> Even if you think it is preferable at an individual level, there are good reasons to question the social value of the logistical complexity that it necessitates. Home delivery of single-packaged items entails an entirely different cost structure than freight trucks driving to consumer-facing warehouses delivering entire pallets of goods to be driven home by customers themselves.
Ok, so 100 people can all drive to the store, or one delivery truck can drive to everyone's house. (Ignoring the packaging waste for a second,) I suspect delivery of single items cuts back significantly on trips to the store.
Amazon goes to great lengths to make purchasing exceedingly easy and fast. And with Prime, customers can buy a single, low-priced item with no shipping costs, cf. the requirement to buy in bulk quantities. As one would expect, this convenience and facilitation leads to more purchases. It also results in more packaging, more waste, more emissions, etc.
This was detailed in a 2024 Netflix documentary that interviewed a former Amazon VP who was fired for her environmental activism
Unlike Costco, Amazon does not disclose data on its environmental impact, e.g., carbon emissions. It's possible Amazon's imapact is less than Costco's, Costco's data shows its impact is relatively severe, but if that were true, then why not share the data
Yeah, this argument falls flat on it's face.
Of course it's more complex than that.
When I worked from the office, centralized retail was very convenient and hardly added any driving.
If you work from home, the opposite is true.
The next revolution would be to standardize reusable packaging, that same daily delivery truck could bring that back. But only government could make that happen.
I could imagine Amazon incentivizing reusable containers on their own TBH. If I was living in a house and not an apartment, I could easily imagine putting the Amazon bins back out so the next time I get a delivery, they take those, and we are constantly cycling bins back and forth.
Even environment aside, from a purely self-interested perspective, I would much prefer it to dealing with the recycling Amazon deliveries entail.
Amazon did that with an earlier version of their grocery delivery service. I assume the cost and logistics of managing and cleaning the bins just wasn’t worth it because their grocery service delivers in paper bags now.
One problem with the bins for normal items is that rarely will they be packed to the brim. I imagine the overall item density would drop significantly if they started using standardized bins instead of appropriately sized boxes for the items.
Well, if there's one company on Earth that's both incentivized to find an algorithm to efficient pack stuff into their shipping bins and also well-financed enough to actually figure out a good linear or quadratic-time algorithm to do so, it's definitely Amazon.
And once they do so they'll have solved two big problems! :)
I used this service before it rolled out widely and these boxes were a mixed bag. On one hand they worked really well, they were essentially insulated hard totes with styrofoam lining and often had dry ice in them for anything that needed to be kept cold. On the other hand, I lived in an apartment, so storing 3-4 totes for a week or more was a real chore.
The funniest thing I remember though is that the totes weren't optimized for the size of some of the products available very well - if you put a frozen pizza in it, it sat diagonally, and without enough room to really put anything above or below it. You order four frozen pizzas, and you're allocating many cubic meters of apartment space for them until the next time you order.
"Amazon bins" ... or maybe just reusable bins that aren't specific to a company? See: shipping containers. A standard bin for home delivery could still have "Amazon" painted on it but the rest of the infrastructure wouldn't be Amazon specific.
That idea is intriguing but brings up a lot of questions. If I live out in the middle of nowhere, order something but take a long time to open it, when does the Amazon truck come back to take the packaging? If there's a million of us procrastinators, is it really that much better than normal centralized garbage collection? Milk bottle delivery and collection only worked because the product naturally had a time limit, and once home refrigeration took off, the practice went away because people didn't consume on the same schedule.
FWIW most Amazon packages I get nowadays are just heavy paper anyways.
You don’t need time limit, you just need to deal with the company frequently enough for this to work.
How I would imagine this work if there was will (I don’t think there is)… there are online grocery delivery services that do this already, it’s not that complicated.
You get your stuff delivered in a reusable bag. They charge you 1 dollar for the bag. Next time you have something delivered, you give the bags back and you’ll get your money back.
Order whole foods from them. They will pack 6 things in 4 reusable insulated bags. The problem is there is no way to send those bags back to be reused.
I go to Costco when I have something else to do in the area; It's almost never a "trip to Costco" for me.
Others have mentioned the parking lot sizes. If we wanted the best of both worlds, we could have online shopping at Costco with curbside delivery. There has to be a warehouse somewhere which means there are trucks/trains/planes moving goods around regardless. Even Amazon builds warehouses closer to where things need to end up eventually to optimize costs. You are comparing apples to oranges.
Finally, Costco delivers if you really don't want to leave your house. Now we are back to the same model but with far more flexibility.
Exact opposite for me, a weekend day is explicitly a Costco day to rack up for the week or month. Anything else I have to do that day is incidental. I assume this is many people's experience too rather than the other way around.
We live two hours from the closest Costco. We make a day of it once every 45-60 days plus shop at other stores we don’t have in our small town and see some family. We don’t have an Amazon account and maybe order something online once a month. We prefer shopping locally or waiting for Costco Day.
If I had a nickel for every time an 18 wheeler dropped something off at my house I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t much, but it’s weird it happened twice.
I think to clarify your point, curbside pickup is the curb of the store/warehouse, not the curb of your house, correct? I think the netizen above thought it was your house's curbside?
That's correct, with curbside pickup you drive to the store, pop open your trunk, and in principle someone from the store's staff is ready and waiting to verify your identity and then load your pre-staged shopping right into your trunk, and you drive off.
So you still have to go to the store but it can be an in-and-out if everything works.
Those individual trips to the store are typically for more than single items, and are often incorporated into trips one would have taken anyways as part of the doing of errands.
Right, 100 trucks delivering 100 single items to 100 homes, or 100 consumers each making 1 trip to buy 100 things. It really depends on the details too much to simplify it so far.
Also, in the photo, it shows a huge car park.
The stores, have to support large empty spaces for parking of those 100 people all driving to the store. I also wonder about the social value of utilizing the land that way.
It's quite efficient use of land. Costco parking lots tend to be full, people tend to leave Costco with full carts and go once or twice a month. Direct to consumer warehouses should be encouraged not discouraged by the environmental social use advocate kinds of people.
It results in fewer miles driven and more being done per mile driven. Each parking space gets more done per parking space. There's less retail worker overhead and the people that do work are paid better and have a higher quality of life.
This is in comparison to the delivery center methodology by e commerce where the land use for delivery driver is somewhere further away from what is needed for community events, and every delivery truck is filled to the brim, way more full than what each consumer vehicle would be filled up with?
Put the entire building over 'em. And solar panels over the building. The Target near my house is built on top of its parking lot. I don't have to cross an entire parking lot, dodging traffic, when I go there by bike or on foot. And it's on a bus line. What's not to like?
In most places in the US, land is cheap enough that paved surface parking is cheaper than building the store above a parking garage. In central urban areas, it's not, so they build up.
Came to say this, it would be hard to handicap this one. Shopping tends to be clustered, so if I’m methodical, I can go fill a car load with a lot of stuff and that might be more economical and environmentally friendly than the vans. But if I’m not, I could certainly see how it would be worse.
I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying it averages out to being better or worse.
If you have ever watched a deliver truck on their tracking app to crawl its way to you from stop to stop you realize the most optimistic timing is maybe 1 minute per package. Assuming the truck, driver, gas could be operated for 60 USD/hr the marginal cost seems more like 1 USD per package, but likely more.
No wonder Amazon decided to basically create their own logistic chain.
Fedex/UPS cost for a single package is roughly ~$13.95 (this was ~5 years ago when I was working in ecommerce) and even if Amazon was getting a huge discount from them for the volume they do, it was still probably nowhere near $1/package.
So you replace a loop that delivers last mile goods to a lot of cars going decently out of their way to the limited places just to pick one item? Surely it’s less miles driven when Amazon does a loop hitting several people right near me than each of us driving farther in total to get our goods.
> But to date it has still not been able to make the conversion away from being an online convenience store, which tells you something important about its model: Amazon is there to fill in the gaps of a dominant mode of goods procurement, not to replace it.
Either we can view single-packaged items as a gap in the goods procurement process, or we remove the means (Amazon) and view it as a forcing function to not have single-packaged items since a certain % of 100 people will start batching before they drive to the store.
I'd be curious further upstream as well. How would it compare from whatever shared point of entry the two approaches would have, say from coming off a boat at a port to the end user rather than just comparing the last mile.
It might, but I go to Costco every 3-4 weeks. If I depended on Amazon for everything I'd be getting multiple deliveries per day because there is no disincentive to doing that.
One issue is Amazon doesn’t appear to optimize for “fewest trucks trips to the block” - we’ll see 4-5 Amazon trucks/couriers on our cul de sac every day (plus USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL). That’s for 10 homes. If Amazon was able to do one truck to the block, that would big a big win for fewer trips/less emissions. Probably.
> I suspect delivery of single items cuts back significantly on trips to the store.
Amazon is also specifically incentivized to be efficient at scale, it impacts their bottom line to the point where they care about the shape of their vehicles. Individuals don't operate on the same scale so these sort of micro-optimizations don't happen.
Humans are specifically incentivized to be efficient at scale. They'll tend to shop at loctions on the way home from work, or otherwise cut down on travel times because traffic sucks.
I honestly can imagine that Costco is overall more efficient than Amazon, especially for people who do shop at Costco. If there's no Costco closeby, its more likely that the individual humans will shop elsewhere or somewhere more convenient.
this isn't even close to true and falls apart in a number of ways, the most popular vehicle in america right now (F-series truck) is woefully inefficient for just about everything
there are people who regularly go out of their way to drive to their favorite store for like 1-2 special items, people bring their dogs along on trips for companionship and leave them sitting in an air conditioned idling car while they shop
individuals are irrationally inefficient in dozens of ways that large businesses root out, for better or worse
Special items they can't get off Amazon, I presume? So they need to take that trip anyway.
No one is driving an hour out of their way for groceries.
And even the F150 truck example: if they are driving 30 miles to work, but 10 miles to Costco and 25 miles to home (Costco being 5 miles out of the way.), that F150 going 5 extra miles is more efficient than a Prius driving 25 miles from a Costco to their home.
Integrating routes throughout the day that matches your driving habits is a basic adulting task that everyone does, and has reasonably high efficiency.
I'm surprised you don't know any inefficient people! I know many. A friend drives 15 minutes out of the way because that grocery store is a little less crowded (they're the same chain). They've probably been doing it for a decade.
> that F150 going 5 extra miles is more efficient than a Prius driving 25 miles from a Costco to their home.
but that's not what's happening, Amazon isn't driving a Prius to your individual home then back to the warehouse... it's driving to a hundred people on an algorithmically optimized route. They do this because efficiency at scale makes them more profit.
Individual people make inefficient preferential decisions all the time, because the incentive to measure and improve these things is too low to bother on an individual scale.
The human driving to work, various activities, to the grocery store (and wherever else) isn't doing it for just one item like Amazon though.
The vast majority of those Amazon packages are for one thing. When the inefficient pickup truck comes back with a whole weeks worth of $200+ groceries, that further increases the efficiency of the home buyer.
It's unlikely that a daily commuter would go to Costco for just one gallon of milk or a few batteries. But I know from my Amazon deliveries that single items are delivered all the time.
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Anyone grabbing just some extra milk or toothpaste is likely grabbing it at an even more convenient store, like 7-11 (mostly because you can't buy one toothpaste at Costco lol).
Amazon generally doesn't do single item delivery for perishable groceries though, Fresh has a $100 minimum to avoid fees, for example.
Non-perishables are fine on a single-unit purchase because again, they're not just going to your house, they're going to dozens in your area every single day.
