How Bad is Online Shopping for the Environment? (politico.com) 103
"E-commerce sales jumped nearly 32 percent in 2020 compared to the prior year, according to U.S. Census Bureau data," reports Politico — and this year "online sales are on track to outpace that record..."
"Now, cities, climate scientists and companies are trying to figure out the consequences for the planet." The most recent research is starting to incorporate more of the complexities of retail. In January, MIT's Real Estate Innovation Lab published a study that simulated hundreds of thousands of those kinds of scenarios and found online shopping to be more sustainable than traditional retail 75 percent of the time... Most research suggests that ordering goods for delivery is more beneficial for the environment because it means people are making fewer individual shopping trips. The average U.S. consumer goes to the grocery store at least 300 times a year. If they drove there, it was likely in a gas-powered vehicle. Plus, there tends to be higher energy demands at storefronts compared to warehouses. But that scale "could easily tip in the other direction," according to a study of the U.S. market published last spring by the sustainable investment firm Generation. The firm's researchers found that e-commerce is 17 percent more carbon efficient than traditional retail, but could change with a few tweaks to their assumptions, such as the number of items purchased in a single visit, the amount of packaging and the efficiency of last-mile delivery...
In an email, Amazon spokesperson Luis Davila pointed to findings by company scientists that suggest online shopping produces fewer emissions than driving to shop at a store; for instance, the company estimates that a single delivery van trip can take 100 round-trip car journeys off the road, on average. During the pandemic, customers made fewer trips to Whole Foods Market stores and other brick-and-mortar Amazon locations and shifted to home delivery, which also lowered emissions. But take a step back, and a bigger, more complex picture emerges. From 2019 to 2020, Amazon's U.S. sales jumped 36 percent to $263.5 billion. By the company's own account, its overall emissions spiked 19 percent, equivalent to running 15 coal plants for one year. More fossil fuel use and investments in buildings, data servers and transportation were key drivers.
That figure reflects its response to consumer demand during Covid-19, but doesn't capture progress Amazon made, Davila said. He said the company tracks the amount of carbon per dollar of gross merchandise sales — a concept known as carbon intensity — and by that measure, Amazon decreased the amount of carbon per purchase last year by 16 percent. In a blog post in June, a company scientist argued that this metric allows high-growth companies like Amazon to identify efficiencies. Amazon also reduced emissions from the electricity it bought by 4 percent due to new investments in clean energy, despite expanding its buildings' square footage. The company is about two-thirds of the way toward 100 percent renewable energy — a key pillar of the company's plan to reach net-zero emissions by 2040.
Emissions from deliveries are expected to decrease as Amazon deploys 100,000 electric vans in the coming decade. Davila did not disclose what portion of the company's fleet that accounts for today.
The director of MIT's Real Estate Innovation Lab also warns that cardboard boxes are some of the largest carbon pollutants in the system regardless of the method of delivery. (Politico points out most packaging ultimately "ends up in a landfill or is burned to produce energy, generating 105.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide last year, according to federal data.") That data also shows only 9% of plastic gets recycled, "because flexible plastic films and pouches and many take out containers still aren't recyclable. Neither are plastic bags, unless consumers bring them to the grocery store."
One recycler tells the site that many companies are now promising to use more recycled materials in their packaging, including Amazon, PepsiCo, Coca Cola and Target — but urges "extended producer responsibility," in which companies (not taxpayers) cover the costs of cleaning up their packaging.
"Now, cities, climate scientists and companies are trying to figure out the consequences for the planet." The most recent research is starting to incorporate more of the complexities of retail. In January, MIT's Real Estate Innovation Lab published a study that simulated hundreds of thousands of those kinds of scenarios and found online shopping to be more sustainable than traditional retail 75 percent of the time... Most research suggests that ordering goods for delivery is more beneficial for the environment because it means people are making fewer individual shopping trips. The average U.S. consumer goes to the grocery store at least 300 times a year. If they drove there, it was likely in a gas-powered vehicle. Plus, there tends to be higher energy demands at storefronts compared to warehouses. But that scale "could easily tip in the other direction," according to a study of the U.S. market published last spring by the sustainable investment firm Generation. The firm's researchers found that e-commerce is 17 percent more carbon efficient than traditional retail, but could change with a few tweaks to their assumptions, such as the number of items purchased in a single visit, the amount of packaging and the efficiency of last-mile delivery...
