I’m familiar with the German system. You don’t get to choose to bag, you have to. Some people might have trouble doing so. My grocery offers a service (for free) to take your bags to your car - I haven’t seen many people use it, but it might be a real help to some of their customers.
The baggers in my supermarket are people who might have trouble getting jobs anywhere else. Giving them good jobs is a net plus to society.
I rather suspect Amazon knows the cost of home delivery down to the millicent. If it drives business that would otherwise go to local stores, perhaps they make money off it. I don’t think they do one day delivery where I live, but there are lockers in our grocery store where you can have your order placed. Which cuts down on driving and lets you combine picking up your order with shopping.
When I go to the airport and get on a plane, I rather like the immediate gratification of arriving at my destination the same day. No more stage coaches and river boats. Is that a bad thing?
You think Amazon is fast. Here in SE Asia we have Lazada. I ordered an item from Lazada that cost $14. Free delivery. I entered my credit card, and got the boilerplate promise of a date a week or two later. My order was placed on line Sunday night. The delivery truck brought it to my door Tuesday morning. 36 hours, no charge for delivery. With a text phone message and an email a half hour earlier alerting me that truck was turning the corner. I live 400 miles from Manila, an hour’s drive out in the suburbs. 36 hours, no charge., $14 order. I was impressed.
It’s a little like that, but I think the analogy breaks down pretty quickly.
Online shopping is mostly search-driven. I don’t do whatever the equivalent of “wandering the aisles” of Amazon. I go search for the thing I want.
Now, when I go search for something I want, Amazon often shows a “people who bought X also bought Y” ad, and that is a lot like an endcap encouraging an impulse buy.
Certainly, people are not very rational. On the other hand, I’m not convinced that having to wait a whole day or two to get something really triggers the “impulse” part of our brain. We’re actually so irrationally short-term focused that I think that’s still too far away. How well would supermarket endcap sales work if they just had a sample there and promised that they’d deliver one to you by the end of the next business day? Probably not that great?
I think most of the increased consumerism driven by Amazon is simply due to lower prices. When prices are lower, people will buy more stuff. At least part of those lower prices are driven by efficiency improvements, which I think is definitely a social good. I agree that the end result of more (mostly ephemeral) stuff being produced probably isn’t.