Does online shopping for nonessentials during pandemic create hardship?

[puzzlegal]

I’ve been wondering the same thing. On the one hand, buying stuff helps the person I am paying. On the other, I wonder if companies are pressuring employees to work too close and in unsafe ways. On the third hand, I wonder how many of those jobs just go away otherwise, and how much the employees need them.

@Napier

There’s a pretty convincing argument here that argues online shopping for nonessentials is wrong on the basis that it increases risk for many people in the supply chain:

Why You Shouldn't Order Nonessential Packages During The Coronavirus Pandemic | HuffPost Life

They’re quoting representatives of the people at risk, and an ethicist.

Thanks, will read.

@Napier

It was more the delivery companies like UPS, FedEx, and the USPS that were expressing fear. They have no way of sorting out what’s a priority, as they don’t know the contents or circumstances.

I’m not very worried about that aspect. Driving around delivering boxes to doorsteps is not very high risk. You don’t catch it from being “outdoors”, but from contact with other people. I think UPS can protect their deliverymen just fine by making sure they have hand sanitizer. The only real point of risk is the loading dock.

I’m more worried about the people in the warehouses, (and the UPS loading dock) running around pulling stuff off the shelves with other employees around.

[peccavi]

I had a unique (for me) shopping experience in this post-COVID retail environment.

Last night, I went into my bedroom, turned on the TV, and the picture was…dim. After fiddling with the picture settings with only a little improvement, I realized that the set is at least 10 years old and just might be at end of life.

In the past, I would have lived with the picture until it got really bad, while leisurely visiting local shops to see which set had the best picture and features (and price). I would have made up a spreadsheet and done on-line research, settled on the exact set, then bought, either negotiating in-store or finding the lowest price online.

But now that set in the bedroom is important. So I went on Amazon and did a little poking around and decided I could get a bigger screen, 4K, and online apps for $250-350, which is probably half what I paid for my current set. I spent about an hour that night narrowing the selections, then another hour in the morning, picked the set, loaded it in my cart, got to the end and saw that Amazon promised delivery is about 2 1/2 weeks.

But on the final checkout page was a little note: Sourced by Best Buy. I went on the Best Buy website, found the model, stuck it in their cart and took it to checkout. They offered to ship and deliver in about a week, but more important, I could pick up the set at my local store (parking lot delivery to my car). The best Buy price was higher by a whole eight dollars.

So this morning I made my biweekly grocery run (mostly fresh vegetables and fruit) and on the way back stopped at the Best Buy. “Delivery” took about five minutes. I was directed to a spot in front of the store, someone came out and looked at the confirmation code on my phone (readable from outside the passenger window), I unlocked my back door, they slid the box into my back seat, and I was on my way. At no time was anyone closer to me than about 6 feet.

I can’t imagine doing anything like this 6 months ago, though I’m sure some facsimile of the process was available. And I supported a local merchant (though I doubt this is going to slow Best Buy’s slow slide into oblivion) and didn’t clog the distribution channels.

[Skywatcher]

@Kovitlac

There are a couple things I’d love from Amazon, but I’ve been putting it off because I’ve heard shipping is dreadful. I don’t pay for Prime so I’d already expect things to take a week and a half or so.

I always try to bundle my purchases so they’ll be over $25, thus qualify for free shipping.

One can search specifically for items which will qualify for free shipping at the $25 threshold.

[Biotop]

I think there is a good case to be made for NOT buying non-essentials. People for the most part need to be sheltering in place. When you buy a non-essential online, a whole host of people are always involved in getting it to you. These are people who could be working to help provide essential services, or otherwise staying at home to prevent the viral spread.

I work in a grocery store and every day we are having lots of people shopping to get their families enough food to ride out the pandemic for another week. We also have people who come in and hand our Customer Service clerks a stack of lottery tickets to run, or want someone to blow up a bunch of balloons for their kid’s birthday. If I or my co-workers get sick working hard to get people food – well that is the chance we have agreed to take in order to do our part. If someone gets sick because of the lottery I will be pissed.

[actualliberalnotoneofthose]

I’m working 60 hours in major ecommerce warehouse and I want to keep being able to do that as long as possible. Plus they are on a major hiring spree. A lot of “co-workers” complain constantly about customers ordering non-essentials and have always complained about products they just don’t like to handle. I tell these people to STFU. What most people would end up defining as essential probably wouldn’t provide the level of work we need to keep working enough for me to eat. So I welcome anyone buying anything, including double dongs and buttplugs and whatever. I do not care. If they pull the overtime I’m going to be in a bad situation.

[Shalmanese]

The way to get the economy back up and running again isn’t to put $10 into someone’s pocket right now. It’s to push as extreme a version of social distancing as possible to drive new cases down low enough that contact tracing and selective quarantine can be enforced. Every day saved on doing this is massive amounts of dollars avoided wasted in the community.

Say you have a distribution center that could get away with 200 staff working in it if people only ordered essential items and 400 staff working to cope with the demand for non-essential orders as well. And say the base rate of presymptomatic infectious people in your community is 0.2% right now. With 200 people, the chances of someone infectious coming into work is 33%, with 400 people, it’s 55%. Not only that, with 200 people, it’s much easier to comply with social distancing protocols but with 400, people are inevitably going to be in closer proximity with each other. So now you’ve increased the risk of someone coming into work infectious, giving it to a bunch of other people, those people going home and giving it to their families and starting off a whole new cluster chain that takes an extra week of social distancing to tamp down.

So no, don’t buy that extra vacuum cleaner if it can wait a few weeks. You’re adding marginally to the danger of your entire community and extending the timeline of lockdowns by forcing people to go into highly dangerous jobs that they don’t have to be doing.