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Comment by macNchz | Hacker News Reader

Funnily enough, the fact that these drones are being employed to deliver "toothpaste and batteries" is really kind of a perfect microcosm of the kind of American planning and zoning foundational to modern NIMBYism—in a different environment, daily necessities like that would be available at a corner store very close to where people live, but we've found it preferable to make such restrictive residential areas and require businesses to have large parking lots such that corner stores have disappeared in favor of strip malls and big box stores, and now we're trying to replace those with annoying drones.

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American zoning prohibiting shops in residential zones but allowing a drone hub just 800ft from residential buildings is a special kind of irony

When you learn more about the history of zoning - it's allll about keeping neighborhoods wealthy. Not allowing lower classes in. A lot of weird things make sense when you look at them through that lens.

American zoning in theory: we will keep noise and pollution away from homes.

American zoning in practice: the only place homes are permitted is within 50 meters of freeways.

Ha! So true.

It's fascinating, zoning in practice just has nothing to do with any of its stated goals.

> American zoning in theory: we will keep noise and pollution away from homes.

I think you misunderstood the parents comment.

The origins of zoning is to prevent the mixing of blacks and whites. It's not about noise pollution; it's about segregation.

this is misinformation -- zoning is complex; basically it appears that "if zoning was ever used to separate minority neighborhoods" then it becomes "zoning is to prevent mixing of races"

Let's be perfectly clear -- racial segregation is illegal in the USA; zoning has many implementations, many uses, many pressures and has baggage from historical situations

We're discussing the origins. The origin of zoning clearly is racial segregation. It was an explicit response to the supreme court decision that outlawed racial covenants.

The "zoning was done by the racists" along with "white flight was what destroyed the cities" is a dumb just-so narrative that the modern analogues of those people peddle so that they may distance their analogously poor sighted idea, movements, advocacy and politics from the mistakes that the

The fundamental problem is that a large part of the population feels entitled to use government to micromanage things that are better off just not managed at all.

It is none of your business what your neighbor puts on their property whether it's a homeless shelter or luxury apartment or a bodega or a fancy coffee shop. Real estate development is something market solves very well if people mind their own business and not other people's business.

That zoning was invented for racial exclusion is not hypothetical. These guys were on the record with their motivations.

The whole race thing is a distraction from the fact that the evil motivations to use the force of government to micromanage others for the most petty and frivolous of reasons (a category that "wrong skin color" would surely fall into) persist to this day.

I agree, because I hold vanilla libertarian beliefs about property rights. Unfortunately 99.12% of American libertarians are using the word to mean "selfish asshole" and as soon as you suggest that zoning is a government taking, they abandon the whole platform to defend zoning.

I'm with you, fellow .88%!

>and as soon as you suggest that zoning is a government taking

Not just zoning, but pretty much any government regulation. It boggles my mind that my state's equivalent of the EPA can just decree whatever their policy is, which has consequences on what they'll approve or won't, and this affects land values massively, and this doesn't legally get classified as a taking.

>they abandon the whole platform to defend zoning.

Which is a social problem that pretty much the entire western world suffers from these days. We don't shun, marginalize and otherwise punish people who are chronically two faced and lack principals (whatever those principals may be).

Instead of worrying about the people - make government pay for takings. It'd be a popular initiative (by which I mean capital-I Initiative, the process available in the Western states).

> It is none of your business what your neighbor puts on their property whether it's a homeless shelter or luxury apartment or a bodega or a fancy coffee shop.

I appreciate your maximalist libertarian proposition, it's a fun exercise when you have no skin in the game. But a) housing is an investment as well as a lodging (and for most people their largest investment), and the value of that investment has everything to do with what's around it. 2) community is a real thing, even when it describes a group of people outside the usual members of sympathetic "intersectionalities".

Everyone hates HOAs until they have to live next to my father, who kept three rusting "parts cars" in the driveway, piles of scrapwood in the yard, and let our dogs run all over the neighborhood.

Zoning is in the history sweet spot: Recent enough that we have well-preserved records of its origins and use. But old enough that we have had time to study the effects in practice, regardless of original intent. Widespread enough that we can know any effects were not hidden variables from local geography or politics. But not universal, so we can compare the effects over time with and without it.

That's all to say that it is well understood by people who study zoning in the US, of which there are plenty, that american racial dynamics are central in the history and use of zoning. It was not always used intentionally for segregation, but it was used for that very frequently over a long enough period of time that you can't consider it incidental to the practice.

