Rising gas prices fuel e-tailer anxieties

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I don't see it

"As far as shipping the goods to these stores goes, that operation is much more efficient than shipping to a customer. Shipping a truck load of books to Amazon.com's wharehouse, is a lot cheaper per book than shipping one or two books at a time to Amazon's customers."

Whether the book is shipped to a book store, or to an individual, either way it goes by (generally full) semi truck until it gets to the consumer's local area. For books bought online, the last leg is made by a smaller truck which combines final delivery with many other packages (a sort of carpooling, if you will). For brick and mortar, the consumer drives that last leg in their private vehicle. I'm not sure which is more efficient to be honest on this last leg, because the "carpooling" effect could offset the presumably greater fuel efficiency of the consumer's car.

I would guess that the long haul component of online sales is actually more efficient than for brick and mortar, because goods of all sorts from many vendors make the same trip together. I imagine it is easier to fill a semi trailer that way. Also, the e-tailer doesn't have to predict demand in advance in each local market, and push goods all across the country in advance, which is inefficient in many ways, including transportation.

UPS and FED Ex are very efficient operations.

Posted by: enduser_z   Posted on: 08/19/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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