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By Root 1108 0

for the environment and amazing for small, independent businesses. After all, suddenly you could open a business without needing a physical storefront—you didn’t even need inventory, because things could be produced when an e-mail came in from a customer, assuming you could fulfill the order in a reasonable amount of time. And of course that’s all true. But overwhelmingly online retail has wound up supporting the same huge, insensitive companies that dominate in the brick-and-mortar world. In spite of the new potential for smaller companies to reach prospective consumers directly, about one-third of the $70 billion that Americans spent online in 2003 (that number had already topped $100 billion by 200653) went to just the top twenty Web retailers, with twelve of those being major chains.54

Amazon.com is the undisputed emperor of this realm, priding itself on offering the world’s biggest selection of items, at prices below, or at least competitive with, what they cost elsewhere. To broaden inventory even further, it partners with other vendors (even large ones like Target) and provides them with warehousing and distribution. Technology is Amazon’s strongest suit and greatest investment (dwarfing H&M’s logistics system by umpteen degrees). Not only for the customer interface—the programs that create a personalized shopping experience and recommend products to users (as founder and CEO Jeff Bezos says, with so many items to choose from, they had to create ways to not only “enable customers to find products, but also enable products to find customers”55)—but also for the logistics of “fulfillment,” or processing an order and getting it to a customer. Imagine tracking a couple of million different products, as opposed to a couple of thousand. Amazon had to create its own “inventory optimization” software that Bezos compares to airline routing: complex algorithms create an optimal “pick path” through multi-million-square-foot warehouses so machines can find and fetch the specific items on order.56 It’s this enormous selection and the technological whiz-bang behind the personalized experience that the Amazon brand is all about.

For most people, it takes a will of steel to resist Amazon and instead choose a local bookstore, which charges the price that’s actually on the cover of the book and may well have to special-order a book because of its limited on-site inventory. Of course, as a result, the ranks of local, independently owned bookstores have been entirely decimated, which is a terrible loss.

However, there’s still lively, ongoing debate among environmentalists about whether online shopping has a lighter footprint than traditional retail. Retail stores consume resources in their building, lighting, cooling, heating, etc., and consumers usually have to climb into their cars to reach them. However, e-commerce uses more packaging and is more likely to rely on air freight for at least part of the product’s journey. An in-depth study done specifically on book sales compared the two forms of distribution. In the traditional model, books are trucked from the printer to a national warehouse, then to a regional warehouse, and from there to the retail outlets. The customer travels to the store to buy the book and brings it home. In the online model, the book is trucked from the printer to a central warehouse. After the customer orders it, it’s packaged, flown to a regional hub, and trucked to the customer’s door.

The study raises an interesting point in terms of unsold books (an average of 25 to 55 percent of what gets printed, depending on the genre57), which are usually either trashed, recycled, or sold to a discount bookstore—all of which at least means further transport, if not also waste. Because in the online model the central warehouse is a single inventory point, there are fewer unsold books, meaning less wasted paper and less transport. In the end, using average fuel consumption rates for the planes, trucks, and cars, average packaging for an average-sized book, and the average rate of books that go unsold, the study found