Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea of a supermarket or department store is kinda “new-ish” (on some historical level), right? Like it is a post 1900 invention I think. Before this, most stores were full service. You go up to a merchant in the bazaar, or the grocer behind his stall, with a list, and they go into the inventory to grab the stuff for you. The innovation of having customers grab their own stuff without supervision was required for…
> We should compare it against the actual alternative of stores bottlenecked by clerks that can only serve one customer at a time (or at least stores small enough that a clerk can watch everybody doing their self-service). The modern version of an old time "full service" store is an e-commerce warehouse in an exurb with quick delivery and that actually works just fine for a lot of things. It's a big component of why…
It might be worth thinking about how these costs are accounted for. In the case of the big store, loss is taken by the store (of course they pass that along as higher prices, but it is ultimately the store’s problem). For deliveries, a good chunk of easy theft (stealing off your porch) is the customer’s problem usually. There’s some unfortunate socioeconomic crosstab there, I think: if you live in a nice neighborhood, theft is less of a problem. If you work from home, you can probably set things up to not leave a package out for too long.
Seems like the burden is falling most squarely on people who live in tough neighborhoods and have to actually go to work.
In some places Amazon has (had?) these self-service lockers where you could pick up your purchases. (Might have been a very college-town centric solution, or something?). It could be nice to see that standardized and spread out.