For years I’ve felt guilty about my use of online shopping. All those little packages coming from big Eastern cities, all the way across the continent, to be driven to my door by a harried little man in an overworked Honda. Surely that’s wasteful compared to me just going to the local bigbox outlet and buying it in person, right? Well, I recently had a thought that has me questioning that logic.
To be clear, if we were talking about a product that was made locally, or for which a locally manufactured alternative of similar quality was available, then local shopping would be the obvious way to go. A total no-brainer. But most of the things I buy online are national or even global brands. Looking at the things I’ve bought most recently, I see products produced in England, Sweden, the US, Canada, India, and of course, China. None of which, to the best of my knowledge, have competition from local manufacturers, here in Saskatchewan.
And once you accept the true globality of our supply chains, the retail vs online scenarios actually look much more similar than my initial intuition accounted for.
Consider the market journey of a made-in-Sweden product arriving in my house. That journey is more or less identical whether it comes through a local retail store, through an online retailer’s warehouse, or is shipped direct from the manufacturer. In each case, the item travels in densely packed, highly efficient shipping networks - either those of a middle-man distributor or of a package delivery service.
I’m sure all carriers are not identical in their environmental impact, but teasing out the differences in carbon efficiencies between say, Walmart’s supply chain, Amazon’s, and FedEx’s is about 2 steps too deep for this initial overview. So, looking from this highest level of the argument, I’ll assume that all of these carriers and middlemen are profit driven companies with optimized logistics that render highly efficient package throughput and are more or less interchangable as far as impact per kilometre. The only real differences that matter are the total distance traveled, and what I’ll call the production-to-consumption ratio of the respective channels.
What do I mean by the production-to-consumption ratio? In order to maximize profits, stores tend to buy more stock than they can actually sell, so when I go into a store and pick an item off the shelf, it’s usually sitting there with a dozen identical “sibling” copies that were all made together. (That’s the production part.) If it’s a really popular product, this isn’t a problem - all the brothers and sisters will find homes quickly. But as anyone who’s worked in retail can tell you, unsold goods are not allowed to take up shelf space for long. Inventory that hasn’t moved in a week, or at most maybe a month, is quickly jettisoned. And eventually, some of it winds up in a landfill, never consumed. So in the retail scenario, more products are produced than are eventually consumed, which obviously increases the burden on landfills, but there’s another hidden problem here: How do they actually reach that landfill?
Most unsold merchandise will either be sent to another store in the chain or sold down-market to a discount vendor, and that means still more kilometres of travel. But the discount retail world is not single-tiered either. A given product might sit in any number of cheaper stores - each time at a lower price under grubbier lighting - until eventually, the stuff that simply cannot find a home winds up in a landfill near you. (Or sometimes on the coast of Malaysia.)
Ultimately, that product you bought at McShinyStore carries a huge but hidden environmental tax - a shared portion of the impacts of all the siblings that never got purchased at all and bounced around the system until they reached the dump. Meanwhile, if you don’t shop at McShiny, and prefer to haunt the discount stores, it’s true that you are rescuing items from their landfill fate, but you are also participating in the complicated transport system that “pinballs” products back and forth across the country, and, in some cases, even around the globe multiple times.
So if we assume the carbon impact of all product delivery journeys are essentially equivalent, per km traveled, it seems to me that brick and mortar retail might in fact be the worst possible way to buy, and that buying online is actually better for the environment than buying local - not worse. And by extension, the ideal choice would then be to buy directly from the manufacturer whenever possible.
Now, admittedly, this has been a lot of hand waving and unsubstantiated simplifying assumptions, so I’m not claiming anything has been proven here. I’m just laying out the bones of a plausible argument and highlighting some of the areas that would need more research before making conclusions. But ever since I first had this idea, I can’t help feeling that there might be fire under all the drifting smoke. Could shopping online actually be more environmentally friendly than shopping retail?
What do you think?
From Frank
As I continue to use Frankie in more ways and with different types of content, I’m beginning to see some friction points. Some are just a function of the limited graphics of the TUI interface I’m using, but some are about the actual information layout itself. Before I start tinkering with it, I want to talk my way through it. And that means: It’s rubber duckie time again!
From Websmith
Now that I’ve identified a useable hosting candidate, my final test of their service will be to roll out a full implementation of the websmith deployment scheme. But in contemplating how I’m going to do that, I’ve realized that I may not have broken the project into distinct repos properly. So I’m going to figure it out by explaining it to the rubber duck. (Meaning you. :-)
From Hearth
Over the course of my lifetime, science fiction has gone from a niche-market storyform aimed at geeks and propeller-heads to a cultural juggernaut consumed by the masses. So you would think that, as a one-time card-carrying member of the Junior Space Ranger’s Adventure Club, I would be delighted by the scifi-rich world I now find myself living in.
But I’m not.