In an email, Amazon spokesperson Luis Davila pointed to findings by company scientists that suggest online shopping produces fewer emissions than driving to shop at a store; for instance, the company estimates that a single delivery van trip can take 100 round-trip car journeys off the road, on average. During the pandemic, customers made fewer trips to Whole Foods Market stores and other brick-and-mortar Amazon locations and shifted to home delivery, which also lowered emissions. But take a step back, and a bigger, more complex picture emerges. From 2019 to 2020, Amazon's U.S. sales jumped 36 percent to $263.5 billion. By the company's own account, its overall emissions spiked 19 percent, equivalent to running 15 coal plants for one year. More fossil fuel use and investments in buildings, data servers and transportation were key drivers.
That figure reflects its response to consumer demand during Covid-19, but doesn't capture progress Amazon made, Davila said. He said the company tracks the amount of carbon per dollar of gross merchandise sales — a concept known as carbon intensity — and by that measure, Amazon decreased the amount of carbon per purchase last year by 16 percent. In a blog post in June, a company scientist argued that this metric allows high-growth companies like Amazon to identify efficiencies. Amazon also reduced emissions from the electricity it bought by 4 percent due to new investments in clean energy, despite expanding its buildings' square footage. The company is about two-thirds of the way toward 100 percent renewable energy — a key pillar of the company's plan to reach net-zero emissions by 2040.
Emissions from deliveries are expected to decrease as Amazon deploys 100,000 electric vans in the coming decade. Davila did not disclose what portion of the company's fleet that accounts for today.
The director of MIT's Real Estate Innovation Lab also warns that cardboard boxes are some of the largest carbon pollutants in the system regardless of the method of delivery. (Politico points out most packaging ultimately "ends up in a landfill or is burned to produce energy, generating 105.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide last year, according to federal data.") That data also shows only 9% of plastic gets recycled, "because flexible plastic films and pouches and many take out containers still aren't recyclable. Neither are plastic bags, unless consumers bring them to the grocery store."
One recycler tells the site that many companies are now promising to use more recycled materials in their packaging, including Amazon, PepsiCo, Coca Cola and Target — but urges "extended producer responsibility," in which companies (not taxpayers) cover the costs of cleaning up their packaging.
Non-story (Score:5, Insightful)
This is another non-story, because as always it's based on conflating tangential things to create a story where there isn't one, e.g.:
"By the company's own account, its overall emissions spiked 19 percent, equivalent to running 15 coal plants for one year. More fossil fuel use and investments in buildings, data servers and transportation were key drivers."
It's trying to imply that because Amazon's emissions spiked to the volume of running an additional 15 coal plants per year that we should question the benefits of online shopping in terms of emissions reduction, but this nonsense, it's a tangential issue. It doesn't matter that Amazon's emissions spiked due to more deliveries because that still means significantly less overall emissions because those 15 coal plants worth of emissions replaced what would otherwise have been 100s of coal plants of emissions.
In essence, the story is conflating emissions at one company, with overall national or global emissions. Cherry picking a single company's emissions going up is irrelevant if in doing so that company is causing a significant reduction in emissions overall because it's displacing higher emission industries. This is like complaining that a wind turbine plant's emissions have doubled in a year when ignoring the fact that the wind turbines built and deployed in the same period by that plant have reduced carbon emissions by several orders of magnitude more.
It's a dumb comparison and it's been done purely to create a story where there isn't one.
Re: (Score:1)
it's been done purely to create a story where there isn't one.
No, it is done to create space for ads where wasn't one.
Re: (Score:2)
Also asking for this: "companies (not taxpayers) cover the costs of cleaning up their packaging." Because that never comes back to the consumer. Nope. Never. Companies need to pay more to produce something, they never fund that through higher prices. They'll simply pay management/shareholders less! Of course! Same for the government cleanup.
/eyeroll
Somebody is always paying.
Re: (Score:3)
Yes but that doesn't matter. Right now the cost is on the consumer and they just dump the packaging wherever this not solving the actual problem .
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I think this is the right answer. Pass-thru of taxes and regulatory costs is a very real challenge when managing corporations, but it seems like we've gone pretty far off the deep end of "corporations will just raise prices, so it's all futile".
It seems pretty clear to me that putting costs back onto corporations isn't just a question of uniform price increases that lets them shed these burdens. These costs can and will be managed differently and the price increases will vary according, possibly disruptin
Re: (Score:2)
It's also going to be a lot easier to make the economic case for switching to EV delivery vehicles to Amazon, than it is to convince the guy who needs 1000 miles of range at 85 MPH and 30 second recharge times.
Re: (Score:2)
They lost credibility with this factoid:
The average U.S. consumer goes to the grocery store at least 300 times a year.
