>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.
> 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.
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.