[pitt1980]

Are you sure online shopping is killing the planet faster?

Whatever they're wasting in returns, they're saving something in reducing the need for physical stores.

I didn't see anything in the way of the discussion of these tradeoffs,

but physical locations for big box stores certainly aren't environmentally free.

[mschuster91]

> Whatever they're wasting in returns, they're saving something in reducing the need for physical stores.

A physical store presence has way more positive effect for a society as a whole than online shopping has. Just look at the developments of the last two decades: Walmart has destroyed local, reachable-by-foot grocery stores, and Amazon (plus corona) has obliterated physical retail. The result is entire communities that have no places left where people regularly come in contact with each other. Inner cities decay (see e.g. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/theres-terrifying-mall-blight...), quality of life declines, and social cohesion vanishes.

You want a reason why Trump got elected, why right-wing populism is on the rise across Western countries? The blight of physical store presence - or, to be precise, the providers of essential services vanishing - is a huge part of the reason why so many people feel disconnected from society. An empty mall, a village center void of any human presence, public services shutting down because the tax base of said stores has vanished? That is immediately visible to the people, and they, historically proven, vote for the person who claims the loudest he has a recipe to fix the situation or at least offers a convenient boogeyman (immigrants, China, Jews, ...).

[spaced-out]

>A physical store presence has way more positive effect for a society as a whole than online shopping has.

Yeah, but not for the planet.

It's incredibly inefficient for people to drive their car to a store and pick up items that take up like 5% of the total space in the vehicle; the ratio of fuel burned to goods shipped is terrible. Maybe grocery shopping isn't so bad, but going to the store to buy one TV or a few linens for the bedroom? What percent of the fuel burned was actually used to move the goods vs. to move the car? Not even 1%.

Compare this to filling up a diesel delivery truck to ship goods around town, optimized by algorithms for maximum efficiency.

[mschuster91]

> It's incredibly inefficient for people to drive their car to a store and pick up items that take up like 5% of the total space in the vehicle

In a well planned and funded city you'd have public transport to transport people to stores where they can look at and try out items before committing to buy them.

The fact that most goods that are returned (and a disturbingly large amount of goods that haven't been sold but incur high storage fees, see https://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/archiv/2021/Trotz-Neuregelu...) are actually destroyed is what makes the environmental balance so bad.