I know where you're coming from, but there's a reason this whole model exists, and it's not because it costs more.
Well sure. But Costcos model is clear to anyone who visits it. You only have to look at all the other shopping carts surrounding you to get an idea of how things work.
Costco shoppers buy a lot at a time. Because Costco forces you to buy 4 tubes of Toothpaste, 24 eggs (or 60 eggs), minimum 1 gallon of milk (no half gallons or pints), and like 20 lbs of rice / 10kg for the Europeans who havent been here and like 3000 meters of plastic wrap.
For Costco, the efficiency is the shear size of the shopping carts and shear mass of the goods sold at a time.
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You literally can't buy only one bar of soap or one toothbrush like you can from Amazon.com or other stores. There's efficiency here because of simple mass.
In contrast, I can look out and see the Amazon packages in my neighbors doors. It's all single items across the neighborhood.
But most people go to Costco for bulk buys. amazon deliveries are almost daily sometimes multiple a day and STILL have the same giant trucks dropping off product at distribution centers.
Back in the day people weren't driving to Walmart or whatever all the time to pick up a thing they wanted/needed, they would do that if they needed it right away, but if they didn't they would just wait until they were already in the store for a weekly trip, or pop in if they happened to be driving by on some other errand they needed to run
Both spectrums are hard. Solving last mile is really really hard, but if you do that's a huge moat (aka Amazon). If you avoid last mile, you best deliver value in some other way, which Costco does by giving you more per dollar than anyone else.
They also offer some degree of curation, so your dollar goes further by volume/weight/unit on average, but also in less quantitative ways quite often. I trust what I buy from Costco, but I’ve completely stopped buying from Amazon (many years ago now) because apart from the poor value prop, I simply don’t like the quality or reliability of what’s offered.
Amazon largely being a dumb marketplace, a faster-shipping AliExpress/Temu, really makes them easy to drop if you find that shipping speed isn’t super important for those types of products. You can just go straight to the source and cut Amazon out entirely.
I've tried Amazon for groceries on this line of thinking. Verdict: it's terrible. Their groceries are priced uncompetitively and after a few times having some stranger pick my produce (and doing an offensively bad job of it) I don't do that anymore.
So since I'm 100% definitely going to the grocery store for produce, at minimum, this whole concept fails. May as well pick up the ziploc bags and paper towels as well while I'm there.
When some of your products are fraudulent all your products are fraudulent. Amazon has zero trust from me these days. It’s the equivalent of an overpriced garage sale.
I’m familiar with the margins in retail (my parents ran a retail store their entire lives).
My point wasn’t that they don’t do a lot of volume; it’s that their retail business is not what’s driving their profit, and I don’t believe it’s growing.
I wouldn’t be surprised (though have not looked) if DoorDash (with DashMart), Uber Eats (which does more than just food), and Instacart have eaten significantly into Amazon’s revenue by solving the “get it to me” problem even faster.
In the US last mile is super hard because of the super high wages. The only way to work around it is volume per delivery person.
If you do 2 deliveries per hour (like Uber Eats / door dash), you pay essentially $5/order (assuming a super low us wage of $10/hour and no equipment cost/ gas).
So no in the US, Amazon is not threatened by such delivery services.
Now if you go to China, the equation flips. Which is why Amazon failed completely.
I see this said a lot, but Amazon products I buy actually work (even if the quality of obviously laughable - it actually performs the function and won't break any time soon to justify a 100x price increase for something more...artisan.
The only order I did for temu, everything arrived completely DOA
It’s also amazing how bad delivery services are in general. The incentives for third party delivery services don’t align well with the other parties. A retailer is judged on the quality of delivery yet only amazon has seemed to realize this (queue incoming anecdotes about amazon screwing up delivery yet i’ve never had an issue getting a refund when it happens).
I think it probably depends too on what different people's living situations are. I have an exurban house with a large driveway and I've basically never had an issue with an Amazon delivery. (Yes, it can be late sometimes but I can track it and I'm usually not in a rush.)
I was reading the book "How the internet happened": During the dot com bubble, there was a company called furniture.com which basically lost a lot of its investor money by learning the hard truth that IKEA also had to learn that shipping Heavy things like furniture isn't actually economical.
I am not sure if costco's model could allow it but especially for amazon, if they tried to do it or make it their USP like furniture.com, then I can imagine a very different outcome for it overall.
There was also a company I think who spent hundreds of millions of dollars (IIRC) in creating a large grocery website with buying large warehouses then and basically losing a ton of money. That business also failed quite drastically.
Another fun fact: when Amazon was first established, one of the largest loopholes that they had used which one can argue was why they were able to exist in the first place was that although they had selected book for Amazon because books are somewhat centralized (barnes and nobles essentially) but I think that the b&n warehouses required 10 books to be ordered each time.
So within the start, what they did was found out there was 1 book which was consistently out of stock. so they would order 1 book which the customer had ordered and then 9 of those other books. I imagine that if it might not have been for this as well, it might've been hard in the start.
There was also the fact that Barnes and nobles created their website and everyone thought that Amazon would basically die. Logic sort of suggests that it should've.
My conclusion is that Retail works in strange ways and timing matters a lot.
Also there are so many little facts within the book and it might be one of the fastest reads that I had of a book but the dot com bubble does feel quite similar to AI bubble IMO.
Here is a graph that I was making of a very limited connection graph of companies during the dot com bubble. https://files.catbox.moe/xdcxuy.png
I think that i have gone a bit too afar from my original comment but I sometimes like to chat and share bits of knowledge that I know and then I can't resist myself! :-D
I hear this, I have been in plenty of meetings where I propose a solution that eclipses most of the project requirements, often for a product person to turn around and say something like “yeah but I like working with X techhnology”, for example Tailwind.
Okay you like Tailwind because you seem to think “p-2” is better than specifying “padding: 2rem;” because when it comes time to tinker with things you don’t want to understand CSS, you want to play with Tailwind.
> A clever person solves a problem; a wise person avoids it.
Wow, what a great quote!I think that this combined with "there is no free lunch" explains a lot of thing (IMO)
(I like to write and once I write, I like to send it free on the internet in the spirit of how older internet must've originally intended but if you wish to read the TLDR it is: Be wise in selecting the problems to be clever at!)
I think that this holds a lot within career-making as well, in terms of deciding what career that you want. For example, I think that sometimes I get hyper-focused on a topic and basically dig the weeds and every information about a particular topic. My recent obsession was with the dot com bubble and supply chains.
but at the same time I think that although its just good thinking about it and gives me more breath of knowledge which helps me form a more nuanced person, but that doesn't mean that for every interest that I have, I have to become the expert or a genuine professional career at it.
Some problems are worth the risk/tradeoff when thought from short term but they quickly become really painful over the long term whereas other problems are more fulfilling long term but really hurt short term and there is a balance within the middle which I have selected which is what's know as CS :-D
I am a somewhat frugal guy and my philosophy has always been of do it yourself but reading about supply chains makes me realize just how interconnected we are. A toilet making company in Japan is an irreplacable component within the AI industry (They make the ceramics sheets on which the wafers are built and they are the only company that have the genuine expertise, patent and skills for doing so and they aren't alone and there are many many companies within such thing)
and even a single aluminim screw-esque component could take like 4-5 turns from australia (mining) -> iceland (cheaper energy) -> China (making proper aluminum bars) -> Vietnam (cheaper labour than China so China itself is offshoring it) -> Back to China.
All while a software engineer from say India/America/Europe is making the website and handling the customer service and taking ad decisions/marketing while another MNC (Amazon) ships it to your doorsteps, a company can be formed anywhere nationwide, and the product could be gone to LATAM.
Basically, although I have gotten on a tangent, my main point is that not every problem has to be solved by you. the world has lots of money in every fields as its just soo interconnected and as such you should decide on the problems which are best worth your time, your expertise and your interests hopefully and tackling that problem and maybe even being clever at that! and being wise in avoiding many of other problems.
Be wise in selecting the problems to be clever at! but to be wise on selecting the problems you want to be clever at, you should be aware of other problems in the first place so its good to analyze more problems, though it could very well be a justification that I might provide myself when I am studying supply chains and the humble container, I also find it interesting how the concepts of containers become so intuitive once you know it in modern shipping and then we applied that same concept AGAIN in Docker/podman but before that time, we were none the "wiser" :-D
Perhaps this depends a lot on location. Parking is a nightmare at my local Costco. The employees are friendly enough most of the time. I truly admire the value and business model but Costco is pretty much the absolute worst shopping experience I can think of.
Agreed. The entire store is wired to encourage impulse buying and keep you from making rational decisions about whether you'll be able to finish that 3lb container of guacamole before it goes bad.
I find the experience of shopping at Costco very uncomfortable. The parking lots are jammed packed, everyone is darting around with large shopping carts, the lines for the cashier are long, sales people are trying to pitch me on travel deals as I walk by - it almost feels like going through a busy airport. I am a Costco member, but I only go to the store when I really need to. The fact that I can shop Costco via Instacart was a gamechanger for me.
I used to work right across the st from one and would spend most of my shift looking out at their parking lot and you could see it get more packed throughout the day, thin out a little bit in the early afternoon and then slowly drain towards closing.
It's always least crowded right at open and then an hour (? or maybe two?) later they open for the "regular" people and once that's the case, it fills quickly.
I regularly shop at Costco and its usually one of five which ever is more convenient at the time. In all of my experience with Costco there is exactly one that has shitty parking, the rest are fine. That is if you have enough wrinkles in your brain to notice that in front of the store there 10 cars waiting for spot and parking a little bit in a back is easier.
I often see people cruising around still looking for parking while I already managed: to park, walk to the storefront, get myself a hot dog, eat my hot dog, grab a cart.
All the comments appear to be US centric, but Costco is also in other countries. So to tell you about the UK:
Here membership is unusual in that it isn't technically open to everyone, it's business and certain professions: https://www.costco.co.uk/membership but in reality anyone who wants to join can find a way.
Also no mention in the article of non-food. In UK Costco is known for special offers on electrical and white good and more. And cheap car tyres iirc
In the UK not everyone drives like USA and Costco's are few and far between, so that limits who shops there. So a niche player compared to the Supermarkets for consumer shopping.
And people also have smaller homes compared to USA and smaller families maybe (or smaller portion sizes...!), and Costco here is more geared towards selling in bulk, and to corner shops and other small businesses. It's more of a hybrid Wholesaler.
I think the article misses discussing Costco’s growing online business. There are a ton of Costco items that you can only buy online or that are sold in a different way online, and they’re often doing so with included shipping very similar to Amazon’s business model.
The shipping is slower, but it’s an interesting part of their business, and I encourage Costco members to try it out. You’d be surprised at the quantity of things you really don’t need to go to the warehouse for.
This is about 80% spot on, but the last 20% fails to mention that you can avoid the in store experience if it isn't for you, and in fact get the stuff you want delivered to your door in a short period of time, using services like instacart. Costco even partners directly with instacart for same day delivery. You can use your membership to get same day delivery shopping on costco's website and they will use instacart to fulfill it for you. Or you can use instacart directly, in which case you don't even need a membership yourself.
Costco is mostly food, clothes, furniture, other large things, and auto services, which generally you don't get from Amazon even if you aren't a Costco member. The points about less choice more apply to like Costco vs grocery stores or Walmart. And I do like Costco, similar low-choice reason I like Trader Joe's even though Costco is its own league.