No the average consumer does not go grocery shopping six times per week.
Sure, some people may do that, but the average would include many people like me that go once every other week.
A citation is provided for shopping "300 times per year" but it is behind a paywall and paywalled citations aren't valid.
Yes, I am aware that argument from icredulity [wikipedia.org] is a logical fallacy, but I don't care. I still don't believe it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You can with a very convenient neighborhood grocery store, and its beneficial from the end customer perspective because you get fresh goods and less wastage.
But the market has been consolidating into large out of town supermarkets, if you have to drive 20 mins to reach the supermarket you're less likely to go there for a single item. People will typically go shopping once a week and fill up the car with their groceries.
I always preferred to go shopping every day and do so when i live somewhere that shops ar
Re: Non-story (Score:2)
I clicked the link and the article says 1.6 times per week. That is 83 times a year. I have no idea where they got 300. That is more days a year than a full time person goes to work.
Didn't even need to say it (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
It might be even better if "Same day delivery" didn't exist. Imagine a third day delivery model, where the shop has one day to transfer to a local warehouse from a megawarehouse, and a second to do the local deliveries using an optimal route. We have the algorithms for that...
Local resilience would drop a few notches though. Going from "a few days' worth on the shelves" to nothing.
Um (Score:5, Interesting)
As the story admits, ordering stuff from Amazon is environmentally better than driving all over town shopping.
When Amazon sales went up, their total emissions went up ... but so what? That's still shopping that was more environmentally sound with them than it would have been at stores.
Re: (Score:3)
As the story admits, ordering stuff from Amazon is environmentally better than driving all over town shopping.
When Amazon sales went up, their total emissions went up ... but so what? That's still shopping that was more environmentally sound with them than it would have been at stores.
Not sure on this ? why? rather than one shopping trip per week where we buy everything we need from the local shopping mall and other shops all within we get multiple deliveries sometimes 2 or 3 in a day some of those were shipped from halfway around the world. (1 packet that took such a long time actually went China to Germany and then to Australia definitely a routing error but still ). Add to that the number of boxes and packing used in the shipping often containing 1 product even though multiple items w
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure on this ? why? rather than one shopping trip per week where we buy everything we need from the local shopping mall and other shops all within we get multiple deliveries sometimes 2 or 3 in a day
One shopping trip per week? Maybe if you live in Boondersville and only drive into the nearest city one a week.
Re: (Score:2)
Unless you're obsessed with buying things I dont see once a week as a non-viable option, thats basically what we did pre-pandemic. The other days during the week are just working and coming home. Then go out one weekend day for shopping, groceries, fucking around, etc
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Can't tell about your habits, I often stop for shopping on my trip, arranged along other things to be done at a target area. Then, my usual transport is bicycle, which makes using it ultimately cleaner option.
Still, the argument, you are responding to, seems very valid to me: if you make online orders, it is often, that your items will take individual transportation, packaging. Don't forget internal filler material, to protect from travel damage, sometimes synthetic. With individual shipping quickly buildin
Re: (Score:2)
Depends on the individual circumstances..
Once a week means you need to plan your meals ahead of time, also that near the end of the week you're eating food which has sat in the fridge all week, you might have to wait a week to replenish something that has unexpectedly run out, and you can end up wasting or running out of food if unexpected circumstances occur (eg guests, last minute meals outside etc).
Once a week is not really desirable, unless you have no choice (eg it takes significant time/effort to driv
Re: (Score:2)
One trip a week is pretty normal for me. The hardware store is across the street from the grocery store, which does make it convenient.
Then three or four Walmart runs a year. Maybe the same in "emergency hardware runs" to either the hardware store or the car parts store.
Two trips to the dentist, two to the optometrist per year, and I haven't needed a doctor since 2018, so that is that total.
In better-stocked times I'd be at the sporting goods store every three months or so for powder and primers and such, a
Re: (Score:2)
Not really, one shopping trip per week is actually very common outside the U.S. and Canada.
And even worse, for those that daily shop, they make use of supermarkets that are so close by that they can walk or use a bicycle instead.
For example: by the time you have jumped in your car drove the miles to your Walmart/Costco/whatever and found a parking spot. I have already walked/cycled there, got the things I need, payed for them, returned home and started preparation.
In that sense delivery services do not redu
Re: (Score:2)
Not really, one shopping trip per week is actually very common outside the U.S. and Canada.
Do you ever buy more than groceries? Hardware, automotive, entertainment, pet supplies, electronics, etc?
