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Comment by bbarn | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this makes me sound like a luddite, but I think same and next day delivery is bad for us all. I left the US 2 years ago, where I was ordering nearly everything from Amazon, and moved to a place where it's significantly difficult to get "stuff" without a long drive or a few week's wait time.

The initial lifestyle change was a little rough, but I found myself over time just accepting I didn't need all the crap I used to order. People are fast to call out amazon's treatment of workers, small businesses, etc., but here we see other companies doing their best to emulate it because people still dump money at Amazon.

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Can't relate. I find it incredibly frustrating when one of my projects is delayed for a week because one component isn't available with overnight shipping. I wish every manufacturer used a shipping/logistics provider and passed on the costs to me instead of half-assing it themselves.

Products seem to have a bimodal delivery time between "tomorrow" and "whenever we feel like it". Is it any wonder that we prefer the former?

I mean, everyone loves instant gratification. It's human nature.

One might ask though, if you know you need something only at the last minute, is it really a project or just something you're brute-forcing your way through?

Example, I've been rebuilding a 40 year old VW van. In the US, I'd have just started busting into it, knowing I could walk down to Rock Auto or Pep Boys and get 99% of what I find I need. Here though, I like to drive that van, and camp in it, so I am much more careful about doing repairs. I end up testing an analyzing parts before ordering them (because it can take a month to get them) and thus, end up wasting less, and building my own troubleshooting ability up more. The net result is the same, a car that works, and your way would have been faster, if not a bit more wasteful.

To your other point, I agree! I think a few days to a week would be fine for most things people want, but it's old school "Allow 6-8 weeks for delivery" or "Tomorrow, sometimes today". We know with relative surety the latter is a stress on human workers, so something in the middle which created jobs, without the down side of the high churn work style would be great.

> We know with relative surety the latter is a stress on human workers

I don't think that's necessarily true. When I order from Amazon I can pick from a small number of days when I want it delivered. I have a hard time believing that if I pick the closest day or the day furthest out that anything is substantially different to the warehouse worker. It only changes the day the system will tell them to collect an item from bin #12345 and will put it in a different shipper queue.

I once got a package in less than 24 hours from a normal online store and still remember the delivery person rushing up and down my stairs. I felt a little embarrassed and would gladly wait a day or two if people in logistics could work at a normal pace without stress.

Heh, I've held off on using Amazon's free "same day" delivery before because it felt guiltily greedy.

But the person running up your stairs is a function of throughput, not latency. Getting it a couple days later, but still ordering online, probably wouldn't change anything. I think getting it in 24 hrs just means the logistics supply chain correctly predicted the warehouse to stock your item.

Wait, how are we supposed to live without same day delivery toilet paper ? /s

People complain about the destruction of small and/or local businesses but at the same time order everything online these days. If you're a luddite I guess I'm a fucking cave man, I still can't get over the fact that people get groceries delivered.

It's aligned with our society trajectory though, instant feedback, convenience before anything, no friction, as little human contact as possible, everything as a service, &c. It doesn't matter if the whole system is run by modern day salves or if pollution is literally destroying our planet, we need our goddamn same day delivery toilet paper

ironically, it was all suppose to give us more free time. Yet, there are whole subcultures and religions dedicated to time management now. It's funny in a sad clown sort of way.

In my own life, the consumerism thing that has given me the most headaches lately is that people have figured out the easiest way to make money, a lot of money, really quickly, in the area I live, is to start a storage unit business. They're full almost immediately.

People have so much stuff they will rent multiple empty garages just to store shit no one cares about. I'm talking furniture, electronics, household white goods, clothes, all kinds of stuff. Just clutter and hoard.

It honestly, genuinely, blows my mind.

Well the assumption back then was wages would keep up with productivity growth and prices wouldn't rise to gobble up what gains had been made. Both of those have proven false, first wages stagnated while productivity continued to rise and then housing prices have completely shot through the roof in most major cities from a combination of limited supply and speculative investment.

As a counterpoint, I’ve been able to eliminate my hoarding tendencies now that I know I can get a anything I need cheaply and quickly.

My thought process used to be to never get rid of anything because I might need it one day. My house was filling up with junk.

For me hoarding stuff falls into two categories: "I might need it later", and sentimentality. Your point covers 1, but not 2. However, smartphone cameras have largely solved 2 fore: I take a bunch of photos of the sentimental object so I can remember it later, then I don't feel so guilty tossing it.

I agree that they are lots of bad things about our excessive consumerism. Given human nature, I don't expect that to change at scale without a world event. There is one positive to the deliveries that is often overlooked. The energy used to drive to the store to pick something up and bring it home is generally multiple times more than all energy used to move that item previously. Having a company optimize 10 deliveries in one trip loop can greatly reduce that energy use. Of course, this could be minimized by limiting trips and going shopping when you are already near stores. However, that doesn't match our normal "want it now" patterns. Just saying that there are environmentally worse than things than same/next delivery and that is another variable in the equation.

Yeah, we're in this weird transition between the now and that distant tech utopia future we all envision, except that transition isn't a transition and that utopia is actually a dystopia.

Perhaps not luddite, but perhaps frugal [not cheap].

One can be forward-thinking/innovative/minimalist/environmental/insert-favourite-ideology-here with Great Depression thinking.

Agree. A few weeks is fine. As you say it causes to you to access more carefully if you need a thing.

Also, encourages planning (maybe the opposite of impulse).

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