I get the impression that people think that e-commerce is pretty bad for the environment. To an extent, I get that: We’ve all had big bundles of cardboard boxes smiling back at us in the hallway once or twice I expect.

I do wonder if our expectations around this are accurate. Think about something like Grocery delivery. Imagine on a given day, a small grocer has 50 electronic orders, and needs one truck to work a full day making those deliveries. It seems to me that when you think about routing, one truck doing a fairly minimal traveling-salesman-order is going to be way more efficient than 50 people driving to the grocer and home.

Now of course, there are problems with induced demand, increased consumerism, but I feel like there are efficiencies derived from the ability to just be patient and wait a few days, allowing the enormous logistics engines at work that power e-commerce to batch things together, ultimately minimizing the impact relative to having a big store everyone goes to (where there’s all kinds of questions about utilization).

Efficiency isn’t a universal good here of course. Some of the efficiency allows a small number of people to have jobs doing an enormous quantity of work, whereas employment levels are higher with local stores; this is the hollowing out of city economies by various giants.

Anyhow: I’d love read a deep dive into the impact of e-commerce, and whether or not it’s more or less efficient than the big box stores of yore.