I'd love to find one place that has everything.
Re: (Score:2)
The US/Canada are car-centric not so much by choice, but more as a consequence of geography.
You can get by without a car if you live in NYC, but in other places which are far more spread out it's not so easy.
The same is true in europe but to a lesser extent. There are people who live outside the major cities, and thus need a car to practically go anywhere.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, the most efficient "solution" would be to build sleeping cells in the basement of the workplaces, then the "employees" aka "slaves" do not need to go anywhere. This model has been used in the past.
But sacrificing quality of life for the sake of the environment is never going to work, the vast majority of people would not accept that unless you operate a dictatorship and force them to. The only sensible solution is to try improving efficiency while also improving quality of life, or at least maintaining
Re: (Score:2)
Geography is indeed an issue. But mainly when traveling from city to city. And you seem to be hell bent on (single level) housing on a relative big lot with a garage.
And that sounds nice, don't get me wrong. But that choice requires a lot of space. For a family the concept sounds great. Unfortunately it is flawed. In the period where it was thought up, there were a lot less people, city centers had lots of different stores and different forms of housing that allowed for diversity and more fitting for the st
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure on this ? why? rather than one shopping trip per week where we buy everything we need from the local shopping mall and other shops all within we get multiple deliveries sometimes 2 or 3 in a day
One shopping trip per week? Maybe if you live in Boondersville and only drive into the nearest city one a week.
One limiting factor will be what you eat. If you eat fresh bread, fresh fish a couple of times a ween, and lots of fruits and vegetables doing just one shopping trip a week is hard.
If you don't eat fish, go for bread with lots and lots of preservatives and avoid fruits and vegetables it's a lot easier.
Or you could plan and get frozen goods for half the week - frozen rolls or bread, plan fruits/vegetables so the ones that go bad quickly are eaten first, and get frozen fish.
Re: (Score:2)
Every single item that the store sells has to be first brought there (but this is generally a single trip along with a lot of other items), and once sold it has to be brought away to the shopper's home. This last step means two trips, one for the shopper to get to the store, one for the shopper to get back home. In total this means more trips than a van delivering the shopping to a whole are a through optimized routing.
Re: Um (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure on this ? why?
The idea is that the amazon delivery truck delivers for multiple families at once, so even if it drove to a 10 home neighborhood every day, that would still be less trips than each household taking one trip per week.
Re: (Score:2)
There's another fact which usually isn't mentioned. With online grocery shopping there's less impulse buying. Easier to stick to a list.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, but ordering a bottle of shampoo via Scumazone instead of walking to the pharmacy around the corner to buy one is NOT better..
It's absolutely better if the shampoos your pharmacy around the corner offers are not any of the ones you want (not to mention the price). Not every man takes showers with your soap.
Re: (Score:2)
When Amazon sales went up, their total emissions went up ... but so what? That's still shopping that was more environmentally sound with them than it would have been at stores.
It would be interesting to make a stab at figuring out how much Amazon adds to global emissions via what they do with a lot of the stuff that gets returned. Here's a summary [greenmatters.com]of a CBC Marketplace investigation [www.cbc.ca] into what happens to goods that are returned.
It turns out that a lot of them go either into landfill or to liquidators. In the first case the carbon impact is obvious and disgusting. In the second case, the carbon footprint is externalized to third-party carriers and therefore doesn't show up in Amazon'
What answer do you want? (Score:3)
Tell me that, and I'll tell you what to count in your estimates.
OK checked the link (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
I was wondering about this one. If you stop at the store on the way home from work because it's literally just a mile out of the way and only did this twice a week, that's probably better then getting a delivery to your house more days. Those extra trips you aren't making add up but since you paid your prime account, you don't feel the extra resources being used for every day deliveries.
Sure, the amazon truck is probably going to be in the neighborhood anyway and likely has room on the truck, so maybe some
New Maths (Score:2)
From the link saying 300 trips per year, "The primary grocery shopper in U.S. households made an average of 1.6 shopping trips per week in 2019." or 83 trips per year.
Ah, but when you add in the average level of maths education and multiply that by the amount of funding made available by online retailers to show how environmentally friendly they are you get whatever number to need.
Re: (Score:2)
Saw this too, 300 trips a year would going to the grocery store 4 out of 5 days, which seems absurd. And that's the 'average' person, so there are people going more than 7 times a week??
No reason to question the rest of their math I guess..
Grocery shopping (Score:5, Insightful)
According to the quoted summary:
The average U.S. consumer goes to the grocery store at least 300 times a year.
