561–570 of 610 posts
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This has to be astoturfed or something. There is literally a Costco in Manhattan and several in suburban Queens and Staten Island. Nothing stops you from going to Costco and just getting a cab back for a once a month trip.
The idea of Amazon astroturfing an HN thread to get more retail customers.
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Very few people are shopping at Costco for their tech stack. And maybe it's just their talented/experienced/numerous staff, but my in-store experience with their tech is as good as it gets. Stuff just works, and works quickly.
Ok, load the app and search for Heinz ketchup and tell me what it would cost to go get some in store. You can’t. You can only get delivery pricing. They don’t have the basic functionality every store has had for a decade. Go to self check-out and grab a scanner for your heavy items, which they sell many of. You can’t, they don’t have them, you have to wait for the attendant to get to you with it. (They’re generally g…
> Go to self-checkout and grab ...
Okay, but what if I really don't care about those important-to-you features?
Based on Costco's membership numbers, I might have a whole lotta of company in that regard.
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If you think "has an SUV and can buy food in advance" == "rich", then the billionaires truly have scrambled your brain.
We don't know from which perspective they're speaking. They might live in a dense European city in an apartment without a car and without parking, and with a supermarket 10 minute's walk away.
> 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 t…
The total price + driving cost is a good proxy for how efficient the whole process is; amazon will somehow include in the price somewhere the delivery home, and both companies largely won't subsidize their whole business method.
Social value is a little trickier; a lot of people benefit much from delivery, but in the end people probably don't buy everything from amazon or costco anyway.
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 c…
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As you have to carry everything, how often do you go shopping?
Maybe I'm unusual, but I live in NYC, with a grocery store a two minute walk away, a Target and Trader Joe's a three minute walk away, and a Whole Foods a four minute walk away. (and various bodegas within minutes as well) I went to that grocery store twice yesterday (picked up a bag of popcorn and a bottle of water to go to the movies, then later some potatoes and sour cream for dinner). I'm going in a few minutes t…
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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…
The problem isn’t the efficiency of car use, it’s car dependency. If retail is only available in the huge units it’s impossible to access those without a car. And if people end up owning cars, even against their will, they will end up using those daily. The goal is to avoid the car-centric lifestyle, not to optimise it. Maybe that is a totally utopian idea in the us, though.
if your objection stands even when the effects you claim to be your motivation aren’t a problem you’re just a zealot and should reevaluate your priorities
If you don’t want a car, don’t get one. There are plenty of places where you can live an entirely walkable life.
Stop trying to reorganize society around your preferences.
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Ok but that doesn't come close to the variety of products you can buy online.
I think this is the point I was trying to make, but didn't make as clearly as I wanted. Sure I could buy two or three different types of keyboards within walking distance, but none of them used my favorite mechanical switches. I was constantly facing choices where I would either need to travel by vehicle to a speciality store (train, bus or car), or I would order the item in. Judging by the flow of packages into my m…
One of the major points(/claims?) of the OP article is that fewer choices is better, pointing to how Costco has just 4k SKUs (paragraphs 4, 5, 6, and some within later paragraphs).
Costco is an elegant solution for the suburbs, where everyone is driving around a vehicle large enough to store giant boxes off a pallet and bring them home. Here in NYC, it's really impractical to go to a warehouse and carry a month's worth of supplies home on the subway. The flip side is that the Amazon last mile deliveries are done on electric scooters that can bring a whole trailer worth of packages to the mailro…
This has to be astoturfed or something. There is literally a Costco in Manhattan and several in suburban Queens and Staten Island. Nothing stops you from going to Costco and just getting a cab back for a once a month trip.