261–270 of 610 posts
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.
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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 tha…
There are four Costco's in NYC, all but one in working class neighborhoods, and full of large families getting deals.
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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
[0] https://flexcontainer.com/product/insulated-molded-container...
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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…
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! :)
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That's interesting, what do people have to do to get membership?
Have a limited company or be in a baroque list of occupations: https://www.costco.co.uk/membership-goldstar-questions
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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.
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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.
Thinking of changing this distribution is highly disturbing because of time wasted, much more limited options and huge price differences. Of course YMMV depending on location, Madrid here... the world the article describes is totally alien to me.
B. F. Skinner's Utopian Vision: Behind and Beyond Walden Two