E-commerce is more and more important to both consumers and businesses. In this year’s second quarter, online sales increased 15 percent while offline sales increased only 2 percent.
It’s easy to understand. Online ordering helps my household avoid treks to shopping districts 20 miles away. It saves us time and gas. But we’re fooling ourselves if we think we’re reducing our carbon footprint this way, because we’re just shifting it to the big delivery companies.
Twenty years ago, it was rare to see a FedEx truck anywhere but in the business district, and UPS might be in the neighborhood once or twice a week. Now in my small town, it’s not unusual to see each of the major carriers crisscrossing our neighborhoods several times every day. Each truck may have only a couple of deliveries to make in town, and they’ve driven quite a distance to make them.
I can see a way of economizing here, but this will involve a major shift in consumer behavior. What if deliveries were made to my village only on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and your neighborhood on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday? We’d still have the convenience of home delivery but just a day or two later. That’s hardly a sacrifice—most of these deliveries are not urgent.
This idea may be a pipe dream, but as gas prices and carbon emissions continue to rise, we are all going to need to get creative about reducing our reliance on fossil fuel, whether it’s in our own vehicles or someone else’s.
Photo, taken on March 10, 2010, courtesy of Dean Morley via Flickr.