If that number seems high to you, it's because the actual link says "The primary grocery shopper in U.S. households made an average of 1.6 shopping trips per week in 2019"
How could Politico be so wrong?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I wondered about that, but I couldn't think of a scenario where the average consumer goes to the grocery store more often than the primary grocery shopper.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Also worth mentioning, maybe the average US consumer goes shopping a lot, but the citation provided did not give any support for their number. Instead it contradicts it.
Re: (Score:2)
Because the primary grocery shopper has to plan the shopping for an entire household, so they are likely to be more organised and have constructed a list. The primary shopper is also less likely to be working, and thus spend most of their time at home. Going shopping is a planned trip, rather than just happening to be passing.
Other people will just get a sudden craving for a bag of chips or a can of coke so in they go, especially if they are working or attending school such that they routinely pass a grocer
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> How could Politico be so wrong?
How many math classes are required for a journalism major?
Their number would suggest that in a 2-adult family somebody from the family is in the grocery store 600 times a year. Or, most days both parents are grocery shopping.
For this to make it to press requires a high degree of innumeracy all the way up the chain.
Every educated person here reading that went "bullshit" immediately.
Re: (Score:2)
Not mentioned (Score:5, Informative)
Is all the waste generated from returned goods. As articles on here have pointed out [slashdot.org], rather than putting returned goods back out for sale, Amazon dumps them in landfills. This is in addition to all the cardboard which either ends up in landfills or is burned.
Also not mentioned, though possibly lumped in with something else, is the associated cost of all those returned products. Yes, having a truck deliver multiple packages slightly reduces the environmental costs, but you have additional costs to repackage and reship all those products back to Amazon and others.
So while shopping online can be more convenient, shopping in stores is probably a wash since one can peruse, try on, and fondle an item before buying it, thus reducing costs associated with returns (which still do happen but at a far lesser rate than online). Not to mention getting a little exercise walking from store to store.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And how much waste is created from product that sits in stores and is never bought? How much food goes to waste? Online shopping eliminates a lot of that and makes the rest more efficient.
Re: (Score:2)
Only if it would be manufactured for the order. However, this is not the case: products will be occasionally sitting on storage shelves until their expiration might be hit before sales happened.
Re: (Score:2)
Online shopping eliminates a lot of that and makes the rest more efficient.
[citation needed]
That sounds like an incredibly dubious claim. I don't see why sitting in a remote warehouse is somehow better than sitting in a less remote shop.
Re: (Score:1)
The cardboard waste is horrible with Amazon. Really wish they would switch to reusable. They only use a handful of different box sizes. I'd definitely be willing to put the empties out for pick-up when I get a delivery notification. Most of the deliveries these days are Amazon trucks, no reason they couldn't pick-up reusable containers.
Re: (Score:2)
Cardboard is going to landfills? Around here they have stopped recycling of plastic and glass, but cardboard collection is still going strong. I wonder if the distance to papermill plays into that.
Re: (Score:2)
I find that strange as well.
I live in Germany, where the recycling rate for cardboard and paper packaging has been above 99% for the last 10 years.
In Germany, we have a separate bin for cardboard and paper. Depending on the county, it is either free, or emptying it has a negative fee.
I know that in some other countries (e.g. France, Ireland), there is a single "recyclable bin", where paper and cardboard are put together with other "recyclable" packaging, such as plastics. I guess that comes with a higher ri
Re: (Score:2)
I can't get a symmetric internet connection, and now you're telling me I can't get a symmetric package delivery service connection. What have we done to so anger the gods?
That can't be right..... (Score:2)
The average U.S. consumer goes to the grocery store at least 300 times a year.
. That's almost every day. That's once every 1.2 days if you want to be more precise. What the fuck? That can't be right. I assume I'm somewhere in the average and I, at most, go once a week. If I'm smart and properly stock-up, I can extend that to once every two weeks.
Do you fucks like the grocery store so much you go every damn day? What the hell is wrong with you people?
Nah. There's no way... There is no damn way that the fucking AVERAGE works out to once a day. That implies there are enough f
Re: (Score:2)
The average U.S. consumer goes to the grocery store at least 300 times a year.
. That's almost every day. That's once every 1.2 days if you want to be more precise. What the fuck? That can't be right.
Yeah, this almost certainly is a situation where the writer was mistakenly conflating two separate facts, and Politico (like most online "news" outlets) doesn't employ editors so no there's no one to proofread and catch these sorts of errors before publishing.
