I live in downtown Portland, OR in a high-rise apartment building. Every day, the UPS, Fedex, and DHL delivery trucks drop off a hundred pounds of packages for the residents of the building. During the holidays, there are probably three or four times as many packages per day.
I am an Amazon Prime member and order a lot of dry goods from the internet due to the convenience factor. However, a Target is opening a couple blocks away from me. Will it matter (as measured in carbon released or cubic feet of additional landfill) if I buy my kitty litter from Amazon or from Target? Is the answer different if I do not get two day shipping from Amazon? Is the answer different if I have to drive to the Target? Is the answer different again if I lived in a single family dwelling out in the suburbs?
The answer almost certainly is “it depends” since there are so many factors involved. In some cases it may be environmentally better to order online, while in other cases it might be better to visit the store.
If you’re looking for an overall ‘on average what’s better’ I think we would be hard pressed to come up with a definitive answer.
Given that each of the major delivery services already visits your building every day, I’d have to lean towards “online” in your case. If the truck had to make a special trip to a house in the sticks, it’d be different. I guess it still depends on how the goods your order are packaged, though.
It really does depend. Your kitty litter has the same supply chain path from the manufacturer to either a Target or Amazon warehouse. From each warehouse, you would have to know how far it traveled to get to you. For Target, assume they would load it into a large delivery truck for a weekly or more shipment to the local target. For Amazon it would be daily - but in either case it would appear to be riding with a bunch of other stuff going to the same location. If you were to drive to the Target, that is an extra transportation step from the Amazon chain.
Maybe a better question is where do you want your money going? With Amazon, it will end up in the coffers of a big company and paid to it’s employees there, as well as the delivery company. With Target, you will be supporting a business in your area and it’s employees, who may be your neighbors, who also spend money in your neighborhood in shops and stores you also use.
If you want to expand your concerns to include the social impact of on-line shopping, consider also the inhuman working conditions often reported at the on-line fulfillment warehouses.
Remember The Jungle by Upton Sinclair? It’s time to re-read this. Fulfillment warehouses seem to be the modern reincarnation of all that.
A few articles: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave. Mac McClelland, Mother Jones March/April 2012. Investigative journalist goes undercover, takes job at warehouse, writes report. Google Mac McClelland for other similar articles.
Amazon Unpacked. Sarah O’Connor, FT [Financial Times] Magazine, Feb. 8, 2013. Lede: “The online giant is creating thousands of UK jobs, so why are some employees less than happy?”
Google fulfillment warehouse slave to find many more.
I’d imagine Amazon in general would use less transportation fuel since its warehouses are “higher up” in the supply chain and only what’s actually been ordered is transported farther down the network. In addition, its warehouses are larger than retail stores in general and more densely packed since there doesn’t need to be a “pleasant shopping experience”, which can make them more efficient to heat and operate.
When we shop at the Target store, we the consumer act as the picker for each item. When we shop online with Amazon, there is now a new job for piece picking/packing that otherwise would not have existed because previously we did it for free.
For something like Target or Walmart, I doubt that online Amazon ordering makes any difference in the number of trips a customer makes to Target/Walmart–there are too other many cheap or bulky items it is not cost effective to order online.
Conversely it probably makes a substantial difference in the number of trips to specialty stores.
Wow, this eye-opening. I didn’t know online store warehouses were so “high efficiency”, almost like working at an electronics manufacturer. Do they have THAT much business? I thought the pickers would only have to stroll through the warehouse and pick what they need.
Yes they do have that much business, but also it’s a different type of business that introduces more labor.
For a traditional DC serving a group of stores but no consumers, frequently items are picked and shipped in large quantities, full cases or pallets. Which means one trip to get to the warehouse location where the case or pallet resides, and then moving the goods to shipping or a conveyor system.
For a DC supporting consumer orders, you now get orders for 1 unit, or maybe 2 different skus, each for 1 unit. With a company like Amazon that carries in the hundreds of thousands or millions of skus, a picker naively picking that order would need to walk, possibly, from one end of the DC to the other just to pick 2 units.
The difference between picking/shipping full cases vs single units can be 10x, 20x, 30x, etc. more labor depending on the specific items involved.
After you picked it, then you need to pack every small order into it’s own carton, print packing slip, shipping label, etc. Again, this is much more labor intensive.
To solve the labor problem that shifted from consumers picking their own items in the store to DC workers picking individual orders, there are various technical/mechanical solutions that batch/aggregate items for picking and then sort them back out by orders, but even with those solutions it’s still more labor than a traditional DC.