Yeah I can’t get 5 different varieties of a ball bearings in the size I need delivered overnight from Costco. And for the things Costco or your local grocery store is great for, Amazon is often a far worse option. I noticed my wife was buying our toothpaste using a subscribe and save thing, so I compared it to our regular grocery store when I went shopping, and Amazon was like 20% more expensive. Great marketing on Amazon’s part getting people to assume it’s always the lowest price, but it’s often not.
The dumbest assumption I saw Amazon baiting people into was using Chase credit card points for purchases. You'd think spending those specifically on Amazon would be more efficient than just getting cash and buying from Amazon with that cash, right? Turns out it's the other way around, and by a large amount.
The Trader Joe's model is an interesting comparison with the Costco model.
Similarities:
* Like you said, both have fewer choices than a conventional grocery store: if you want ketchup or peanut butter, there's only going to be one brand and one size.
* Both of them don't have scales at the registers: unlike at a conventional grocery store, nothing is sold by weight (which I'm sure provides another small efficiency gain).
* Both of them are cheaper than your typical grocery store.
Differences:
* I feel like Trader Joe's leans on store brand / white-labeling items more than Costco -- yes Kirkland Signature is a thing but Trader Joe's takes it further.
* The shopping experience is pretty different both in terms of the in-store experience and the quantities things are sold in.
* Costco requires a membership, Trader Joe's doesn't.
I wonder which elements of the two models would work best for a public grocery store.
Trader Joe is owned by one of the two German Aldi groups (two brother split original business to have one each) And both of them employ the same model globally.
They are huge - ~15,000 stores worldwide and growing fast
As per their financials it’s roughly 50-50. I personally buy groceries and household consumables for the most part apart from the occasional electronics purchase.
IMO Costco’s food hits the sweet spot between high end grocery store quality and walmart level price.
I think a lot of people buy furniture and clothing on Amazon. It's extremely cheap and easy to return, or just throw away if you can't return it (not endorsing that).
I purchased a new mattress to fit my fold-out futon frame, from Walmart.com.
And the reason I chose Walmart at that time is because they offered good products, mostly first-party inventory (despite the marketplace format) but moreover, they offered a quick add-on option at checkout to hire a haul-away service to come to my door and haul away the junked, old mattress.
I own no vehicle; I live on the second floor no elevator, and the haul-away service was a godsend and a bargain price.
This post seems quite far fetched. Amazon is well aware of the paradox of choice, and the vast majority of UI changes I have seen recently are exactly those that guide and reinforce you to buy one option, without the decision paralysis. Items are not homogeneous, and it is obvious that they try to concentrate purchases to a smaller set of SKUs to reap the same benefits as Costco. It’s simply that Amazon can additionally support the long tail of SKUs with a heterogeneous warehouse system (and heterogeneous profit margins).
On the delivery side: US suburbia is just in general not a sustainable solution. Delivery is just one way in which it bites. Somewhere like NYC, the amortized delivery cost (internalized or externalized) is very low (and opposite to Costcos which require a drive to an inconvenient location).
The bit about agents doing your shopping is falling for the same trap as crypto people thinking NFTs will kill Ticketmaster. These have never been technical problems: the APIs don’t exist for nontechnical reasons.
That sounds like they might have leveraged housing development incentives. In a lot of cities with high housing costs you get tax breaks for investing in residential properties.
I don’t know if Vancouver has any of these off the top of my head.
And what you’re saying is true as a generality, that big box stores often fit in at least some parking in dense areas. I have found that grocery stores and big box stores do the most parking subsidies especially when they expect their customers to be buying a lot of bulky items. They seem to frequently have free or deeply discounted validated parking in underground garages.
Maybe not in Manhattan or anything but in many other large cities with high land value in downtown areas.
I would love to hear more about Costco's engineering culture. The fact they are still running/modernizing/supporting AS400 infrastructure and RPGLE applications is remarkable. I have to imagine that they have a unique devops model internally to keep that alive; especially facing a dwindling talent market.
Surprisingly Amazon is actually pretty constrained. There are usually only 3-10 versions of a given product but sold by hundreds of different resellers.
When I was shopping for a water distiller there was only one large one but branded for ten different Chinese companies. (And They all had the same dangerous flaw where water could spill on the electrical plug.)
Amazon is the anti-Costco also. We thought about it, and it doesn't really make sense to get a Costco membership when we can lean into Prime more. It doesn't help that we live in a fairly urban area (Ballard in Seattle) and Costco's is pretty suburban.
I'd much rather order some heavy stuff from Amazon to have delivered and walk to the local grocery store for everything else.
A major upside to Costco is you can actually see stuff and you also can walk out of the store same-day. Also I never ever worry about the counterfeit and/or low-quality crap you inevitably get from Amazon. And if Costco sells me something crappy, I drag it back in and don't even have to start up the printer (it's a zombie at this point). Costco has a running rule that they never charge above 10% in profits so I know I'm getting a good deal too.
What about the price-quality aspect? Costco blows Amazon away here IME. Plus there's the fact that someone can become an employee of Costco out of high school and spend their entire career there, with decent wages and benefits. That's not happening at an Amazon Prime fulfillment warehouse.
You can order from Costco on Instacart here in the Bay Area.
This said, there's a lot of quality stuff at Costco (besides their huge wines collection) that you can't find anywhere else.
Generally the bulk things I would have gotten at Costco, which isn't much for our family, so mostly protein drinks, olive oil, and so on. They come in pretty big cases, and it definitely seems like the heaviest thing the Amazon driver is delivering that day.
We still drive to the Chinese grocery for a big bag of rice every once in awhile.
I dont like Costco, it epitomizes American over-consumption. Parking lot overflowing with oversized SUVs with people loading up oversized trolleys with food from food corporations to take back to their oversized fridges and storage basements.
Over-consumption? That doesn't follow. I sustain my family on Costco, going once a month or so, but have to feed four people, including two teenagers that consume way more than 2000 calories a day. You keep using the word "oversized", but that assumes the SUV, the fridge, the trolley are not suited for purpose. But they are!
I think what you're really critiquing is people who don't shop frequently, and therefore buy in bulk.
I think the poster is indeed criticizing bulk shopping. I would then to agree that shopping in bulk makes it easier to overprovision or to have things go to waste or being bought superfluously. I am also not sure about it being cheaper in total because my experience with bulk sellers is that they achieve their profit margins by their product mix, so selling you some cheap items as loss leaders or discount items and recouping on others that you buy at the same time. Doing weekly shopping trips at different supermarkets can counteract that by letting you buy more various promotional items.
Of course it comes down to how much personal time you then have to spend on shopping to drive your bill down.
I've done the A/B test. Costco saves my family 25% across just food, ignoring other stuff I get there (batteries, shirts, jackets, shoes, underwear, deodorant, etc.)
You're pointing out that you need to plan properly to bulk shop, since you're necessarily modeling future consumption over days/weeks across multiple people, but that's different than over-consumption. It means you have to be analytical and plan, but that's exactly how we do it.
I despise the city living lifestyle, where folks jam themselves in tiny grocery stores to buy 2oz containers of jam and mustard because they don't have enough room to actually fit the food they want. My sister and dad live this way in NYC, and it's annoying as hell every single time I visit them. Wanna throw a meal together? First step: leave the apartment.
Aldi seems to. I thought of them as I read about Costco, not because of the size of their stores (which are generally quite small as supermarkets go) but because of the limited choices. Aldi normally has everything I need but doesn't have a lot of choice in any individual thing. It makes shopping there feel very efficient.
Walmart does this too, and it's one of the worst experiences/value-propositions I've ever experienced. It might be better in the US but in Canada it's expensive, poor quality and painful: pick three.
If you don't like American over-consumption you can go to Carrefour and try out French overconsumption where people load up oversized trollies with corporate food to take to their SUVs in the overflowing parking lot... in France.
Are you under the impression that it is a uniquely American trait to have a bigger house than you need, more car than you need, and a penchant for corporate food? Over-consumption is human nature, not an American invention. America just happens to be able to afford it on a scale that most countries can't. Go to the poorer countries on earth, and you will still see people over-consuming if they have the means.
Maybe it isn't even overconsumption. Maybe it's just a different way of getting things done. Do you think that the people that buy Costco sized packs of toilet paper wipe their ass unnecessarily? Or maybe they just make fewer trips to the store to buy toilet paper.
Since toilet paper is mostly non-perishable it shouldn't really matter, right? But for anything that goes bad there is also a tipping point where you bought too much and have things go to waste.
Because of the large quantities my family with 4 children is able to go to Costco once a month and purchase almost everything our family will need for the entire month this means we only need to go to the store one or two additional times during the month for things like milk and bread.
Saying that everyone eating there is indulging in overconsumption is a ridiculous overgeneralization. Not to mention people that are planning parties, bbqs, get togethers etc. Just because you can't think of any reason for people to need large portion sizes besides overconsumption does not mean others are so limited in their imagination.
We have a larger family and Costco combined with access to a decent grocery store that's within walking distance is great: get deals on larger quantity staples and milk, eggs and bread several times a week.
> to take back to their oversized fridges and storage basements.
It's really awesome to have plenty of food storage, with extra and oversized refrigerators, and a deep freeze too.
I keep mine full of vegetables and beef - I have a whole beef slaughtered annually.
Can you explain why this is a bad thing or why it means overconsumption? Why is the stereotypical "European" method of going to the store every day superior to me spending ~10 minutes once every two to three weeks to go to Wal-Mart? What do you do when there are shocks, like weather events, power outages (my generator will tide my fridges over, but will take down a store POS terminal), civic unrest, or pandemics? Or if you're just plain busy? I really appreciate being able to be fully stocked (with rotating backups so I am never actually out) of basically all foods and home staples (like TP). What's the downside?
There’s nothing wrong with your way, it’s just a different lifestyle based on how dense of a community you live in. People living in apartments in dense cities don’t have room for a whole cow in their apartment, but there’s probably a few grocery stores in walking distance, so they pick up food more often. Living in a suburb means that you probably don’t walk by a grocery store on your way home from work, and you probably have some space, so it makes sense to shop less frequently and in bulk. These are both valid ways to live that satisfy different sets of preferences.
If the stats in this are true, Amazon’s warehouse workforce turns over at 25 times the rate of Costco’s workforce, for almost the same wage. That is remarkable.
I like the idea that Costco and Amazon are diametric opposites — for example I couldn't shop at Costco for a very very long time because I lived in the city and didn't have a car.
Amazon and other delivery companies (e.g. Weee) came to the rescue. For a while I lived close enough to a Costco for a 20 minute bike, so I'd load up my gym bag full of food - even then Costco is not ideal because there's only so much you can carry (one thing of meat, one thing of eggs, some veggies).
For those that think Costco are the uber-shopping experience are missing that they both provide very opposite consumer experiences. (Yes Costco has shipping, and same day shipping, but it hits different from Amazon).
This is also opposite to corner store grocery systems where you can pop in at any moment to get fresh fruit, a wider choice, smaller quantities at more flexible hours etc.
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tldr - what I think I'm saying is that Costco is the perfect "suburban" purchasing experience - great if you tick the boxes that you have a big family (otherwise why do you need a 60 pack of toilet paper), a big house (where do you fit all that toilet paper), a car (to transport the toilet paper), etc.
anyone who don't tick those boxes can't really take advantage of any of that - so while Costco is amazing, it definitely shouldn't be the only way to shop.
There's another reason for Costco's appeal and trust among members: Kirkland Signature. Costco mandates that any KS product must be at least 10% better in quality than the leading national brand it replaces and/or cost less.
That further helps simplify shopping and decision-making and resolves the paradox of choice. Instead of having to sort through a wide variety of unknown brands on Amazon, they just go with KS.