If you look to the early 20th century you can read the discussions people were having at the time about it: letters, and op-eds, and sometimes the ordinances themselves explicitly discuss the racial justifications. At the time racial segregation was well within the national overton window, they did not have a reason to hide to hide this motivation and so they did not. Later on it gets more complicated.

I went to Disney World for a long vacation. I stayed in multiple Disney properties, just for the novelty. The cheapest "resort" (really just a large motel complex) was one experience, the most expensive a very different one.

I preferred the expensive one.

I don't hate the poors.

Except when zoning intentionally destroys the value of neighborhoods where undesirables live - how the highways were built, red lining, etc.

Neither of those were zoning. It's easy to conflate a lot of these actions together, but they are very different legal structures.

is there a book that chronicles that history accurately? interested

(I know there's been a lot written about redlining specifically, but I'm talking more broadly of the development and history of zoning.)

"The Color of Law" gets into some details, though it's not explicitly about zoning. Other books about zoning are... strangely supportive.

Here in Los Angeles we have honest to God oil derricks on public school grounds and in the middle of our neighborhoods but you can't build an apartment or open up a new corner store because of zoning.

In *some parts of Los Angeles. The city is getting better district by district, if only incrementally.

The east side of Los Angeles (Los Feliz Silver Lake, Atwater Village, Echo Park, Highland Park, Eagle Rock, Glassell Park) has managed to replace most of its neighborhood councils with YIMBY-sympathetic types that are pushing for mixed use and density along their arterials.

Not that it’s the end-all-be-all solution, but compared to the west side where I have family, it’s a breath of fresh air to see neighbors generally cautiously enthusiastic about new development rather than immediately trying to figure out how to stop it by default

I grew up in Middle America Suburbia, with big yards, cul-de-sacs and strict zoning laws. I thought it was normal that, for anything you wanted to buy, you had to get in a car and drive to it. I was told it was because of zoning laws, and it was meant to keep the neighborhood "peaceful". Well, in college I dated a girl from East LA, and she once took me to visit her family. The neighborhood had zero zoning enforcement. Every house was basically a residence and a small business - hair salons, taco shops, car repair shops, etc. It totally shocked me, like "How could people live like this?" And then we walked the neighborhood. I was shocked again how everyone knew one another so well, and all the little businesses served one another. It was a full-on bartering system, like, "Here's some fresh tortillas. Tell your Mom I'll be by next week with my daughter to do her hair for her quinceanera."

I lived my entire childhood in the same house in Suburbia, and I still don't know most of my neighbors' names. The neighborhood was "peaceful", because of zoning laws, but it was boring as shit, and most of all, I'm not so sure having to get in a car and drive just to get a box of cereal was a good thing.

To borrow a line from Marvel's Ultron: "I think you're confusing peace with quiet."

Don't get me wrong, I like my quiet suburb too. That said it's become increasingly apparent to me and I feel to society at large how incredibly atomized and alienated our society is with itself. All of us have "community" on the Internet, which is both not as good, and also is insanely catered to your individual desires and wants, and this is, frankly, unhealthy. A little social friction with people you live and work amongst is a good thing, it teaches you how to resolve conflicts, how to express difficult feelings, and how to negotiate your way through the world.

I'm reminded of the book "Life in Code" by Ellen Ullman:

“…the ideal of the internet represents the very opposite of democracy, which is a method for resolving difference in a relatively orderly manner through the mediation of unavoidable civil associations. Yet there can be no notion of resolving differences in a world where each person is entitled to get exactly what he or she wants. Here all needs and desires are equally valid and equally powerful. I’ll get mine and you’ll get yours; there is no need for compromise and discussion. I don’t have to tolerate you and you don’t have to tolerate me. No need to care for my neighbour next door when I can stay with my chosen neighbours in the ether, my email friends and the visitors to the sites I visit, people who think as I do, who want what I want. No need for messy debate and the whole rigamarole of government with all its creaky bothersome structures. There’s no need for any of this, because now that we have the World Wide Web the problem of our pursuit of happiness has been solved! We’ll each click for our individual joys, and our only dispute may come if something doesn’t get delivered on time. Would you rather be at home?”

And what is this if not the core essence of Suburbia? Tiny kingdoms for tiny kings, each answerable only unto itself, and utterly beside itself with rage any time that authority is questioned by... anything, from Neighborhood Associations to building codes to the local city.

Your quaint experience in the barrio isn't justification for having an unlicensed automotive repair business (which process hazardous waste) run out of a personal residence is a good thing.

