Isn't this only true until the moment retailers start passing shipping costs through to consumers? Yes, truck rolls to a whole district may have a lower footprint than 200 round trips in cars, but many of the retailers in this article are also doing long-haul hops in air freight to distribute their goods. Isn't oil going to fuck these people too?
Not as much. A company can figure out its logistics in a way a consumer can't. Overnight shipping is going to become a lot more expensive, but one-week shipping probably isn't. And if people start buying everything from home, there are economies of scale there.
I wonder if todays postal services are the best fit for the coming wave of online shopping, or if there is an opportunity for a better system. I don't really know how delivery works these days, though.
In my country, the mailman drives the same route every day and visits every house. But the trucks for bigger things don't stop everywhere, and I am not sure if they take the same route every day. For sure they have fancy algorithms for finding the optimum route. What will distribution look like if there are lots of big deliveries for every house, every day?