Costcos tech stack is frankly unconscionably bad. It’s the one way in which Sam’s Club crushes them.
There’s no reason they couldn’t do basically all of the good things mentioned in this article plus have a functional website, let me scan and pay with my phone in store, have a handheld scanner at each register, etc.
I nodded along to much of the article, but I really think it's wrong to see this as a model for public grocery stores. The analysis is glossing over a lot of the key factors that Costco uses to make its logicstics model work. You can't buy small quantities, so the staff don't need to spend much time breaking down pallets; you're not allowed in the building without a membership, so there's little need to invest in behavior policing or loss prevention.
Seriously though, I was thinking on how I had to stop and get cat litter, milk, and cereal on my way home today when I read what you posted. While I get some consumables online; pet food, filters for my odd-sized vent, and until recently Hello Fresh; I mostly buy consumables in person.
> To put it crudely, having someone in a Sprinter van deliver a recently-purchased toothbrush to your doorstep is simply not a universalizable action, from either a business or logistical standpoint. It is a modern feat that Amazon is capable of doing this, but that it can be done does not mean that it should, nor even that it can be done writ large. For most consumption, it is far more efficient for people to handle the “last-mile delivery” themselves by going to stores and buying a good amount of stuff when they do so.
When you order your X, a van doesn't drive from Amazon's warehouse to your home and then back with only your order. The van takes a van-full (hopefully) from the warehouse, and makes many stops at many homes, businesses, etc.
That seems more efficient, in terms of fuel, climate impact, etc., than each customer making a separate round trip. Is there data showing it either way?
Great, thanks. Here's the abstract. And for context, it's a collaboration with Ford Motor Co.
... We report and compare the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for a 36-item grocery basket transported along 72 unique paths from a centralized warehouse to the customer, including impacts of micro-fulfillment centers, refrigeration, vehicle automation, and last-mile transportation. Our base case is in-store shopping with last-mile transportation using an internal combustion engine (ICE) SUV (6.0 kg CO2e). The results indicate that emissions reductions could be achieved by e-commerce with micro-fulfillment centers (16-54%), customer vehicle electrification (18-42%), or grocery delivery (22-65%) compared to the base case. In-store shopping with an ICE pick-up truck has the highest emissions of all paths investigated (6.9 kg CO2e) while delivery using a sidewalk automated robot has the least (1.0 kg CO2e). Shopping frequency is an important factor for households to consider, e.g. halving shopping frequency can reduce GHG emissions by 44%. Trip chaining also offers an opportunity to reduce emissions with approximately 50% savings compared to the base case. Opportunities for grocers and households to reduce grocery supply chain carbon footprints are identified and discussed.
It's interesting that consumers driving EVs reduce the cost on the same scale as deliveries (presumably in an ICE vehicle).
They omit apples-to-apples comparisons (at least from the press release and abstract)
* Consumer ICE vs. Delivery service ICE
* Consumer EV vs Delivery service EV
* Sidewalk delivery robot vs Bicycle or ebike
The last is a bit bizarre - comparing a 2-mile radius sidewalk mechanism to pickup trucks and delivery vans, but omitting the very popular 2-mile delivery method.
USPS is fueled by parcel deliveries, but also in large part by literal tons of junk mail on dead trees; spammers have paid Uncle Sam handsomely to spam every citizen's mailbox for decades, and it's the most lucrative thing USPS can do with our home mailboxes.
The postal service is a quasi government entity that has operated (not to get too deep into the politics of it) for many years at a loss. It does compete with Amazon, as well as being used by Amazon, but it's very different as a business than Amazon.
I got this when I told Gemini "post office loss retirement prepaid" because of other articles I have read that I cannot remember.
"In 2006, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA). This law forced the USPS to do something virtually no other government agency or private corporation has to do: prefund its retiree healthcare benefits 75 years into the future[0]. Essentially, they were legally required to fast-track billions of dollars into a fund to pay for the future retirement health benefits of current employees, and theoretically even future employees who hadn't been hired yet."
I would expect Amazon to be more efficient. Besides the round trips, there's operating the store, putting items on display, all that. As I said above, Amazon and Costco don't compete so directly though, like you aren't buying a pie from Amazon.
Indeed true. Even more efficient is when people can wait a few days and let Amazon bundle your orders and deliver on a designated day.
That said people don’t typically get in a car to buy one thing -though obviously sometimes they do. On average though their trips will be for multiple things. I still think even without using designated delivery days Amazon deliveries are more efficient than individuals going out to buy things independently.
I've always wondered why I don't see passed on savings for the "amazon day" thing. It's gotta be way better for their logistics to deliver bulk orders, or pick a standardized delivery day for each neighborhood or something. Why do they only offer a single dollar of credit for choosing it?
I don’t know how much they are saving. On the one hand they save a stop (they aren’t saving a van as there are likely already vans delivering near by). on the other they have to hold on to stock longer waiting for things to all be ready. It costs money to store things
I was zeroing out the amount purchased: The comparison is the customer picks up one item vs. Amazon delivers one item, or the customer picks up 12 or 20 things vs. Amazon delivers the same amount.
I'd still love to see data.
The problem with environmental impact is really a consequence of subsidized energy costs, including the externalization of environmental cost. If the consumer and Amazon paid the actual cost of fuel, they would make valid economic and environmental choices and we wouldn't need to figure it out like this.
> Amazon often negotiates delayed payment terms with suppliers, leaning on them to allow payment windows longer than the thirty-day industry norm.
Oh how I would wish for this crap to be banned. By law. Simply put, at the scale of "you are even allowed to sell at large volume to Amazon, Walmart, ..." you aren't on equal footing with Amazon. You are subservient.
Contract law still builds on the idea that b2b contracts are made between roughly equal parties because that was how business was done back 200 years ago, and thus there's much less legal protection than for b2c contracts.
Because Amazon and Walmart, as the giants they are, aren't hurting for cash. If you're a small time vendor or buyer, those 30 days could be the difference between eating tonight or going hungry. Meanwhile. Amazon and Walmart could just pay it out of their reserves early and Jeff Bezos isn't going to go hungry. Also, why would prices go up?
Yeah, and? Redistribute all the wealth that goes to the stonk market to the people. Henry Ford figured that out a century ago - for a healthy economy, you need people to be able to afford stuff!
I admired Costco for installing USA-made manhole covers rather than use those made in India, which most municipalities have shifted to for lower cost.
I’m probably the only person who would notice that. Sort of how Steve Jobs explained that a good carpenter cares about the backside of the dresser as much as the front, even if no customer will ever notice.
I don’t know why people like Costco so much. BJ’s Wholesale is much better and offers more variety. It seems mostly suitable for carnivores.
That being said their refund and the way their employees is great though. I would prefer walmart if they treat their employee better and give better pay.
Comparatively, as I have both a Costco and Sam's Club memberships, the floorplans on Costco stores are much more efficient. Both stores get crowded but Sams suffers from poor design which makes traffic worse. Although, Sams does compensate with a smoother checkout experience.
Personal convenience vs societal cost? Let’s have both ffs. Fucking luddites. Same kind of folks arguing against AI because it will take their shitty low paying job. No post-scarcity future for us! We want to work in debt servitude forever!
> Even if you think it is preferable at an individual level, there are good reasons to question the social value of the logistical complexity that it necessitates. Home delivery of single-packaged items entails an entirely different cost structure than freight trucks driving to consumer-facing warehouses delivering entire pallets of goods to be driven home by customers themselves.
Ok, so 100 people can all drive to the store, or one delivery truck can drive to everyone's house. (Ignoring the packaging waste for a second,) I suspect delivery of single items cuts back significantly on trips to the store.
Perhaps this is just slightly oversimplified
Amazon goes to great lengths to make purchasing exceedingly easy and fast. And with Prime, customers can buy a single, low-priced item with no shipping costs, cf. the requirement to buy in bulk quantities. As one would expect, this convenience and facilitation leads to more purchases. It also results in more packaging, more waste, more emissions, etc.
This was detailed in a 2024 Netflix documentary that interviewed a former Amazon VP who was fired for her environmental activism
https://www.netflix.com/title/81554996
She disclosed, brace yourself, that Amazon encourages people to buy stuff they do not need
https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/former-amazon-employee-b...
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/29/amazon-settles-with-employee...
Unlike Costco, Amazon does not disclose data on its environmental impact, e.g., carbon emissions. It's possible Amazon's imapact is less than Costco's, Costco's data shows its impact is relatively severe, but if that were true, then why not share the data
If you don’t think Costco encourages people to buy things they don’t need you’ve never shopped at Costco.
Anyway, my 55 gallon drum of mayonnaise is starting to go bad, got to make a run.
Yeah, this argument falls flat on it's face. Of course it's more complex than that.
When I worked from the office, centralized retail was very convenient and hardly added any driving. If you work from home, the opposite is true.
The next revolution would be to standardize reusable packaging, that same daily delivery truck could bring that back. But only government could make that happen.
I could imagine Amazon incentivizing reusable containers on their own TBH. If I was living in a house and not an apartment, I could easily imagine putting the Amazon bins back out so the next time I get a delivery, they take those, and we are constantly cycling bins back and forth.
Even environment aside, from a purely self-interested perspective, I would much prefer it to dealing with the recycling Amazon deliveries entail.
Amazon did that with an earlier version of their grocery delivery service. I assume the cost and logistics of managing and cleaning the bins just wasn’t worth it because their grocery service delivers in paper bags now.
One problem with the bins for normal items is that rarely will they be packed to the brim. I imagine the overall item density would drop significantly if they started using standardized bins instead of appropriately sized boxes for the items.
Well, if there's one company on Earth that's both incentivized to find an algorithm to efficient pack stuff into their shipping bins and also well-financed enough to actually figure out a good linear or quadratic-time algorithm to do so, it's definitely Amazon.
And once they do so they'll have solved two big problems! :)
OIC.
I will note like the other person though that I often get like "just one thing in a box that's clearly too big"
I used this service before it rolled out widely and these boxes were a mixed bag. On one hand they worked really well, they were essentially insulated hard totes with styrofoam lining and often had dry ice in them for anything that needed to be kept cold. On the other hand, I lived in an apartment, so storing 3-4 totes for a week or more was a real chore.
The funniest thing I remember though is that the totes weren't optimized for the size of some of the products available very well - if you put a frozen pizza in it, it sat diagonally, and without enough room to really put anything above or below it. You order four frozen pizzas, and you're allocating many cubic meters of apartment space for them until the next time you order.
I quite often get inappropriately sized boxes.
"Amazon bins" ... or maybe just reusable bins that aren't specific to a company? See: shipping containers. A standard bin for home delivery could still have "Amazon" painted on it but the rest of the infrastructure wouldn't be Amazon specific.
That idea is intriguing but brings up a lot of questions. If I live out in the middle of nowhere, order something but take a long time to open it, when does the Amazon truck come back to take the packaging? If there's a million of us procrastinators, is it really that much better than normal centralized garbage collection? Milk bottle delivery and collection only worked because the product naturally had a time limit, and once home refrigeration took off, the practice went away because people didn't consume on the same schedule.
FWIW most Amazon packages I get nowadays are just heavy paper anyways.
You don’t need time limit, you just need to deal with the company frequently enough for this to work.
How I would imagine this work if there was will (I don’t think there is)… there are online grocery delivery services that do this already, it’s not that complicated.
You get your stuff delivered in a reusable bag. They charge you 1 dollar for the bag. Next time you have something delivered, you give the bags back and you’ll get your money back.
