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Comment by toddmorey | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else worry that we don't really need everything "port to porch" in two days? It's impressive logistics, but I worry about the environmental impact when we so strongly stress urgency over efficiency.

Or are there ways to make rapid home deliveries efficient in ways I don't comprehend?

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I wouldn't expect Deliverr to add much, if any, environmental impact.

The way they work is by partnering with hundreds/thousands of warehouses throughout the US. The merchant sends units in to a few of these, and now the units are closer to the end customer, so it can get there faster.

Whether it's all stored in one central warehouse, and then distributed, or done via Deliverr (& Amazon FBA & Walmart's) way, it still needs to get from A to B. Just now it's closer. There might be a little extra shuffling.

What I love about Deliverr is they have very predictable pricing. I used them for some small units I experimented with adding to my catalog.

Cloudflare (or your favorite CDN company) for physical goods. That's neat!

reverse logistics actually can be environmentally positive. Instead of mailing a return back to the headquarters, you drop it off at kohls or cvs and then it gets batched and sent as a palette rather than as loose mail. Pretty cool stuff

Something I like about Amazon is the ability to nominate an "Amazon Day" (e.g. Friday). When checking out, you have the option of next day delivery as usual, but so have the option to choose your Amazon Day.

As you say, a lot of the time you don't need things the next day, so this is a nice way to group all your orders into a single delivery, while being more climate friendly.

This is cool! I'd never used this despite being an Amazon user for 14 years/however long the Amazon Day has existed.

Lately I've tried to find non-Amazon options to meet my needs, but this'll be great to know for the future :)

I live in Canada but have family in the US. When I was there many years ago I ordered some stuff on Amazon and got the option to delay delivery to a more efficient time, and in return was offered some coupons for either future orders or the Amazon app store (can't quite remember).

I order from Amazon somewhat frequently and would be happy to have 'weekly' delivery rather than next day. 99% of the time I don't need it right away.

I'm in the UK and Amazon has offered this for a while now - they call it Amazon Day. I don't order regularly enough for it to be worth it, but I think the idea is that you order whatever through the week and it's all delivered together on one day each week.

Interesting, I wish they would bring that to Canada. I hate seeing my recycling bin full of one time use cardboard boxes. There's a small chain of hardware stores in North America called Lee Valley (think specialty hardware and tools, not HomeDepot). The owner was so annoyed at all the boxes he offered to pay anyone $0.25 for any box they brought it. He even used not so subtle language like "Those boxes with a smile." It was during the pandemic so I suspect it was a little self serving (ex. their supply of boxes was hard to come by or their cost was greater than $0.25 for regular boxes), but the message came off as very genuine.

Perhaps they've improved this, but when I tried using "Amazon Day", it just meant fewer deliveries, but those deliveries still resulted in the same number of boxes.

It also, hilariously, sometimes didn't even result in fewer deliveries, just all of those deliveries occurring on one day.

I almost always choose "Amazon Day". Most of the time the orders get consolidated into fewer boxes (not always, though).

Even if it only occasionally results in fewer deliveries, Amazon Day is still an efficiency win.

I have Amazon Day in NYC as well. Wasn't aware that it doesn't exist everywhere.

I look at it this way, and see two counterpoints (though I could be wrong):

1) the product has to get to you anyway. Whether they do that in two days or a week, it doesn't seem like the T+NUM_DAYS variable would impact the environment differently.

2) if not for rapid shipping, a lot more people would go out shopping at stores a lot more. A single truck making a lot of deliveries-- even though it's running for 8-13+ hours, may still be more efficient than all of those people making multiple trips to different stores to get what they need.

Once you put the infrastructure (airplanes capacity, delivery cars, processing centers, etc) to do next-day deliveries in place, in a lot of places you don't have enough scale to saturate it, so it's more efficient to run everything over it than to use something else.

This is a very normal thing in logistics. I imagine on the places where there is enough scale, they do offer discounts for slower options.

Reminds me of conventional vs organic milk. Organic milk was far more expensive and in short supply for so long, related to conversion costs for conventional dairy farms. However once McDonalds switched to organic milk, it became cost effective for most dairies to switch over to organic.

I know what you mean, my assumption is that quicker (on-demand) delivery requires more vehicle miles than a slower, batched delivery.

then again, if deliveries took 5-7 days instead of 1-2, more people would probably just drive out and buy what they want, which is worse for the environment than one truck making 200 deliveries per day.

Does it, though? The Amazon truck that delivers my packages drives down our street stopping every few houses. Stopping once extra for my house isn't going to add extra fuel usage.

If the truck is full every day, and drives the same route every day, it won't save fuel to batch deliveries.

If Amazon took longer, I would have to take a trip to the store for a lot more things. Me driving to a store and back uses a lot more fuel than a single truck that is bringing things to dozens of houses on my street.

As others have said, I'm not sure the environment impact is different between 1-2 days vs. a week. In terms of fuel costs etc. Maybe travelling by ship instead of air, or on long haul might affect this though.

I'm more concerned about the human toll on the rapid delivery tbh. As someone joked, I created a prime order that sets off a rube goldbert level of dystopian suffering for a number of humans, just so I get a product at my door that I could have picked up from a local retailer in under an hour.

That's my bigger concern.

We already live in this broken future. Deliverr powers Walmart warehousing and a recent order for 12 units of dental floss resulted in 5 packages arriving over several days.

TBH, while I'm worried about that, I'm far more concerned with the poor state of reverse logistics. The sheer amount of returned product that ends up in a landfill is shocking and, assuming direct-to-consumer online purchasing continues to thrive--and I think that's inevitable--we desperately need a solution that allows products to be rapidly inspected, recovered, and returned to supply chains in a way that's efficient and sustainable.

If you mean vehicle emissions that's a consequence of our country's car-centric design. I lived in a large Asian city for a while and nearly everything that could be carried by a single person was delivered delivered via electric bikes/scooters, both online retail and food delivery.

I appreciate your concern, and I'd support some kind of increased transparency into delivery options' carbon intensity; I'd be happy to choose as delayed shipping as possible if it could help guarantee a lower-carbon trip!

On the flip side, how much of the environment has been paved over for strip malls and their parking lots? A warehouse is much more dense and a delivery route potentially more efficient than everyone driving to the store and back.

I've not attempted to calculate the difference. Just a thought.

Absolutely agree. Jimmy jet set is getting his vibrolux pen set delivered biweekly in record time, meanwhile some of the world waits exorbodently for deliveries of life saving medicine and food, or are otherwise greatly dissserviced by supply and delivery operations.

I mean, most of the stuff we don't even need, never mind needing it in two days.

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