I'm sure if that guy could move his business he would, if money and personal circumstances dictated otherwise.

Typical straw man argument

If that interests you, maybe the question "how did it get to be like this" will too. This video is pushing a point down your throat. If you can ignore that at the end it compares Canada's New London to Holland’s Utrecht: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0

Turns out the choice between "Middle America Suburbia" path and the other you describe really is a choice. Some have very deliberately chose one and some equally deliberately have chosen the other.

Like you I've nearly always lived in the "American Suburbia" style. Like you I literally didn't realise (in fact I would have scoffed at the idea) there were other choices. That was despite the fact I was taught by migrant European teachers, who, when I look back, made it very plain what they thought of the "American Suburbia" style of living. Us calmly accepting the extra overheads of longer roads, consequent travel times, power transmission, transport fuel costs, freight and so on just blew them away. It blew me away too once I understood it.

Then, again like you, I got live in one of these high density neighbourhoods for a very short while, and experienced the level of social cohesion and the "big village" feel of it.

Now I think "wtf? I've been had".

My mom is beginning to get old and now has cataracts. I wonder what happens to the Americans who can no longer drive a car due to age, disease or handicap? You're effectively stranded in this suburbia.

Independent businesses can't pay to kiss the ring in the form of all manner of local permits and hoops that must be jumped through to the benefit of various parties who otherwise have no stake in the matter.

Amazon can.

Chain stuff can.

That's a large part of why every good school district that's inevitably full of bad people winds up looking exactly the same.

While I oppose restrictive zoning, that fixing that isn't going to change the situation. Where people live is a compromise and the single family house in the suburb has some great properties that mean many people will choose that set of compromises. The density of single family houses doesn't support a corner store. It did before the automobile/streetcar, but now that those are common people will prefer to travel to to the much cheaper big-box store (which also has more selection) for most purchases and that doesn't leave enough "I just ran out of one thing" to support a corner store.

Don't get me wrong, there will be more corner stores if they are allowed. However the economics of retail mean that most single family homes cannot not be in walking distance of a corner store. It gets worse when you account for single family houses being so car dependent people will out of habit drive to their neighbors even though the walk from where they park their car is longer than the door to door walk.

People go on walks or bike in their neighborhood all the time. A suburban neighborhood could absolutely support a corner store with a handful of parking spots. We just don't allow for the experiment to even happen due to zoning regulations.

The zoning also is way too specific. Not far from my house is a busy intersection that has stuff like pawn shops and a run-down 7/11 at it. Very close to the intersection is a lot that's been empty for at least a decade now. A few years ago my wife and I thought we should look up what it costs and see if we can just pave it and put a food cart pot down. Turns out you can't do it. You must build a two-unit building with a specific number of rooms and square footage. WTF?! It's like a planned economy for housing. Needles to say, the lot is still empty because nobody wants to build a home like that in that location.

The magic word is "variance" - the problem is it takes time (not even money, usually just time) to popularize an idea and get it publicly accepted and then pushed through the city council.

I've seen it done; sometimes it takes a few months because it's simple and nobody cares, other times it takes years.

And often the city council is itself playing the long game; waiting for the pawn shop and 7/11 to go out of business or sell, and then they snap it up, bulldoze it, and sell it to a developer who will build what they envision for the plot.

Something that turned me on to these issues in the first place was reading through the P&Z committee minutes for my rural New England hometown, where simply opening a hair salon in an existing, vacant commercial space in the village center has been a multi-year affair because their variance for not having off-street parking expired when the previous business closed.

It's in a 150 year old commercial building and has had a variety of even higher-traffic businesses in it for decades, but now the town has created this artificial barrier to filling the existing space, which clearly functioned just fine before (the town has plenty of parking), and is dragging the process out through meeting after meeting. It's frustrating to watch.

It's surprising how little effort is needed to move the needle on those kinds of things. If you started showing up at meetings and complaining about wanting the hair salon, it could be the difference between tabling for another month and letting it through.

Especially if the number of people complaining keeps growing.

I've seen it happen. The vast majority of these things go so far under the radar that it's no wonder the decision is often the "conservative" one (by which I mean status quo, the activity that requires no activity).

So, as an ignorant foreigner... surely someone already _has_ tried this, right? Like, I gather US zoning is pretty localised; there has to be _some_ local authority who has tried it.