In fairness, Amazon does seem to have improved in this regard. There's less plastic and fewer comically oversized boxes.
Order whole foods from them. They will pack 6 things in 4 reusable insulated bags. The problem is there is no way to send those bags back to be reused.
Anything to avoid walkable neighborhoods, naturally.
I go to Costco when I have something else to do in the area; It's almost never a "trip to Costco" for me.
Others have mentioned the parking lot sizes. If we wanted the best of both worlds, we could have online shopping at Costco with curbside delivery. There has to be a warehouse somewhere which means there are trucks/trains/planes moving goods around regardless. Even Amazon builds warehouses closer to where things need to end up eventually to optimize costs. You are comparing apples to oranges.
Finally, Costco delivers if you really don't want to leave your house. Now we are back to the same model but with far more flexibility.
Exact opposite for me, a weekend day is explicitly a Costco day to rack up for the week or month. Anything else I have to do that day is incidental. I assume this is many people's experience too rather than the other way around.
If I'm grabbing a couple items, I can be in and out of my Costco on the way back from work in 10m if the timing is right.
But yeah the wrong day, and it's 30m at least.
We live two hours from the closest Costco. We make a day of it once every 45-60 days plus shop at other stores we don’t have in our small town and see some family. We don’t have an Amazon account and maybe order something online once a month. We prefer shopping locally or waiting for Costco Day.
We’re an hour out and I had to do a deep dive and finally admit to myself that the savings just really weren’t there, including membership and gas.
Nobody does Costco and something else. That’s insane. Like going to IKEA and then somewhere else. Impossible.
I live 5 min from my closest Costco, and I go 2-3 times per week for a handful of items. It’s like any other store.
> There has to be a warehouse somewhere which means there are trucks/trains/planes moving goods around regardless.
Do you want an 18-wheeler truck to do your curb-side deliveries? Or a personal train?
If I had a nickel for every time an 18 wheeler dropped something off at my house I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t much, but it’s weird it happened twice.
What?
I think to clarify your point, curbside pickup is the curb of the store/warehouse, not the curb of your house, correct? I think the netizen above thought it was your house's curbside?
That's correct, with curbside pickup you drive to the store, pop open your trunk, and in principle someone from the store's staff is ready and waiting to verify your identity and then load your pre-staged shopping right into your trunk, and you drive off.
So you still have to go to the store but it can be an in-and-out if everything works.
Those individual trips to the store are typically for more than single items, and are often incorporated into trips one would have taken anyways as part of the doing of errands.
Technically, so is the home delivery. It is usually a delivery truck full of packages for nearby addresses.
Right, 100 trucks delivering 100 single items to 100 homes, or 100 consumers each making 1 trip to buy 100 things. It really depends on the details too much to simplify it so far.
It is more like 1 truck delivering 100 single items to 100 homes.
No, not if you're matching the volume of items between the two scenarios.
It's a little my complicated than that though, I'm very rarely driving to the store for a single item.
Not groceries, which I'm typically buying locally anyway. But I'll frequently drive to a store for some item I need.
Also, in the photo, it shows a huge car park. The stores, have to support large empty spaces for parking of those 100 people all driving to the store. I also wonder about the social value of utilizing the land that way.
It's quite efficient use of land. Costco parking lots tend to be full, people tend to leave Costco with full carts and go once or twice a month. Direct to consumer warehouses should be encouraged not discouraged by the environmental social use advocate kinds of people.
It results in fewer miles driven and more being done per mile driven. Each parking space gets more done per parking space. There's less retail worker overhead and the people that do work are paid better and have a higher quality of life.
This is in comparison to the delivery center methodology by e commerce where the land use for delivery driver is somewhere further away from what is needed for community events, and every delivery truck is filled to the brim, way more full than what each consumer vehicle would be filled up with?
Put solar panels over ‘em
Put the entire building over 'em. And solar panels over the building. The Target near my house is built on top of its parking lot. I don't have to cross an entire parking lot, dodging traffic, when I go there by bike or on foot. And it's on a bus line. What's not to like?
The exepense is what's not to like. Far cheaper to build a single-story warehouse + outside parking lot than a second story above a parking garage.
In most places in the US, land is cheap enough that paved surface parking is cheaper than building the store above a parking garage. In central urban areas, it's not, so they build up.
Came to say this, it would be hard to handicap this one. Shopping tends to be clustered, so if I’m methodical, I can go fill a car load with a lot of stuff and that might be more economical and environmentally friendly than the vans. But if I’m not, I could certainly see how it would be worse.
I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying it averages out to being better or worse.
When the Amazon truck drives down my street it’s always stopping at 5 houses or so. So the marginal cost of my package is practically zero.
If you have ever watched a deliver truck on their tracking app to crawl its way to you from stop to stop you realize the most optimistic timing is maybe 1 minute per package. Assuming the truck, driver, gas could be operated for 60 USD/hr the marginal cost seems more like 1 USD per package, but likely more.
No wonder Amazon decided to basically create their own logistic chain.
Fedex/UPS cost for a single package is roughly ~$13.95 (this was ~5 years ago when I was working in ecommerce) and even if Amazon was getting a huge discount from them for the volume they do, it was still probably nowhere near $1/package.
Judging Amazon's social value by delivery efficiency is just wrong.
Amazon's biggest benefit is that anything can be sold there. So now more problems in my life could have a solutions I can buy.
As for the delivery? There are more efficient ways to send deliveries. People can pickup deliveries at work or the gas station on their way home.
People don't care. How is that Amazon's fault?
So you replace a loop that delivers last mile goods to a lot of cars going decently out of their way to the limited places just to pick one item? Surely it’s less miles driven when Amazon does a loop hitting several people right near me than each of us driving farther in total to get our goods.
I wonder if Amazon eventually gets cut out by 3D printing/replicators for imitable objects.
For small items, add drones and the last miles savings get big.
So the breakeven is ~50 such items in one order.Lol, where did you get those numbers from? xD
Tesla uses something like 15kWh per 100km, so 5 mile drive is something like 1.1kWh
Yeah I botched that. It's around 1.5kw/mile for an ICE car.
> But to date it has still not been able to make the conversion away from being an online convenience store, which tells you something important about its model: Amazon is there to fill in the gaps of a dominant mode of goods procurement, not to replace it.
Either we can view single-packaged items as a gap in the goods procurement process, or we remove the means (Amazon) and view it as a forcing function to not have single-packaged items since a certain % of 100 people will start batching before they drive to the store.
I'd be curious further upstream as well. How would it compare from whatever shared point of entry the two approaches would have, say from coming off a boat at a port to the end user rather than just comparing the last mile.
It might, but I go to Costco every 3-4 weeks. If I depended on Amazon for everything I'd be getting multiple deliveries per day because there is no disincentive to doing that.
I never thought about it but doorstep delivery actually saves on emissions in a more optimized route. Interesting takeaway.
One issue is Amazon doesn’t appear to optimize for “fewest trucks trips to the block” - we’ll see 4-5 Amazon trucks/couriers on our cul de sac every day (plus USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL). That’s for 10 homes. If Amazon was able to do one truck to the block, that would big a big win for fewer trips/less emissions. Probably.
For the average person an Amazon package has amazingly lower emissions than driving to the store.
> I suspect delivery of single items cuts back significantly on trips to the store.
Amazon is also specifically incentivized to be efficient at scale, it impacts their bottom line to the point where they care about the shape of their vehicles. Individuals don't operate on the same scale so these sort of micro-optimizations don't happen.
Humans are specifically incentivized to be efficient at scale. They'll tend to shop at loctions on the way home from work, or otherwise cut down on travel times because traffic sucks.
I honestly can imagine that Costco is overall more efficient than Amazon, especially for people who do shop at Costco. If there's no Costco closeby, its more likely that the individual humans will shop elsewhere or somewhere more convenient.
I honestly don't know where the nearest Costco is but it's nowhere convenient.
this isn't even close to true and falls apart in a number of ways, the most popular vehicle in america right now (F-series truck) is woefully inefficient for just about everything
there are people who regularly go out of their way to drive to their favorite store for like 1-2 special items, people bring their dogs along on trips for companionship and leave them sitting in an air conditioned idling car while they shop
individuals are irrationally inefficient in dozens of ways that large businesses root out, for better or worse
Special items they can't get off Amazon, I presume? So they need to take that trip anyway.
No one is driving an hour out of their way for groceries.
And even the F150 truck example: if they are driving 30 miles to work, but 10 miles to Costco and 25 miles to home (Costco being 5 miles out of the way.), that F150 going 5 extra miles is more efficient than a Prius driving 25 miles from a Costco to their home.
Integrating routes throughout the day that matches your driving habits is a basic adulting task that everyone does, and has reasonably high efficiency.
I'm surprised you don't know any inefficient people! I know many. A friend drives 15 minutes out of the way because that grocery store is a little less crowded (they're the same chain). They've probably been doing it for a decade.
> that F150 going 5 extra miles is more efficient than a Prius driving 25 miles from a Costco to their home.
but that's not what's happening, Amazon isn't driving a Prius to your individual home then back to the warehouse... it's driving to a hundred people on an algorithmically optimized route. They do this because efficiency at scale makes them more profit.
Individual people make inefficient preferential decisions all the time, because the incentive to measure and improve these things is too low to bother on an individual scale.
The human driving to work, various activities, to the grocery store (and wherever else) isn't doing it for just one item like Amazon though.
The vast majority of those Amazon packages are for one thing. When the inefficient pickup truck comes back with a whole weeks worth of $200+ groceries, that further increases the efficiency of the home buyer.
It's unlikely that a daily commuter would go to Costco for just one gallon of milk or a few batteries. But I know from my Amazon deliveries that single items are delivered all the time.
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Anyone grabbing just some extra milk or toothpaste is likely grabbing it at an even more convenient store, like 7-11 (mostly because you can't buy one toothpaste at Costco lol).
Amazon generally doesn't do single item delivery for perishable groceries though, Fresh has a $100 minimum to avoid fees, for example.
Non-perishables are fine on a single-unit purchase because again, they're not just going to your house, they're going to dozens in your area every single day.
I know where you're coming from, but there's a reason this whole model exists, and it's not because it costs more.
Well sure. But Costcos model is clear to anyone who visits it. You only have to look at all the other shopping carts surrounding you to get an idea of how things work.
Costco shoppers buy a lot at a time. Because Costco forces you to buy 4 tubes of Toothpaste, 24 eggs (or 60 eggs), minimum 1 gallon of milk (no half gallons or pints), and like 20 lbs of rice / 10kg for the Europeans who havent been here and like 3000 meters of plastic wrap.
For Costco, the efficiency is the shear size of the shopping carts and shear mass of the goods sold at a time.
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You literally can't buy only one bar of soap or one toothbrush like you can from Amazon.com or other stores. There's efficiency here because of simple mass.
In contrast, I can look out and see the Amazon packages in my neighbors doors. It's all single items across the neighborhood.
But most people go to Costco for bulk buys. amazon deliveries are almost daily sometimes multiple a day and STILL have the same giant trucks dropping off product at distribution centers.
great for specialized items you want to pay premium for, awful for paper towels
Back in the day people weren't driving to Walmart or whatever all the time to pick up a thing they wanted/needed, they would do that if they needed it right away, but if they didn't they would just wait until they were already in the store for a weekly trip, or pop in if they happened to be driving by on some other errand they needed to run
Prices tell this activity is very efficient and not burdensome on society.
The part about Costco choosing to avoid the last mile shipping problem reminded me of a proverb, roughly translated as:
A clever person solves a problem; a wise person avoids it.