All I can say is - I do just about all the grocery shopping for our family of three. I go more frequently so that I can use the self-check, most of the time... and even so I only go twice a week at most.
Re: (Score:2)
And every time you do, you're getting ripped off. Why? Because part of the price of every item in a supermarket goes to paying the wages of the checker and bagger, but when you use the self-check line you're not using either a checker or a bagger and the market simply pockets that part of the price.
Re: (Score:2)
I go more frequently so that I can use the self-check, most of the time... And every time you do, you're getting ripped off. Why? Because part of the price of every item in a supermarket goes to paying the wages of the checker and bagger, but when you use the self-check line you're not using either a checker or a bagger and the market simply pockets that part of the price.
You're failing to factor in the amount of money one can assign to one's own time. What you're suggesting is absolutely valid....in a vacuum. I generally go through the human-powered line but, once in a while, when the lines have backed up and it looks like I'm gonna be standing there for more than 10 minutes, I'll go thru the self-checkout. Maybe the cashier takes 3 minutes to do my whole purchase.. Assuming a pay rate of $30/hr that's $1.50 in wages. It's not nothing, but it's less than the value I as
Re: (Score:2)
I'm retired, so the extra time isn't important and considering how slow most of the people using the "express line" are, it doesn't really save much time. Mostly, it's the principle for me as I don't like being ripped off like that.
Re: (Score:2)
You're failing to factor in the amount of money one can assign to one's own time. I'm retired, so the extra time isn't important and considering how slow most of the people using the "express line" are, it doesn't really save much time. Mostly, it's the principle for me as I don't like being ripped off like that.
And that's fair. But, to each his/her own. I certainly don't feel like I'm being ripped off if I can save some time. 10 minutes... Less than that and I'll stand in line like the rest of the folks..
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
The number of trips strikes me as plausible. In the case of big cities and their suburbs, there could easily be 5 or more food stores that are regularly visited (Whole Foods, Trader Joes, cut rate 1, cut rate 2, local mainstream 1, local mainstream 2). Sure, some trips could hit more than one of those, but many trips would visit a single store. Between frozen foods, shopping fatigue, and total duration of the trip, people would most often visit 1-2 stores per trip. And this doesn’t count places like alcoholic beverages and other specialty stores (butcher, bakery, etc.).
Fair enough but they didn't mention a butcher or bakery. They specified Grocery Store. I'm willing to give a bit of slack on that precise definition, but bakery isn't making the cut. Did a quick straw-poll with the only two people in my vicinity (not claiming accuracy here) and I got the same answer as myself. Both visit the grocery store 1x per week. Twice sometimes. Three, once in a blue moon.. Batch trips were the goal for all 3 of us though.. i.e. hit two or three stores in a single day. Qualifier
Try persuading a woman to reproduce with you (Score:2)
The average U.S. consumer goes to the grocery store at least 300 times a year.
. That's almost every day. That's once every 1.2 days if you want to be more precise. What the fuck? That can't be right. I assume I'm somewhere in the average and I, at most, go once a week. If I'm smart and properly stock-up, I can extend that to once every two weeks.
Do you fucks like the grocery store so much you go every damn day? What the hell is wrong with you people?
Nah. There's no way... There is no damn way that the fucking AVERAGE works out to once a day. That implies there are enough fucking retards going several times PER DAY to offset those of us that go once a week or once every two weeks.
Nope. Not buying it.
OK first of all, why are you throwing around the R-word? You know that makes you sound dumber than the people you're making fun of?
So you can go 2 weeks without going to the store, you clearly have no kids. If you casually throw around the R-word like that, it sounds pretty incel, so I am not surprised. However, if you ever do manage to persuade someone to have a kid with you, you'll have to go quite often. Before kids, yeah, I could go awhile without going to the store.
While every 1.2 days is ex
Re: (Score:2)
OK first of all, why are you throwing around the R-word? You know that makes you sound dumber than the people you're making fun of?
I don't give a fuck if you don't like it. Every goddamn word that was a "scientific definition" or "medical definition" at one point in time has been twisted by assholes, exactly like you, into meaning something else. Well, fine. We don't use that word to describe the mentally challenged anymore. We haven't use it for a long time. When was the last time you heard a doctor use the term retarded? I'm using it in an entirely different context and if you don't like that, go piss up a rope.
So you can go 2 weeks without going to the store, you clearly have no kids. If you casually throw around the R-word like that, it sounds pretty incel, so I am not surprised. However, if you ever do manage to persuade someone to have a kid with you, you'll have to go quite often. Before kids, yeah, I could go awhile without going to the store.
