The environmental downsides to mail order
During the last few months I’ve been thinking a lot about my shopping habits. I tend to do most of my shopping with local retailers, but I also do a fair amount of mail order. Some of this mail order is for items which I can’t get locally (for instance the item is rare and made in a remote location), but the vast majority of these items are either stocked locally or can be special ordered by a local retailer.
When people talk about shopping locally they usually cite the benefits to the local economy and the personalized service that one gets from smaller retails who are focused on a specific region. These issues are big and have been the primary draw for my local shopping over the past few years. For instance my wife and I buy most of our music from a small music store called The Landing. It has a small number of employees and one of the two owners are often there. The owners live in our neighborhood and so much of the money gets spend here again. They know our musical tastes and make musical recommendations when we shop there and stock the types of music that we like. We can listen to any CD that we’d like on their customer listening stations (a couple of CD playerswith high quality headphones). All of these things make the shopping experience very enjoyable and are more important to me than price (although I think that their prices are competitive). I have similar relationships with my video store, bike shop, grocery stores (although my primary grocery store is a national chain), farmer’s market, and other places that I shop day to day. These are the obvious benefits of local shopping and ones that are commonly discussed.
Another option for me to buy CDs would be shopping with Amazon. Amazon also provides a reasonably nice shopping experience due to the reviews available on their website. I can’t listen to as much of the music as at my local record store, but I can listen to 30 second selections of most tracks. When I buy from Amazon some of the money is going back into my greater community (but this is only true because both Amazon and I are located in Seattle), but it isn’t going into my immediate community. I don’t get the personal attention from Amazon that I get from my local record store,although they do have software that tries to make it feel like I’m getting personal attention. The prices are about the same because Amazon’s prices are cheaper,but I have to pay shipping (or wait a long time).
One of the big differences in shopping with Amazon vs shopping at The Landing are how items are delivered. They both have the same selection (because The Landing can special order items from the same distributors that supply Amazon). However when I order a CD or two from Amazon they come direct to my house. When The Landing orders a CD for me it comes in a box with dozens of other CDs to the store.
Shipping 25 CDs to a single store and having 25 people pick them up from the store has a smaller environmental footprint than shipping 25 CDs to individual houses. The packaging per CD is much smaller when you pack 25 of them into one box than when you use 25 boxes, one per CD (especially with Amazon packaging which tends to use much larger boxes than necessary). A UPS truck delivering 25 CDs to a business requires a single stop where delivering to 25 residences typically requires 25 stops. If the shop is in a commercial area (as The Landing is) then it probably can make a single stop to deliver packages to multiple stores. It is less common that multiple neighboring houses will receive packages on the same day. A UPS truck may take a couple of hours (idling or running the whole time) to deliver packages to those 25 houses.
Some of this gets even more interesting when you look at purchasing more unique items from retailers that are far away. In an extreme example I could decide to purchase Ortlieb bicycle panniers from an east coast shop (because they are slightly cheaper). The distributor is located in Kent, WA (about 20 miles south of Seattle). The panniers are made in Germany. So if I purchased the panniers from an east coast shop they would travel from Germany to the distributor in Kent, then back to a shop on the east coast, and finally back to me in Seattle. Those panniers would have travelled well over 10,000 miles before ever being used and 6,000 of them would be inside my own country to save a small amount of money. In the greater scheme of things I think that it is more beneficial for myself and my community if I am less price conscious and more aware of the route that the item takes to get to me.
I’d love to have numbers on how much fuel is consumed in the shipment of a single package by ground across the country. I’d also like to know what percentage of package deliveries are going to businesses vs homes. It might be possible to estimate the extra fuel consumption for mail order packages using this data.
If anyone knows of any more detailed analysis in this area please let me know. I’ll follow-up here.