This post seems quite far fetched. Amazon is well aware of the paradox of choice, and the vast majority of UI changes I have seen recently are exactly those that guide and reinforce you to buy one option, without the decision paralysis. Items are not homogeneous, and it is obvious that they try to concentrate purchases to a smaller set of SKUs to reap the same benefits as Costco. It’s simply that Amazon can additionally support the long tail of SKUs with a heterogeneous warehouse system (and heterogeneous profit margins).

On the delivery side: US suburbia is just in general not a sustainable solution. Delivery is just one way in which it bites. Somewhere like NYC, the amortized delivery cost (internalized or externalized) is very low (and opposite to Costcos which require a drive to an inconvenient location).

The bit about agents doing your shopping is falling for the same trap as crypto people thinking NFTs will kill Ticketmaster. These have never been technical problems: the APIs don’t exist for nontechnical reasons.

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titanomachy 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Somehow Costco managed to get their store right in the middle of downtown Vancouver. They put it under some condo towers.

	▲	Grombobulous 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That sounds like they might have leveraged housing development incentives. In a lot of cities with high housing costs you get tax breaks for investing in residential properties. I don’t know if Vancouver has any of these off the top of my head. And what you’re saying is true as a generality, that big box stores often fit in at least some parking in dense areas. I have found that grocery stores and big box stores do the most parking subsidies especially when they expect their customers to be buying a lot of bulky items. They seem to frequently have free or deeply discounted validated parking in underground garages. Maybe not in Manhattan or anything but in many other large cities with high land value in downtown areas.