Sure, to greater and lesser degrees! Prominent master-planned examples include Seaside, FL [0]; Celebration, the Disney-designed suburb near Orlando with its “town center”; and, in a less ambitious variant, The Villages, a collection of retirement communities notionally premised on “village”-scale lifestyle (and accessibility by golf cart) [1].

My impression is that people like them just fine when they get built, it’s just not The Way Things Are Done at the (rather local) planning level. Maybe more about inertia than malice—and, like so much of the built environment, planning today is accountable to the accumulated political weight of all the individual families’ and developers’ decisions that led up to this point.

[0] https://www.theamericanconservative.com/new-urbanist-paradis...

[1] https://www.thevillages.com/shopping-dining/

US zoning is complex. While final control is local, the state and federal government puts rules in place. The feds mostly if you do X you get some subsidy (loans for single family houses for example). States often set the rules that locals abide by - the local says some area is R1 (single family), R5 (apartments I think), C1 (retail but I'm not sure what type).... but state law says what those codes mean. The local can choose which of the zones an area is but probably cannot create new ones. The local can give a variance for you to do something not allowed, but everyone who wants it needs to follow state rules.

Remember zoning has been around for around 100 years. The rules change all the time. What I gave as examples were true at some point in history when I looked this up but may not be today. There are 50 states with their own rules. Some states have things like counties that sit between the state and the local. Generally states look at what others are doing and follow that with tweaks, but not always (New York and California are most likely to do their own thing - and they are the most populas states so they matter even if a minority of the total.)

The reality of many countries show that people are not averse to local shopping. They only become so if there are no really good options to use a car and drive a few miles to buy a single toothpaste.

What you say is likely true. I've seen even crazier developments though. Not super far from me is a giant development of 3-4 story apartment buildings. It's easily a mile long and 1000ft wide. Just identical mid-rise buildings but not a single store, cafe or restaurant. It's truly the worst of both worlds. No privacy and space and zero walkability. Even by car the next decent grocery store is 5 minutes away.

Entirety of Irvine, California

They can only afford to live in those single family houses in the suburbs because they don't have to pay the full cost of the infrastructure to run miles and miles all the way out to their house. It's being subsidized by the taxes paid by folks in the inner cities.

Then why do cities keep annexing suburbs? If they are such a resource sink you would think the opposite would be true - cities would shrink their borders.

The people doing the annexing gain power and influence by extending their reach and base of constituents, but they don't (as individuals) pay the price of supporting those neighborhoods.

In our cities history, it was EXPLICITLY to maintain republican control of local government. The city, it's like 200 years history, has REPEATEDLY split and consumed neighboring locals full of rich white guys to maintain a rich white republican control.

The is a strong towns talking point, but it is completely wrong. The first suburbs were built in the 1880s, 140 years latter they have built and rebuilt all their infrastructure.

Most of a city budget isn't even the infrastructure costs you claim they are not paying. If you expand out to the state where the highways are paid for the cost of infrastructure is even smaller as a percentage of the budget.

Densities have changed quite a bit across American suburbs over time—Brooklyn Heights, considered to be one of the first commuter "suburbs" in the 1800s is like 75k/people per square mile, Levittown, perhaps the first real planned cul-de-sac community in the late 40s: 7.5k, whereas a modern single family subdivision suburb is more like 2.5k.

That is mostly about birthrates. The number of houses is similear.

Either that or your are cherry-picking your examples. Where I live the suburbs from the 1920s are slightly less dense than the developments they are building right now.

Suburbs used to be built with convenient access to businesses until 1946. They aren't mutually exclusive features of a pleasant neighborhood. Most American's have never experienced a well functioning old suburb and don't realize the scale of the hellscapes they are really living in.

Just because you prefer to live somewhere else doesn't make it a "hellscape." How would you react if someone called a city block like people on this thread are romanticizing a "hellscape?"

If suburbs are truly people's preference then we shouldn't need laws to mandate their existence

Right. Given what the laws allow a suburb is often your best compromise. However the laws often force things that make your other options even worse.

That is laws mandating suburbs are not the only evil. There are also laws that mandate bad cities.

I can think of multiple “corner stores” that are the only business within a single-family home residential area within a few minutes drive of the house I grew up in in suburban NY. I’m pretty sure they all got grandfathered in and would not be permitted as new construction with the zoning, but they’ve all been in business since before I was born and are still going. These are mostly neighborhoods without sidewalks, and the stores have parking for only a handful of cars.

