Those individual trips to the store are typically for more than single items, and are often incorporated into trips one would have taken anyways as part of the doing of errands.
Right, so with Amazon you have one truck visiting 100 addresses every day for two weeks (because people are buying 2-3 items per order). With Costco you have 100 people each driving to Costco once, on a single day.
From a cars-on-the-road and fuel expenditure perspective, the latter sounds better.
If Amazon customers ordered like Costco shoppers, the Amazon model might very well be better. But they don't, so it isn't.
In reality, you get both. People don’t shop at Costco OR Amazon. People primarily go to Costco for food (then stumble on everything else), Amazon has struggled over and over to get their grocery business to catch on. They’re just the best source of the everything else part.
These are only comparable in an academic business model comparison, in reality, these are different retailers selling different things and consumers behave differently depending on context of what they’re buying. A lot of people want low cost on food, meanwhile, they’ll spend superficially on disposable plastic junk with very little practical value. I’m taking about the American consumer specifically when I say everyone.
Right, 100 trucks delivering 100 single items to 100 homes, or 100 consumers each making 1 trip to buy 100 things. It really depends on the details too much to simplify it so far.
With there typically being a free shipping minimum (or a relatively fixed shipping cost for daily goods), it seems like the benefits of the 1 truck model are likely even greater as customers are explicitly encouraged to group purchases together.
For the aforementioned 100 homes, if the 100-items-in-1-truck are needed multiple times per week, then the 100-items-in-100-cars are likely also needed multiple times per week, so the extra CO2 etc would be even worse.
Amazon routinely is delivering things to my house 3+ times in a single day. They don’t do a great job of grouping their orders into deliveries.
We’re usually to “blame”. We don’t do coordinated orders in our household. We have 3 people ordering individually and I know I sometimes place multiple orders per day. But, I’d expect that shouldn’t matter and they’d notice all these orders with the same address could be put on the same delivery truck. Instead, it seems they just process orders as first in first out.
They have recently added a feature in the delivery options if I already have a pending delivery it will say “add to your Tuesday delivery” or similar, which I’m likely to choose. For a while they really wanted me to use an “Amazon day”, which would be like picking Tuesday as the day of the week my deliveries would come on. I specifically pay for Prime to have fast delivery so I don’t understand why they ever thought I’d go for that.