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Costco is the anti-Amazon

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Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#231

Post by scarab92 »

Loudergood wrote: post #45
gwbas1c wrote: post #33

> 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…

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.

Amazon already delivers to the house next door to yours. The incremental cost of an extra stop is near zero. The efficiency of home delivery vastly exceeds people going to the shops themselves, even if they are stopping at multiple shops.

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#232

Post by dpark »

llbbdd wrote: post #203
dpark wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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…

They must have been using different crates for you (different region or perhaps era). For me they were standard plastic bins[1] with a separate “cold bag” inside for frozen stuff. No actual styrofoam I recall, although this was also over 10 years ago so I could be misremembering.

[1] https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/S-9745G

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#233

Post by shawn_w »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #172
m463 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 furn…

>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.

Probably thinking of HomeGrocer or WebVan (which bought out the former and then went bankrupt too)

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#234

Post by dpark »

SllX wrote: post #225
MikeTheGreat wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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! :)

They might have the ability to do so. The motivation? Well let me put it this way: I tried Amazon’s grocery delivery service, and stopped using it because everything— everything —kept arriving in its own individual bag regardless of whether it made any sense, so it was just a bunch of bags I had to carry upstairs. That bags also had no handles. So they were optimizing for something, but it definitely wasn’t packaging…

Optimizing for dollar cost. Human time costs more than the extra packaging.

Results would doubtless be different if they were optimizing for minimal environmental impact or produced waste.

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#235

Post by [deleted] »

garbagewoman wrote: post #168
Amezarak wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Minor point: you have a whole cow slaughtered annually.

[deleted]

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#236

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

shawn_w wrote: post #233
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 furn…

>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. Probably thinking of HomeGrocer or WebVan (which bought out the former and then went bankrupt too)

I think it was WebVan and you are right (but I am not entirely sure) but thanks for writing the comment, appreciate it :-D

> (which bought out the former and then went bankrupt too)

ironic, does make you think if the clock has reached full circle in terms of bubbles but there are just so many similarities within the dot com bubble and AI bubble(TM) which are just so hard to ignore.

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#237

Post by danudey »

scrame wrote: post #131
dpark wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I quite often get inappropriately sized boxes.

I remember reading somewhere that the boxes are not sized to the items they contain, but to a combination of 'items they contain' and 'space we need the box to take up on the truck'; i.e. if you have five items of one unit size in a six-unit-wide truck they will slide around (and potentially get damaged, fall over, etc), but if you put one of those items in a two-unit-size box then the boxes will not slide around, meaning that while the box is inefficiently sized in isolation it is optimally sized in a logistical context.

I'm not sure how true this is, nor how reasonable it sounds since I don't know what the inside of an Amazon delivery truck looks like, but it sounds like the sort of thing that could be true in some circumstances.

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#238

Post by jasondigitized »

gwbas1c wrote: post #33

> 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…

How many items does the average consumer buy when they go to the store? It's not one.

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#239

Post by paulryanrogers »

scarab92 wrote: post #231
Loudergood wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Amazon already delivers to the house next door to yours. The incremental cost of an extra stop is near zero. The efficiency of home delivery vastly exceeds people going to the shops themselves, even if they are stopping at multiple shops.

> The incremental cost of an extra stop is near zero.

This assumes folks get deliveries on the same day and largely only from Amazon. And that we cannot build more walkable / bike able infrastructure.

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#240

Post by bluefirebrand »

claw-el wrote: post #174
alanbernstein wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, maybe more than one truck.

One truck per delivery service

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