You’re right that “most” houses can’t be within walking distance of a corner store outside cities, but my anecdata experience is those residential communities can definitely support those businesses. They might require a short drive, but they’re still a lot closer than the shopping center, and a mix of “ran out of one thing”, deli/breakfast sandwiches, and beer keeps them in business.

I suspect many of them are grandfathered in economically too - they are not generating enough income to support starting a new one, but the family has had it for years and never ran the numbers to see just how badly they are doing. (or maybe they only work so long as the equipment doesn't break)

> The density of single family houses doesn't support a corner store. It did before the automobile/streetcar, but now that those are common people will prefer to travel to to the much cheaper big-box store (which also has more selection) for most purchases and that doesn't leave enough "I just ran out of one thing" to support a corner store.

Yet somehow, I've seen the exact same kind of suburban structure in a lot of Middle Eastern, car heavy cultures. Lots of single family villas packed together, often around a common area with a park, a medical center, an elementary school and a small shopping area adjacent to the park for small retailers and food outlets. The outlets and retailers often have a loyal customer base of people living nearby, the people enjoy the convenience of not having to take their car through a busy road just to buy groceries, and the food outlets enjoy the guaranteed patronage of visitors to the park. And these are households with multiple cars, not just 1 or 2.

For bigger purchases sure there are bigbox stores, but very few go there and buy - it's all done online with a few clicks and delivered to your home for free.

This is standard in Australia. Suburb with a block of shops... small block - choose from convenience store, cafe, hairdresser, bakery.. large block will have a supermarket of some sort

usually with parking spots because people drive.

But there's also an efficiency argument there.

If technology now allows us to JIT distribute from a single store / warehouse across a larger area, isn't that better?

Imho, the real problem with American suburban design is (a) the elimination of spaces where community organically happens (read: corner store) without replacement with something else (e.g. a park) & (b) the centralization of corporate power enabled by monopolies (e.g. Amazon logistics).

To (b), I'd much prefer if drone distribution centers like this were city-owned property, with the drone service provided by one or more drone operators, with adjacent warehouse space for any company that wanted to distribute.

Well, it's also possible that delivery drones at scale maybe just have an unavoidable noise pollution factor. Sure, roads do too but those are pretty much a given even in areas with density that supports good public transit--and maybe especially if--see e.g. Manhattan. (And it's not like trains don't cause noise pollution too.)

Aside from the odd military helicopter from a nearby training area, I have pretty much zero audible air traffic at my house. I would very much object to large drones overhead on a regular basis.

Manhattan is pretty far on the other extreme. In the kind of medium density typical of European cities (dense rows of 3-6 story townhouses) you have enough density to support excellent public transit and multiple supermarkets in walking distance while having very moderate road noise outside of arterial roads. Delivery drones would absolutely increase noise pollution in such places

Ironically, there was some griping about the amount of tourist helicopter sightseeing traffic around Manhattan recently.

E.g. https://council.nyc.gov/gale-brewer/helicopters/

That is true most streets are after all only used by the locals who live on that street. It is also quiet in the evening.

It isn’t efficient when you factor in the cost of such small deliveries.

Also having some form of slack in the system goes a very long way in making the system resilient, especially in a system where your provider’s interests are not aligned with yours.

Cost in terms of what? Electric drone delivery is likely more cost-effective (external-accounted) than any of the alternative solutions.

Are toothpaste and batteries really daily necessities though? I buy toothpaste maybe once every two years in bulk, and batteries basically never, due to pretty much everything being rechargable via USB.

It's items in the collective though. (And I still use batteries although they're certainly nothing like daily necessities.) During the pandemic I really amped up my use of Amazon, etc. for deliveries and I found that I ended up getting orders delivered quicker once or twice a week than I would have ended up getting to even fairly nearby stores for.

Your dentist might want to have a talk with you if you're not using toothpaste daily.

They said they buy it in bulk. I also do. Years ago I bought a dozen reels of floss from a dental supply shop. $60 for 2km of floss. I am still using it.

Check the expiration date on that toothpaste. Fluoride usually loses effectiveness 1-2 years after purchase (depending on production date). I'd get a new tube every 12 months or less.

Well, and a lot of people don't want to pay the premium usually associated with a bodega/corner store if they don't need to. I frequented some local camera stores over the years when they were more of a thing and, however rose-colored glasses I want to view them through, they weren't that great relative to today's options.

In Europe there's a good chance the 'corner shop' is run by a national business or franchise, benefitting from their supply and logistics systems.