My kid's 27 now. Wha
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, buddy, the world changes (Score:2)
I don't give a fuck if you don't like it. Every goddamn word that was a "scientific definition" or "medical definition" at one point in time has been twisted by assholes, exactly like you, into meaning something else. Well, fine. We don't use that word to describe the mentally challenged anymore.
Sorry dude,words change. Manners change. In 1950, you could say N-word to my grandpa all you like and it wouldn't be rude. I bet if one of your employees called him that today, you'd tell him to stop. I am sure in your day, the R-word, and many others, were perfectly acceptable insults, but it's considered by most to be quite rude today.
Am I offended? Honestly no. You're a stranger. I don't really give a shit about you. You just sound like an asshole and I am quite comfortable questioning your ma
How bad is Coke, Pepsi, Nestle fo the environment? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Pro tip: people might take you seriously if you don't act like a piece of shit stuck to the bottom of their shoe.
Guess what would reduce emissions even more? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
This may surprise you, but YOU are future landfill. Worrying about every little thing that is "bad for the planet" just makes your role as fertilizer come sooner.
Re: (Score:2)
This may surprise you, but YOU are future landfill.
I have no idea where you live but here, we don't throw cadavers into landfill. Burial plots are expensive & so most people opt for cremation, which produces less greenhouse gases than decomposition.
Worrying about every little thing that is "bad for the planet" just makes your role as fertilizer come sooner.
Not doing anything to mitigate global heating is currently making everyone's roles as fertiliser come sooner. How much success do you think you'll have with the strategy of "carry on consumer shopping as if nothing's wrong & hope it'll go away by itself"?
300 (Score:2)
>"The average U.S. consumer goes to the grocery store at least 300 times a year. "
OMG. Granted, I am not typical, but I might go food shopping less than 26 times a year. Now, if there were 4 people in the house, it would go up at least 4 times as much, in total. I think they might mean the average HOUSEHOLD, not consumer.
Even the most perishable goods are not going to spoil in less than a week. Most are at least 2 weeks or more (milk, eggs, produce, fruit, etc). Frozen, boxed, and canned items will
Re: (Score:2)
In dense urban areas, buying groceries every few days is a common thing. No cars needed, just one or two bags worth. Or even a small shopping trolley/cart.
Shopping patterns are vastly different in car-dependent places. Once you have a car, you can go to big-box stores, buy lots of stuff, fill up the trunk, then fill up an oversized fridge and freezer, etc.
Detrimental in large European cities (Score:3)
In large European cities (Paris, France in my case), a lot of people in city centers don't have cars. So online shopping replaces a *walk* to the supermarket with a delivery van. There's no way in hell this improves emissions. Same thing with Uber Eats, Deliveroo, etc. This has "induced demand" written all over it.
Now we even have online shops competing for 15-minute delivery inside Paris. This is insane! Both environmentally and from a health perspective! Not to mention, streets blocked by delivery vans, illegally parked on sidewalks. All of these services need to be reigned in somehow.
Re: (Score:3)
Contactless deliveries may have temporarily replaced a walk to the shops during periods of lockdown...
Otherwise if the shop is a convenient walk away, people generally prefer to walk there and get instant service.
But there are also things which it makes sense to buy in bulk, or goods which are heavy etc. For those a delivery service is extremely useful.
Then there are also the elderly, sick or disabled for whom a walk to the shops isn't very practical.
How bad is your Angular/node.js website? (Score:3)
How bad for the environment is using a relational database when you don't use relational features? The vast majority of applications I've ever worked on took a JSON object, broke it into 20 or more pieces to save...and then read, only by the primary key, the exact same object. Could it not have been saved as a CLOB or using a document-based database?
How many ORM users make the system do 100x the work because they wanted to load an entire object into memory, use the Hibernate/JPA save() function to delete over 100 rows and reinsert them (over 100 SQL statements)...just to update one field, which could have been done in 1 statement, had they had any clue how to use a database (something most young programmers are really weak with, it seems)? We really need to start shaming them for not using JPQL or SQL for updates.
Finally, how bad for the environment is it that your site is not pre-rendered? Why do we send tons of JavaScript HTML rendering instructions when the output is always the same? I know it's more fun and inspiring to make your website super-dynamic and complex, but so many sites dynamically build complex layouts that ultimately are static. They never vary by user/role/etc. How bad for the environment is your massive complex Angular framework application, which, in the end, just does simple form logic.
