391–400 of 610 posts
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Anything to avoid walkable neighborhoods, naturally.
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When all the compilers format your hard disk, programming has negative externalities.
When all the candidates are flesh-eating bacteria, democracy has negative externalities.
I can write implications with false premises too!
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As someone that has lived in a walkable neighborhood with a lot of shopping let me tell you, it doesn't solve the problem. Realistically you aren't going to reach more than 250k skus within a 20 minute walk of your home, and probably less. Even this is very heavily biased towards using retail space instead of space for anything else (homes, restaurants, parks, offices). You can only build up to add more space within…
For reference, Google tells me that the largest Argos stores in the UK have only ~20k SKUs in stock.
As another point of comparison: Costco themselves say[2] that they have about 4k SKUs, and state that most supermarkets have about 30k SKUs.
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Anecdotally, I can find just about everything I want, in terms of consumables, at Kroger.
Sometimes I walk over to the bodega instead. They don't have much for inventory outside of beer/smokes/soda, and their selection of actual food is both limited and expensive. But it's only a block away, so...
[1]: https://www.foodindustry.com/articles/the-largest-supermarke...
I understand the appeal, but let’s be honest. Costco is designed for rich people who think they are frugal. You drive your big SUV there to load up on months worth of food and goods, which you can only do because you have a big house with enough storage for all of it. And who cares if some of it goes bad because you can always go back for more and hey it was so cheap anyway. You even pay a membership for the privileg…
If you think "has an SUV and can buy food in advance" == "rich", then the billionaires truly have scrambled your brain.
Whenever someone says America can do great things, I don't think of battleships, fighter jets, or AI models, I think of Costco.
To note, Costco doesn't make much sense in most places outside of the USA (and doesn't have to. No shop needs to cater to the whole world). It still exists in select locations in some countries, but are more exotic experiences than anything else. Shopping for weeks of groceries at a time is IMHO crazy niche, it requires a level of isolation and buying power that is seldom combined.
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I think to clarify your point, curbside pickup is the curb of the store/warehouse, not the curb of your house, correct? I think the netizen above thought it was your house's curbside?
That's correct, with curbside pickup you drive to the store, pop open your trunk, and in principle someone from the store's staff is ready and waiting to verify your identity and then load your pre-staged shopping right into your trunk, and you drive off. So you still have to go to the store but it can be an in-and-out if everything works.
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OIC. I will note like the other person though that I often get like "just one thing in a box that's clearly too big"
I have been told, by (if I'm remembering my source right) someone who has worked as a UPS driver for 30+ years, that Amazon does that on purpose. Because the variable they're optimizing for is not "are we wasting cardboard". Cardboard is a renewable resource, which also recycles really well, so a little wasted cardboard is not a big deal. What they're optimizing for is packing the truck . Your item arrived in a too-b…
Except: The hypothetical perfectly-packed 53' trailer that leaves the originating warehouse is not the same trailer that delivers stuff to my doorstep. Things get sorted and re-sorted as they move along. It ultimately becomes random instead of optimized, and these random giant boxes take up a lot of space in local delivery vehicles.
Besides, the exceptions can be too exceptional to support any notion of it being deliberate.
It's difficult to describe the biggest box I've ever gotten from Amazon, except to say that it was too big to fit onto the seat of the recliner by the door where I usually put these things. I've received full-size, assembled, 1990s tower PCs in smaller boxes.
Inside of that exceptional box was just 3 ethernet cables, each 1 foot long, that cost me less than $1 each. That whole box could have been a brown paper envelope.
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As someone that has lived in a walkable neighborhood with a lot of shopping let me tell you, it doesn't solve the problem. Realistically you aren't going to reach more than 250k skus within a 20 minute walk of your home, and probably less. Even this is very heavily biased towards using retail space instead of space for anything else (homes, restaurants, parks, offices). You can only build up to add more space within…
I second. I live right above a shopping mall and next to Dongmen, which is easily one of the largest shopping areas in the world, yet I still end up ordering most things online.
> 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.
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Perhaps this depends a lot on location. Parking is a nightmare at my local Costco. The employees are friendly enough most of the time. I truly admire the value and business model but Costco is pretty much the absolute worst shopping experience I can think of.
Agreed. The entire store is wired to encourage impulse buying and keep you from making rational decisions about whether you'll be able to finish that 3lb container of guacamole before it goes bad.
Other stores (Target, Walmart, etc) will let you look up the item's aisle in their app and be considerate of your time.