I think it holds a lot of truth in engineering.
Both spectrums are hard. Solving last mile is really really hard, but if you do that's a huge moat (aka Amazon). If you avoid last mile, you best deliver value in some other way, which Costco does by giving you more per dollar than anyone else.
They also offer some degree of curation, so your dollar goes further by volume/weight/unit on average, but also in less quantitative ways quite often. I trust what I buy from Costco, but I’ve completely stopped buying from Amazon (many years ago now) because apart from the poor value prop, I simply don’t like the quality or reliability of what’s offered.
Amazon largely being a dumb marketplace, a faster-shipping AliExpress/Temu, really makes them easy to drop if you find that shipping speed isn’t super important for those types of products. You can just go straight to the source and cut Amazon out entirely.
It’s not only a faster Temu for e-junk. It can also deliver your paper wipes and bananas in the same order.
Could you just place 3 different orders to 3 different vendors? Sure.
Could you just drive to the grocery for 2 bananas and then to Costco for the big discounted paper wipes? Sure.
But likely you will not. Which is why Amazon pulls a Trillion in revenue.
I've tried Amazon for groceries on this line of thinking. Verdict: it's terrible. Their groceries are priced uncompetitively and after a few times having some stranger pick my produce (and doing an offensively bad job of it) I don't do that anymore.
So since I'm 100% definitely going to the grocery store for produce, at minimum, this whole concept fails. May as well pick up the ziploc bags and paper towels as well while I'm there.
When some of your products are fraudulent all your products are fraudulent. Amazon has zero trust from me these days. It’s the equivalent of an overpriced garage sale.
You do you, I and most others don't have issues, hence their revenue.
In Q1 2026, AWS was 60% (roughly) of Amazon’s operating income.
I’m not so sure their retail piece is the part that’s making them big money.
If they were targeting 60% margins in grocery they would be bankrupt.
Retail has famously razor thin margins.
But their cash flow came in handy when AWS needed 300B in cash for gpus. Nobody could lend them that amount.
I’m familiar with the margins in retail (my parents ran a retail store their entire lives).
My point wasn’t that they don’t do a lot of volume; it’s that their retail business is not what’s driving their profit, and I don’t believe it’s growing.
I wouldn’t be surprised (though have not looked) if DoorDash (with DashMart), Uber Eats (which does more than just food), and Instacart have eaten significantly into Amazon’s revenue by solving the “get it to me” problem even faster.
In the US last mile is super hard because of the super high wages. The only way to work around it is volume per delivery person.
If you do 2 deliveries per hour (like Uber Eats / door dash), you pay essentially $5/order (assuming a super low us wage of $10/hour and no equipment cost/ gas).
So no in the US, Amazon is not threatened by such delivery services.
Now if you go to China, the equation flips. Which is why Amazon failed completely.
I see this said a lot, but Amazon products I buy actually work (even if the quality of obviously laughable - it actually performs the function and won't break any time soon to justify a 100x price increase for something more...artisan.
The only order I did for temu, everything arrived completely DOA
It’s also amazing how bad delivery services are in general. The incentives for third party delivery services don’t align well with the other parties. A retailer is judged on the quality of delivery yet only amazon has seemed to realize this (queue incoming anecdotes about amazon screwing up delivery yet i’ve never had an issue getting a refund when it happens).
I think it probably depends too on what different people's living situations are. I have an exurban house with a large driveway and I've basically never had an issue with an Amazon delivery. (Yes, it can be late sometimes but I can track it and I'm usually not in a rush.)
They don’t avoid the problem. They avoid solving it and let it be your problem.
But they don't avoid solving it, they offer it by partnering with instacart.
It seems costco can deliver HEAVY things that amazon can't (economically, afaict)
I was reading the book "How the internet happened": During the dot com bubble, there was a company called furniture.com which basically lost a lot of its investor money by learning the hard truth that IKEA also had to learn that shipping Heavy things like furniture isn't actually economical.
I am not sure if costco's model could allow it but especially for amazon, if they tried to do it or make it their USP like furniture.com, then I can imagine a very different outcome for it overall.
There was also a company I think who spent hundreds of millions of dollars (IIRC) in creating a large grocery website with buying large warehouses then and basically losing a ton of money. That business also failed quite drastically.
Another fun fact: when Amazon was first established, one of the largest loopholes that they had used which one can argue was why they were able to exist in the first place was that although they had selected book for Amazon because books are somewhat centralized (barnes and nobles essentially) but I think that the b&n warehouses required 10 books to be ordered each time.
So within the start, what they did was found out there was 1 book which was consistently out of stock. so they would order 1 book which the customer had ordered and then 9 of those other books. I imagine that if it might not have been for this as well, it might've been hard in the start.
There was also the fact that Barnes and nobles created their website and everyone thought that Amazon would basically die. Logic sort of suggests that it should've.
My conclusion is that Retail works in strange ways and timing matters a lot.
Also there are so many little facts within the book and it might be one of the fastest reads that I had of a book but the dot com bubble does feel quite similar to AI bubble IMO.
Here is a graph that I was making of a very limited connection graph of companies during the dot com bubble. https://files.catbox.moe/xdcxuy.png
I think that i have gone a bit too afar from my original comment but I sometimes like to chat and share bits of knowledge that I know and then I can't resist myself! :-D
Incredible quote, thank you for posting it
I hear this, I have been in plenty of meetings where I propose a solution that eclipses most of the project requirements, often for a product person to turn around and say something like “yeah but I like working with X techhnology”, for example Tailwind.
Okay you like Tailwind because you seem to think “p-2” is better than specifying “padding: 2rem;” because when it comes time to tinker with things you don’t want to understand CSS, you want to play with Tailwind.
Often, you are better off with a single standard environment rather than one with a hodgepodge of locally optimal solutions.
Hum... You want to say that tailwind is that standard, and some place can just avoid any css by using it?
You want to say that there shouldn’t be standards because tailwind has limitations?
Depends on who "you" are. A project manager might be better off. An individual contributor is probably better off using the right tool for the job.
You can put tailwind on the CV
> A clever person solves a problem; a wise person avoids it.
Wow, what a great quote!I think that this combined with "there is no free lunch" explains a lot of thing (IMO)
(I like to write and once I write, I like to send it free on the internet in the spirit of how older internet must've originally intended but if you wish to read the TLDR it is: Be wise in selecting the problems to be clever at!)
I think that this holds a lot within career-making as well, in terms of deciding what career that you want. For example, I think that sometimes I get hyper-focused on a topic and basically dig the weeds and every information about a particular topic. My recent obsession was with the dot com bubble and supply chains.
but at the same time I think that although its just good thinking about it and gives me more breath of knowledge which helps me form a more nuanced person, but that doesn't mean that for every interest that I have, I have to become the expert or a genuine professional career at it.
Some problems are worth the risk/tradeoff when thought from short term but they quickly become really painful over the long term whereas other problems are more fulfilling long term but really hurt short term and there is a balance within the middle which I have selected which is what's know as CS :-D
I am a somewhat frugal guy and my philosophy has always been of do it yourself but reading about supply chains makes me realize just how interconnected we are. A toilet making company in Japan is an irreplacable component within the AI industry (They make the ceramics sheets on which the wafers are built and they are the only company that have the genuine expertise, patent and skills for doing so and they aren't alone and there are many many companies within such thing)
and even a single aluminim screw-esque component could take like 4-5 turns from australia (mining) -> iceland (cheaper energy) -> China (making proper aluminum bars) -> Vietnam (cheaper labour than China so China itself is offshoring it) -> Back to China.
All while a software engineer from say India/America/Europe is making the website and handling the customer service and taking ad decisions/marketing while another MNC (Amazon) ships it to your doorsteps, a company can be formed anywhere nationwide, and the product could be gone to LATAM.
Basically, although I have gotten on a tangent, my main point is that not every problem has to be solved by you. the world has lots of money in every fields as its just soo interconnected and as such you should decide on the problems which are best worth your time, your expertise and your interests hopefully and tackling that problem and maybe even being clever at that! and being wise in avoiding many of other problems.
Be wise in selecting the problems to be clever at! but to be wise on selecting the problems you want to be clever at, you should be aware of other problems in the first place so its good to analyze more problems, though it could very well be a justification that I might provide myself when I am studying supply chains and the humble container, I also find it interesting how the concepts of containers become so intuitive once you know it in modern shipping and then we applied that same concept AGAIN in Docker/podman but before that time, we were none the "wiser" :-D
Whenever someone says America can do great things, I don't think of battleships, fighter jets, or AI models, I think of Costco.
Agree 100%. Costco exemplifies american dream... recent immigrants perusing well-stocked aisles, friendly employees, ample parking, cheap tasty hot dogs, etc.
Perhaps this depends a lot on location. Parking is a nightmare at my local Costco. The employees are friendly enough most of the time. I truly admire the value and business model but Costco is pretty much the absolute worst shopping experience I can think of.
Agreed. The entire store is wired to encourage impulse buying and keep you from making rational decisions about whether you'll be able to finish that 3lb container of guacamole before it goes bad.
I find the experience of shopping at Costco very uncomfortable. The parking lots are jammed packed, everyone is darting around with large shopping carts, the lines for the cashier are long, sales people are trying to pitch me on travel deals as I walk by - it almost feels like going through a busy airport. I am a Costco member, but I only go to the store when I really need to. The fact that I can shop Costco via Instacart was a gamechanger for me.
ample parking? Not at any locations in my area. Even on weekdays.
Go within an hour or so of opening.
I used to work right across the st from one and would spend most of my shift looking out at their parking lot and you could see it get more packed throughout the day, thin out a little bit in the early afternoon and then slowly drain towards closing.
It's always least crowded right at open and then an hour (? or maybe two?) later they open for the "regular" people and once that's the case, it fills quickly.
> Go within an hour or so of opening.
Hah. It’s such a PITA that Costco includes an hour earlier entry on the top tier membership.
I regularly shop at Costco and its usually one of five which ever is more convenient at the time. In all of my experience with Costco there is exactly one that has shitty parking, the rest are fine. That is if you have enough wrinkles in your brain to notice that in front of the store there 10 cars waiting for spot and parking a little bit in a back is easier.
I often see people cruising around still looking for parking while I already managed: to park, walk to the storefront, get myself a hot dog, eat my hot dog, grab a cart.
The hotdogs. You know the world is ending when Costco raises the prices of their hotdog.
I think of this: https://patrickcollison.com/fast
Sadly this is not the case anymore these days.
Wallmart is absolutely impressive. But many places have something similar to Costco.
I mean, Costco is great, but I think the purest expression of American capitalism is Buc-ee’s.
Can you explain why? Non-american here :)
I present to you, the 8th wonder of the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis_Pyramid
Yeah that’s pretty not bad. They just need to deposit them along the interstate system.
Welcome to Costco, I love you.
All the comments appear to be US centric, but Costco is also in other countries. So to tell you about the UK:
Here membership is unusual in that it isn't technically open to everyone, it's business and certain professions: https://www.costco.co.uk/membership but in reality anyone who wants to join can find a way.
Also no mention in the article of non-food. In UK Costco is known for special offers on electrical and white good and more. And cheap car tyres iirc
In the UK not everyone drives like USA and Costco's are few and far between, so that limits who shops there. So a niche player compared to the Supermarkets for consumer shopping.
And people also have smaller homes compared to USA and smaller families maybe (or smaller portion sizes...!), and Costco here is more geared towards selling in bulk, and to corner shops and other small businesses. It's more of a hybrid Wholesaler.