It's really cool and such to point fingers at everyone else, but a huge portion of Slashdot's userbase are programmers for web-based applications. Does anyone abuse CPU cycles worse than JavaScript devs? I was embarrassed by how bad Java used to be, then I started working with Angular frontends and node.js and Python backends. But even among the more efficient languages...do you ever stop and ask "Is this framework providing ANY value" for this application...beyond padding my resume, of course.
One fight I have had most of my life is questioning the use of superfluous frameworks and I ALWAYS lose. I look at a transaction holistically and then question every choice. I "Marie Kondo" the stack. Does this framework "spark joy?" (or really, provide SOME value). If not, dump it. I've gotten many to admit it has no value or often negative value, but have never persuaded anyone to simplify their stack. When in doubt, engineers just throw in extra frameworks, for some reason.
I thought the move to the cloud would make things better. Instead of wasting time and theoretical electricity, you get an itemized bill from your cloud service provider...and still, I can never persuade people to simplify their applications. Rather than taking the time to learn each component and understand the business requirements, they'd all rather throw in every bit of technology, "just in case" they need it later. Most don't even know what their choices do, just that someone sometime told them it was good, so they need to add it.
It doesn't matter if it's a new feature or refactoring an existing one. I don't think I have ever persuaded an engineer to drop useless frameworks, even when there's cost savings and tangible scalability and performance improvements. They just don't care...or I'm the world's worst salesperson. Regardless, I hope shaming them for contributing to climate change becomes a new trend. They need to care about making their business logic efficient and scalable, not just throw more instances to prop up their shaky and pointlessly byzantine spaghetti code.
Re: How bad is your Angular/node.js website? (Score:2)
Feel better? Must have been a very long day at the office. Glad to see you got it off your chest.
well done, sir (Score:2)
Feel better? Must have been a very long day at the office. Glad to see you got it off your chest.
I appreciate that comment! :) Well done, sir!
I can see it the other way as well (Score:2)
100 trips saved per delivery van - underestimate (Score:2)
> the company estimates that a single delivery van trip can take 100 round-trip car journeys off the road, on average
For what it's worth, my son just started at a delivery company that handles Amazon deliveries, and a typical 8-hour (-ish) shift for beginners is to handle 150 packages. For more experienced drivers is more like 250 packages per shift.
I don't know what they mean by "a single delivery van trip" but this company loads up those 250 packages at the start of the day and by the end of the day
Re: (Score:2)
Point is, it's got to be way more efficient for one truck to make 250 deliveries per day focused on one relatively small area vs 250 individual vehicles making separate trips to a store.
Flip sides, of course, are additional packaging required for individual delivery plus the fact that people order online more frequently than they would otherwise make a trip to the store, on average.
That's kind of contradictory there: people tend to drive somewhere and do a bunch of shopping, so 250 deliveries per day isn't
Grocery store at least 300 times a year? (Score:2)
While the actual stats behind the link are paywalled, they are summed up as "The primary grocery shopper in U.S. households made an average of 1.6 shopping trips per week in 2019."
This amounts to 83 times a year, and that's for the "primary grocery shopper" per household, not the "average U.S. consumer".
Clearly something is screwey with that article.
Competition in last-mile delivery (Score:2)
A few decades ago, my country had a national postal service that had pretty much a monopoly on mail incl. packages. The only exceptions were courier services where you paid through the nose to have 'need it right now' delivery. Every day, one mailman would do a fixed route delivering mail incl packages door-to-door on that route.
Then mail delivery was commercialized, the market broken open (while still requiring the national mail service to deliver everywhere while others get to cherrypick delivery areas).
N
Forge environment... (Score:2)
Forget whether it's "better for the environment." How about is it better for people? And the answer is a resounding "yes." It saves hours a week running around to stores, waiting in checkout lines, and dealing with annoying sales people who either are too attentive or not available when you need them.
Missing an important piece of information (Score:2)
The products the retailers sell. Amazon overwhelmingly sells merchandise from fly by night/knockoff Chinese brands with an unknown or nonexistent ESG goals especially through its marketplace. Most brick and mortar retailers have ESG metrics for their suppliers. What is the impact of Amazon vs traditional retail when this is considered?
How are those shopping trips happening? (Score:2)
Have they analyzed the question of how many of those shopping trips are dedicated journeys, and how many are incidental parts of a trip that is already being made such as a commute to work? The impact of the latter is much lower, at least if it isn't possible to replace that drive with public transit.
I don't own a car so I obviously don't commute to work. But sometimes I rent a car for a weekend trip, and I just about always make some shopping stops while I have it; possibly on the trip out for durable good
Re: (Score:2)