an hour ago | parent [-]

The style of plastic bin definitely looks the same. The ones we were getting looked something like this[0], same folding-flap top as in your link but form-fitted insulation inside:

[0] https://flexcontainer.com/product/insulated-molded-container...

	▲	dpark 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah. I’m not certain if the Amazon ones were actually the same as the ones I linked. But extremely similar at least. 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.

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imoverclocked 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"Amazon bins" ... or maybe just reusable bins that aren't specific to a company? See: shipping containers. A standard bin for home delivery could still have "Amazon" painted on it but the rest of the infrastructure wouldn't be Amazon specific.

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cyberrock 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That idea is intriguing but brings up a lot of questions. If I live out in the middle of nowhere, order something but take a long time to open it, when does the Amazon truck come back to take the packaging? If there's a million of us procrastinators, is it really that much better than normal centralized garbage collection? Milk bottle delivery and collection only worked because the product naturally had a time limit, and once home refrigeration took off, the practice went away because people didn't consume on the same schedule.

FWIW most Amazon packages I get nowadays are just heavy paper anyways.

	▲	serial_dev 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You don’t need time limit, you just need to deal with the company frequently enough for this to work. 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.

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ghaff 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In fairness, Amazon does seem to have improved in this regard. There's less plastic and fewer comically oversized boxes.

	▲	dexterdog 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Order whole foods from them. They will pack 6 things in 4 reusable insulated bags. The problem is there is no way to send those bags back to be reused.

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scarab92 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Amazon already delivers to the house next door to yours. The incremental cost of an extra stop is near zero. The efficiency of home delivery vastly exceeds people going to the shops themselves, even if they are stopping at multiple shops.

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paulryanrogers 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> The incremental cost of an extra stop is near zero.

This assumes folks get deliveries on the same day and largely only from Amazon. And that we cannot build more walkable / bike able infrastructure.

	▲	NavinF an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Amazon already gives a discount if you're willing to wait for them to batch deliveries. Personally I would still have an order arriving every other day regardless of walkable/bikeable infrastructure. Same as most Americans.

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Zambyte 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Anything to avoid walkable neighborhoods, naturally.