That's interesting, what do people have to do to get membership?
I think the article misses discussing Costco’s growing online business. There are a ton of Costco items that you can only buy online or that are sold in a different way online, and they’re often doing so with included shipping very similar to Amazon’s business model.
The shipping is slower, but it’s an interesting part of their business, and I encourage Costco members to try it out. You’d be surprised at the quantity of things you really don’t need to go to the warehouse for.
This is about 80% spot on, but the last 20% fails to mention that you can avoid the in store experience if it isn't for you, and in fact get the stuff you want delivered to your door in a short period of time, using services like instacart. Costco even partners directly with instacart for same day delivery. You can use your membership to get same day delivery shopping on costco's website and they will use instacart to fulfill it for you. Or you can use instacart directly, in which case you don't even need a membership yourself.
True, but at higher prices (and with delivery fees), which somewhat defeats the purpose of the cost savings at Costco.
But saving the cost and time of you driving there yourself, which if you're honest is probably worth the delivery fee.
Sure, although personally the comparison would be to delivery from other stores.
Costco is mostly food, clothes, furniture, other large things, and auto services, which generally you don't get from Amazon even if you aren't a Costco member. The points about less choice more apply to like Costco vs grocery stores or Walmart. And I do like Costco, similar low-choice reason I like Trader Joe's even though Costco is its own league.
Yeah I can’t get 5 different varieties of a ball bearings in the size I need delivered overnight from Costco. And for the things Costco or your local grocery store is great for, Amazon is often a far worse option. I noticed my wife was buying our toothpaste using a subscribe and save thing, so I compared it to our regular grocery store when I went shopping, and Amazon was like 20% more expensive. Great marketing on Amazon’s part getting people to assume it’s always the lowest price, but it’s often not.
The dumbest assumption I saw Amazon baiting people into was using Chase credit card points for purchases. You'd think spending those specifically on Amazon would be more efficient than just getting cash and buying from Amazon with that cash, right? Turns out it's the other way around, and by a large amount.
They often have promotions which can make this very lucrative. “spend at least 1 mile, get 40% off” etc
yes, I started buying with miles because Amazon was giving me more value for those than my current bank.
The Trader Joe's model is an interesting comparison with the Costco model.
Similarities:
* Like you said, both have fewer choices than a conventional grocery store: if you want ketchup or peanut butter, there's only going to be one brand and one size.
* Both of them don't have scales at the registers: unlike at a conventional grocery store, nothing is sold by weight (which I'm sure provides another small efficiency gain).
* Both of them are cheaper than your typical grocery store.
Differences:
* I feel like Trader Joe's leans on store brand / white-labeling items more than Costco -- yes Kirkland Signature is a thing but Trader Joe's takes it further.
* The shopping experience is pretty different both in terms of the in-store experience and the quantities things are sold in.
* Costco requires a membership, Trader Joe's doesn't.
I wonder which elements of the two models would work best for a public grocery store.
Trader Joe is owned by one of the two German Aldi groups (two brother split original business to have one each) And both of them employ the same model globally.
They are huge - ~15,000 stores worldwide and growing fast
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldi
As per their financials it’s roughly 50-50. I personally buy groceries and household consumables for the most part apart from the occasional electronics purchase.
IMO Costco’s food hits the sweet spot between high end grocery store quality and walmart level price.
I think a lot of people buy furniture and clothing on Amazon. It's extremely cheap and easy to return, or just throw away if you can't return it (not endorsing that).
I purchased a new mattress to fit my fold-out futon frame, from Walmart.com.
And the reason I chose Walmart at that time is because they offered good products, mostly first-party inventory (despite the marketplace format) but moreover, they offered a quick add-on option at checkout to hire a haul-away service to come to my door and haul away the junked, old mattress.
I own no vehicle; I live on the second floor no elevator, and the haul-away service was a godsend and a bargain price.
This post seems quite far fetched. Amazon is well aware of the paradox of choice, and the vast majority of UI changes I have seen recently are exactly those that guide and reinforce you to buy one option, without the decision paralysis. Items are not homogeneous, and it is obvious that they try to concentrate purchases to a smaller set of SKUs to reap the same benefits as Costco. It’s simply that Amazon can additionally support the long tail of SKUs with a heterogeneous warehouse system (and heterogeneous profit margins).
On the delivery side: US suburbia is just in general not a sustainable solution. Delivery is just one way in which it bites. Somewhere like NYC, the amortized delivery cost (internalized or externalized) is very low (and opposite to Costcos which require a drive to an inconvenient location).
The bit about agents doing your shopping is falling for the same trap as crypto people thinking NFTs will kill Ticketmaster. These have never been technical problems: the APIs don’t exist for nontechnical reasons.
Somehow Costco managed to get their store right in the middle of downtown Vancouver. They put it under some condo towers.
That sounds like they might have leveraged housing development incentives. In a lot of cities with high housing costs you get tax breaks for investing in residential properties.
I don’t know if Vancouver has any of these off the top of my head.
And what you’re saying is true as a generality, that big box stores often fit in at least some parking in dense areas. I have found that grocery stores and big box stores do the most parking subsidies especially when they expect their customers to be buying a lot of bulky items. They seem to frequently have free or deeply discounted validated parking in underground garages.
Maybe not in Manhattan or anything but in many other large cities with high land value in downtown areas.
I would love to hear more about Costco's engineering culture. The fact they are still running/modernizing/supporting AS400 infrastructure and RPGLE applications is remarkable. I have to imagine that they have a unique devops model internally to keep that alive; especially facing a dwindling talent market.
Highly recommend the Acquired podcast and their Costco episode if people want to dive deeper into the history of this company.
https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/costco
Surprisingly Amazon is actually pretty constrained. There are usually only 3-10 versions of a given product but sold by hundreds of different resellers.
When I was shopping for a water distiller there was only one large one but branded for ten different Chinese companies. (And They all had the same dangerous flaw where water could spill on the electrical plug.)
Amazon is the anti-Costco also. We thought about it, and it doesn't really make sense to get a Costco membership when we can lean into Prime more. It doesn't help that we live in a fairly urban area (Ballard in Seattle) and Costco's is pretty suburban.
I'd much rather order some heavy stuff from Amazon to have delivered and walk to the local grocery store for everything else.
A major upside to Costco is you can actually see stuff and you also can walk out of the store same-day. Also I never ever worry about the counterfeit and/or low-quality crap you inevitably get from Amazon. And if Costco sells me something crappy, I drag it back in and don't even have to start up the printer (it's a zombie at this point). Costco has a running rule that they never charge above 10% in profits so I know I'm getting a good deal too.
What about the price-quality aspect? Costco blows Amazon away here IME. Plus there's the fact that someone can become an employee of Costco out of high school and spend their entire career there, with decent wages and benefits. That's not happening at an Amazon Prime fulfillment warehouse.
You can order from Costco on Instacart here in the Bay Area. This said, there's a lot of quality stuff at Costco (besides their huge wines collection) that you can't find anywhere else.
As someone who finds ordering groceries obscene what kind of heavy stuff do you get that you need to order in?
Generally the bulk things I would have gotten at Costco, which isn't much for our family, so mostly protein drinks, olive oil, and so on. They come in pretty big cases, and it definitely seems like the heaviest thing the Amazon driver is delivering that day.
We still drive to the Chinese grocery for a big bag of rice every once in awhile.
I dont like Costco, it epitomizes American over-consumption. Parking lot overflowing with oversized SUVs with people loading up oversized trolleys with food from food corporations to take back to their oversized fridges and storage basements.
Over-consumption? That doesn't follow. I sustain my family on Costco, going once a month or so, but have to feed four people, including two teenagers that consume way more than 2000 calories a day. You keep using the word "oversized", but that assumes the SUV, the fridge, the trolley are not suited for purpose. But they are!
I think what you're really critiquing is people who don't shop frequently, and therefore buy in bulk.
I think the poster is indeed criticizing bulk shopping. I would then to agree that shopping in bulk makes it easier to overprovision or to have things go to waste or being bought superfluously. I am also not sure about it being cheaper in total because my experience with bulk sellers is that they achieve their profit margins by their product mix, so selling you some cheap items as loss leaders or discount items and recouping on others that you buy at the same time. Doing weekly shopping trips at different supermarkets can counteract that by letting you buy more various promotional items.
Of course it comes down to how much personal time you then have to spend on shopping to drive your bill down.
I've done the A/B test. Costco saves my family 25% across just food, ignoring other stuff I get there (batteries, shirts, jackets, shoes, underwear, deodorant, etc.)
You're pointing out that you need to plan properly to bulk shop, since you're necessarily modeling future consumption over days/weeks across multiple people, but that's different than over-consumption. It means you have to be analytical and plan, but that's exactly how we do it.
I despise the city living lifestyle, where folks jam themselves in tiny grocery stores to buy 2oz containers of jam and mustard because they don't have enough room to actually fit the food they want. My sister and dad live this way in NYC, and it's annoying as hell every single time I visit them. Wanna throw a meal together? First step: leave the apartment.
Costco is one of the few stores in America that attempts to give great value to consumers. Most supermarkets just don’t
Aldi seems to. I thought of them as I read about Costco, not because of the size of their stores (which are generally quite small as supermarkets go) but because of the limited choices. Aldi normally has everything I need but doesn't have a lot of choice in any individual thing. It makes shopping there feel very efficient.
Walmart does this too, and it's one of the worst experiences/value-propositions I've ever experienced. It might be better in the US but in Canada it's expensive, poor quality and painful: pick three.
Not sure that counters their point...or even relates to it.
If you don't like American over-consumption you can go to Carrefour and try out French overconsumption where people load up oversized trollies with corporate food to take to their SUVs in the overflowing parking lot... in France.
Are you under the impression that it is a uniquely American trait to have a bigger house than you need, more car than you need, and a penchant for corporate food? Over-consumption is human nature, not an American invention. America just happens to be able to afford it on a scale that most countries can't. Go to the poorer countries on earth, and you will still see people over-consuming if they have the means.
Maybe it isn't even overconsumption. Maybe it's just a different way of getting things done. Do you think that the people that buy Costco sized packs of toilet paper wipe their ass unnecessarily? Or maybe they just make fewer trips to the store to buy toilet paper.
Since toilet paper is mostly non-perishable it shouldn't really matter, right? But for anything that goes bad there is also a tipping point where you bought too much and have things go to waste.
Enforcing appropriate sized consumption is a terrifying thought.
If that's the only thing you can find to dislike about Costco, then they are indeed the saints of the retail world.
What sizes of SUV, trolleys, fridges, and storage basements would meet with your approval?
Because of the large quantities my family with 4 children is able to go to Costco once a month and purchase almost everything our family will need for the entire month this means we only need to go to the store one or two additional times during the month for things like milk and bread.
Saying that everyone eating there is indulging in overconsumption is a ridiculous overgeneralization. Not to mention people that are planning parties, bbqs, get togethers etc. Just because you can't think of any reason for people to need large portion sizes besides overconsumption does not mean others are so limited in their imagination.
We have a larger family and Costco combined with access to a decent grocery store that's within walking distance is great: get deals on larger quantity staples and milk, eggs and bread several times a week.
> to take back to their oversized fridges and storage basements.
It's really awesome to have plenty of food storage, with extra and oversized refrigerators, and a deep freeze too.
I keep mine full of vegetables and beef - I have a whole beef slaughtered annually.
