How our home delivery habit reshaped the world

The great trick of online retail has been to get us to do more shopping while thinking less about it – thinking less, in particular, about how our purchases reach our homes. This divorce of a product from its voyage to us is perhaps the thing that Amazon has sold us most successfully. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, never wanted his customers to worr... See more

In 2009, researchers at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh estimated that a shopper emits 24 times more carbon dioxide if she drives 12.8 miles to buy a single item than if she orders it online.

It is as if we have forgotten that a product is an object moving through space, fighting gravity, air resistance and other forces of nature. Companies, though, are only too aware of it. While we choose and buy our purchases with mere inch-wide movements of our thumbs, they are busy rearranging the physical world so that our deliveries pelt towards ... See more

You might now reason that even a 12-minute walk to the store to buy a can of beans is too great an expenditure of time, and that the fee paid for one-hour delivery is a fair price to snatch those minutes back into your life. Of course, the principle of opportunity cost assumes that we will earn the value of that fee back in some way in those 12 min... See more

But as delivery schedules have dwindled into hours, even the gigantic warehouse full of stuff in a central place such as the triangle is proving insufficient. Now, companies also need smaller distribution centres around the country, to respond rapidly to orders and to abbreviate the last mile as much as possible. These smaller sheds cannot stock as... See more

Eventually, we will want our deliveries to be so prompt that we will practically be sitting on top of the products we will order. At Chetwoods, the architecture firm, a managing director named Tim Ward told me about “brownfield” sites in London that the e-commerce industry can swallow: real estate that has fallen into disuse, and that can be repurp... See more

Similarly, the effortlessness of home delivery urges us to forget that, once upon a time, we were a part of the supply chain, lugging our goods home in plastic bags or loading up our cars. We were our own last-mile solution. When we quit that role, it was as if the supply chain became invisible to us.