That means prices are usually the same as in their larger stores, although the cheapest (low margin) brands might not be stocked in the smaller ones.

I would never consider buying toothpaste or normal batteries online. What a hassle! Just take the packet off the shelf in the small supermarket that's at the end of my street, or the one by the station, or the one near the station by work, on the one just the other side of work.

This is one supermarket chain in Denmark, and you'll note I haven't centred the map on the middle of Copenhagen but the suburbs: https://www.google.com/maps/search/Netto/@55.736038,12.46374...

I think this conversation has gotten a little exaggerated or maybe just over-specific to the bay area, the US is full of corner shops operated by famous brands like 7-11. They're usually combined with gas stations. The American phrase is "convenience store." You have to leave your suburban housing development to go to them, but if you live in the city they're probably within walking distance. They don't exist in the sphere of highly paid professionals, though, because they're eminently practical from a commercial standpoint and sell inexpensive junk food, novelty knives, figurines, cigarettes, and whatever you'd imagine being there just to move off the shelves. I've only seen useful goods in a handful of them, and it's always sold in tiny quantities (imagine buying a single roll of toilet paper) because their clientele might not have the capital to invest in bulk purchases.

If you want to put this in a sort of social context, it's that laborers actually have quite a bit of money in America because having a lot of cash relative to the price of goods is the one part of the promise that comes true, and as a result they're catered to by a lot of retail. Those inexpensive retail outlets are the subject of endless complaints from people who you could call the conscious middle class and make up most of what you would think of as cheap American consumerism. The quintessential duo of Walmart and McDonalds is exceeded by convenience stores along this dimension and for most HN users, they don't exist in that they never think about them, and post things like "I don't have a corner shop."

I'm not sure of all the reasons but you absolutely do have a lot of smaller supermarkets in Europe with chains like Sainsbury, Tesco, Waitrose, and so forth (most familiar with UK) which are certainly smaller than most US supermarkets but pretty price competitive with decent products. As you say, in the US you have convenience stores which are pretty crappy for anything other than junk food or buying a coke. Even in NYC, I'm not sure bodegas are much better.

I wasn't clear.

7-11 exists in Denmark more-or-less as you describe (bit more food, less junk).

The Netto shops I linked to are small supermarkets, selling a full range of groceries — fresh fruit and vegetables, meat, fish, bread, cheese, milk, eggs, pasta, rice, toiletries, cleaning products, light bulbs, ... I need hardly describe a grocery store. Toilet paper comes in a pack of 8 or 10 or so. Meat is probably in 250g and 500g packs, with a couple of options at 1kg. There are 6 kinds of toothpaste, 6 types of rice etc.

In much of the city, there are multiple shops like this within 5 minutes' walk.

I do the majority of my grocery shopping in a shop like this, which is why I'd never consider buying toothpaste online.

> They don't exist in the sphere of highly paid professionals, though, because they're eminently practical from a commercial standpoint and sell inexpensive junk food, novelty knives, figurines, cigarettes, and whatever you'd imagine being there just to move off the shelves.

That's a different thing. What they're talking about is, effectively, just a very small supermarket, usually run by national chains. I have in walking distance of me about six instances of Tesco; one big one, one medium one, three small ones (single storefront) and one tiny one (convenience store sized). They all have basically the same core stock, at _mostly_ the same prices (I think the really tiny one is a little more expensive).

What a hassle! I click a button and 6 months supply of the exact toothpaste I like arrives at my doorstep as early as same day.

Here in Dubai, I have 2 or 3 corner stores within maybe a hundred meters of my residential tower and 9/10 purchases for groceries are through a delivery app.

You're not wrong, but it will take decades to fix American urban development, if ever at all. Today, Amazon could use the US postal service for last mile delivery, which delivers six days a week and has systems in place for large scale shippers to deliver parcels to the closest hub. The choose not to, in the same way they squeeze their fulfillment workers as hard as they can. They want to make a logistics robot that does not require humans.

Amazon will use the postal service when it's the "best" option available (decided by some supercomputer AI somewhere, probably).

What Amazon is deathly afraid of, and is a reality, is Walmart dropping stuff off at people's houses. The local Walmart provides next-day (sometimes same day if ordered early enough) free delivery of most anything non-perishabale they have in stock. Walmart already has the neighborhood warehouse, they just had to add a delivery driver or two. 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart.

That could eat Amazon up and spit it out almost overnight. They know it, too.

And the batteries and toothpaste from Walmart are almost certainly not counterfeit.

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