Can you explain why this is a bad thing or why it means overconsumption? Why is the stereotypical "European" method of going to the store every day superior to me spending ~10 minutes once every two to three weeks to go to Wal-Mart? What do you do when there are shocks, like weather events, power outages (my generator will tide my fridges over, but will take down a store POS terminal), civic unrest, or pandemics? Or if you're just plain busy? I really appreciate being able to be fully stocked (with rotating backups so I am never actually out) of basically all foods and home staples (like TP). What's the downside?
There’s nothing wrong with your way, it’s just a different lifestyle based on how dense of a community you live in. People living in apartments in dense cities don’t have room for a whole cow in their apartment, but there’s probably a few grocery stores in walking distance, so they pick up food more often. Living in a suburb means that you probably don’t walk by a grocery store on your way home from work, and you probably have some space, so it makes sense to shop less frequently and in bulk. These are both valid ways to live that satisfy different sets of preferences.
Minor point: you have a whole cow slaughtered annually.
“Costco is the anti-Amazon” Haha OK
Just wait until Amazon turns some of its warehouses into Costco-style retail stores…
If the stats in this are true, Amazon’s warehouse workforce turns over at 25 times the rate of Costco’s workforce, for almost the same wage. That is remarkable.
I like the idea that Costco and Amazon are diametric opposites — for example I couldn't shop at Costco for a very very long time because I lived in the city and didn't have a car.
Amazon and other delivery companies (e.g. Weee) came to the rescue. For a while I lived close enough to a Costco for a 20 minute bike, so I'd load up my gym bag full of food - even then Costco is not ideal because there's only so much you can carry (one thing of meat, one thing of eggs, some veggies).
For those that think Costco are the uber-shopping experience are missing that they both provide very opposite consumer experiences. (Yes Costco has shipping, and same day shipping, but it hits different from Amazon).
This is also opposite to corner store grocery systems where you can pop in at any moment to get fresh fruit, a wider choice, smaller quantities at more flexible hours etc.
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tldr - what I think I'm saying is that Costco is the perfect "suburban" purchasing experience - great if you tick the boxes that you have a big family (otherwise why do you need a 60 pack of toilet paper), a big house (where do you fit all that toilet paper), a car (to transport the toilet paper), etc.
anyone who don't tick those boxes can't really take advantage of any of that - so while Costco is amazing, it definitely shouldn't be the only way to shop.
There's another reason for Costco's appeal and trust among members: Kirkland Signature. Costco mandates that any KS product must be at least 10% better in quality than the leading national brand it replaces and/or cost less.
That further helps simplify shopping and decision-making and resolves the paradox of choice. Instead of having to sort through a wide variety of unknown brands on Amazon, they just go with KS.
https://www.thestreet.com/retail/costco-reveals-why-kirkland...
Costcos tech stack is frankly unconscionably bad. It’s the one way in which Sam’s Club crushes them.
There’s no reason they couldn’t do basically all of the good things mentioned in this article plus have a functional website, let me scan and pay with my phone in store, have a handheld scanner at each register, etc.
nothing I buy on amazon is available at costo
They would be , in their own way, competing against "each other"? , with different models to get the product to customer .
I nodded along to much of the article, but I really think it's wrong to see this as a model for public grocery stores. The analysis is glossing over a lot of the key factors that Costco uses to make its logicstics model work. You can't buy small quantities, so the staff don't need to spend much time breaking down pallets; you're not allowed in the building without a membership, so there's little need to invest in behavior policing or loss prevention.
> you're not allowed in the building without a membership
I wonder why other stores like Target don't do that as well. Beyond the obvious, it just seems like the way to go.
I'm surprised e-commerce is still under 17 percent.
It makes me want to check my purchasing habits to see if I'm around that mark.
Cars & car parts, food, gas and clothes are still purchased almost exclusively in person. Those are each a massive percentage of spending.
https://www.census.gov/retail/marts/www/marts_current.pdf
That tracks. I wouldn't trust e-gas either.
Seriously though, I was thinking on how I had to stop and get cat litter, milk, and cereal on my way home today when I read what you posted. While I get some consumables online; pet food, filters for my odd-sized vent, and until recently Hello Fresh; I mostly buy consumables in person.
> To put it crudely, having someone in a Sprinter van deliver a recently-purchased toothbrush to your doorstep is simply not a universalizable action, from either a business or logistical standpoint. It is a modern feat that Amazon is capable of doing this, but that it can be done does not mean that it should, nor even that it can be done writ large. For most consumption, it is far more efficient for people to handle the “last-mile delivery” themselves by going to stores and buying a good amount of stuff when they do so.
When you order your X, a van doesn't drive from Amazon's warehouse to your home and then back with only your order. The van takes a van-full (hopefully) from the warehouse, and makes many stops at many homes, businesses, etc.
That seems more efficient, in terms of fuel, climate impact, etc., than each customer making a separate round trip. Is there data showing it either way?
Here's one study sort that answers your question
https://news.umich.edu/carbon-emissions-and-grocery-shopping...
In-store pickup using a internal combustion engined vehicle produced more emissions than any other option studied.
Great, thanks. Here's the abstract. And for context, it's a collaboration with Ford Motor Co.
... We report and compare the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for a 36-item grocery basket transported along 72 unique paths from a centralized warehouse to the customer, including impacts of micro-fulfillment centers, refrigeration, vehicle automation, and last-mile transportation. Our base case is in-store shopping with last-mile transportation using an internal combustion engine (ICE) SUV (6.0 kg CO2e). The results indicate that emissions reductions could be achieved by e-commerce with micro-fulfillment centers (16-54%), customer vehicle electrification (18-42%), or grocery delivery (22-65%) compared to the base case. In-store shopping with an ICE pick-up truck has the highest emissions of all paths investigated (6.9 kg CO2e) while delivery using a sidewalk automated robot has the least (1.0 kg CO2e). Shopping frequency is an important factor for households to consider, e.g. halving shopping frequency can reduce GHG emissions by 44%. Trip chaining also offers an opportunity to reduce emissions with approximately 50% savings compared to the base case. Opportunities for grocers and households to reduce grocery supply chain carbon footprints are identified and discussed.
It's interesting that consumers driving EVs reduce the cost on the same scale as deliveries (presumably in an ICE vehicle).
They omit apples-to-apples comparisons (at least from the press release and abstract)
The last is a bit bizarre - comparing a 2-mile radius sidewalk mechanism to pickup trucks and delivery vans, but omitting the very popular 2-mile delivery method.Also this argument is easily refuted by the US Postal Service, which physically delivers individual pieces of paper in a few days, for pennies.
Right but that’s a government service and it should be totally fine for them to deliver mail below cost using taxpayer money to make up the deficit.
Like every other government service - highways, defense, etc. They’re profitable to the system, but not per se.
The US Post Office is funded by its own revenue, I'm pretty sure.
It still enjoys many government mandated monopolistic advantages.
See: American Letter Mail Company.
USPS is fueled by parcel deliveries, but also in large part by literal tons of junk mail on dead trees; spammers have paid Uncle Sam handsomely to spam every citizen's mailbox for decades, and it's the most lucrative thing USPS can do with our home mailboxes.
The postal service is a quasi government entity that has operated (not to get too deep into the politics of it) for many years at a loss. It does compete with Amazon, as well as being used by Amazon, but it's very different as a business than Amazon.
I got this when I told Gemini "post office loss retirement prepaid" because of other articles I have read that I cannot remember.
"In 2006, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA). This law forced the USPS to do something virtually no other government agency or private corporation has to do: prefund its retiree healthcare benefits 75 years into the future[0]. Essentially, they were legally required to fast-track billions of dollars into a fund to pay for the future retirement health benefits of current employees, and theoretically even future employees who hadn't been hired yet."
[0]: https://apwu.org/the-usps-fairness-act/
I would expect Amazon to be more efficient. Besides the round trips, there's operating the store, putting items on display, all that. As I said above, Amazon and Costco don't compete so directly though, like you aren't buying a pie from Amazon.
There's also the externalities. Costco effectively supports car infested surburbia which lots of people blame for a great many problems.
Indeed true. Even more efficient is when people can wait a few days and let Amazon bundle your orders and deliver on a designated day.
That said people don’t typically get in a car to buy one thing -though obviously sometimes they do. On average though their trips will be for multiple things. I still think even without using designated delivery days Amazon deliveries are more efficient than individuals going out to buy things independently.
I've always wondered why I don't see passed on savings for the "amazon day" thing. It's gotta be way better for their logistics to deliver bulk orders, or pick a standardized delivery day for each neighborhood or something. Why do they only offer a single dollar of credit for choosing it?
I don’t know how much they are saving. On the one hand they save a stop (they aren’t saving a van as there are likely already vans delivering near by). on the other they have to hold on to stock longer waiting for things to all be ready. It costs money to store things
I get 6% back instead of 5% with my Amazon card which is more than enough to incentivize me in many situations.
I was zeroing out the amount purchased: The comparison is the customer picks up one item vs. Amazon delivers one item, or the customer picks up 12 or 20 things vs. Amazon delivers the same amount.
I'd still love to see data.
The problem with environmental impact is really a consequence of subsidized energy costs, including the externalization of environmental cost. If the consumer and Amazon paid the actual cost of fuel, they would make valid economic and environmental choices and we wouldn't need to figure it out like this.
> Amazon often negotiates delayed payment terms with suppliers, leaning on them to allow payment windows longer than the thirty-day industry norm.
Oh how I would wish for this crap to be banned. By law. Simply put, at the scale of "you are even allowed to sell at large volume to Amazon, Walmart, ..." you aren't on equal footing with Amazon. You are subservient.
Contract law still builds on the idea that b2b contracts are made between roughly equal parties because that was how business was done back 200 years ago, and thus there's much less legal protection than for b2c contracts.
This needs to change, and the sooner the better.
Why? Then we’d have to pay more to buy stuff.
Because Amazon and Walmart, as the giants they are, aren't hurting for cash. If you're a small time vendor or buyer, those 30 days could be the difference between eating tonight or going hungry. Meanwhile. Amazon and Walmart could just pay it out of their reserves early and Jeff Bezos isn't going to go hungry. Also, why would prices go up?
Yeah, and? Redistribute all the wealth that goes to the stonk market to the people. Henry Ford figured that out a century ago - for a healthy economy, you need people to be able to afford stuff!
And yet, Amazon Prime is inspired by Costco membership.
I admired Costco for installing USA-made manhole covers rather than use those made in India, which most municipalities have shifted to for lower cost.
I’m probably the only person who would notice that. Sort of how Steve Jobs explained that a good carpenter cares about the backside of the dresser as much as the front, even if no customer will ever notice.
Thanks for an interesting comment! (No irony intended).
I don’t know why people like Costco so much. BJ’s Wholesale is much better and offers more variety. It seems mostly suitable for carnivores.
That being said their refund and the way their employees is great though. I would prefer walmart if they treat their employee better and give better pay.
Costco is way too damn crowded. There needs to be 2x or 3x the number of stores. It is a great deal. But an utterly miserable shopping experience.
That's because of "them". If they weren't here.
Them is a universal variable you already injected.
Comparatively, as I have both a Costco and Sam's Club memberships, the floorplans on Costco stores are much more efficient. Both stores get crowded but Sams suffers from poor design which makes traffic worse. Although, Sams does compensate with a smoother checkout experience.
Part of the reason their prices are low is they are very efficient at using their total hours open.
I often just get it delivered to my house to avoid the crowds though.
Personal convenience vs societal cost? Let’s have both ffs. Fucking luddites. Same kind of folks arguing against AI because it will take their shitty low paying job. No post-scarcity future for us! We want to work in debt servitude forever!