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How online shopping is changing the world
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In the past, there were only a few things delivered to our homes
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like newspapers, pizza or Asian food. Nowadays, there is a
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universe of products like DVDs, video games, Spanish oranges,
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clothes, books, groceries or medicine and you can order them all
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online. Even more exotic is ordering insects to feed your tarantula.
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Or do you need help around the house? So why not order a
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plumber or a carpenter online to help you. This new experience of
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shopping is known as e-commerce or e-business.
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Most home deliveries still consist of the familiar brown cardboard
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parcels from retailers such as Amazon which is responsible for
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half of all packages delivered in the US each year. Jeff Bezos,
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Amazon’s founder, never wanted his customers to worry about
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shipping - about how much it costs, or about how long it takes.
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“Time is money. Save both.”, is the slogan which shows that
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Amazon’s main goal is to deliver their products as quickly as
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possible. Amazon’s emphasis on speed forced other retailers to
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hurry, too, and shoppers started to believe that something that
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cannot be received quickly, is not worth having at all.
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In 2005, Amazon created Prime, a club for shoppers paying a
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fixed fee every year, so that they got free two-day shipping on
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everything they bought. Prime now has more than 100 million
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members. A market analysis firm found that 93 per cent of Prime
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members keep their subscriptions after a year, and 98 per cent
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after two years. “Not for patient people,” runs a Prime slogan, and
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it is right: one out of every three Prime members has deleted items
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from their shopping baskets after learning that they could not
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arrive in two days. Meanwhile, Amazon halved Prime shipping
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time down to a day.
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A lot of attention has been paid to problems such as how best to
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pack a box, how to beat traffic and what to do when a delivery
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driver rings the doorbell and no one is home. The cardboard box is
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the most obvious symbol of e-commerce and stands for the
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conflict of choosing between our unlimited consumption and the
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health of the planet. A heavier box costs more to buy and it also
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uses more fuel to ship for example. Like every company, Amazon
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has been trying to design boxes that are both light and strong. But
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still many companies use packaging materials excessively.
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However, the environmental impact of all that paper and plastic is
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just one part of the overall carbon footprint of online shops. In
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addition , vans and trucks of companies such as FedEx, UPS and
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DHL increase traffic. The great trick of online retail is to get us to
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do more shopping without thinking about it for too long. So, when
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ordering online some people buy far more than they need, send
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unwanted items back and order new ones, forcing drivers to come
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back. Some people live so far out in the countryside that delivery
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drivers must make an effort to find them. Especially the cities
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struggle with home delivery because they were not designed to
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handle this amount of transport activity. Delivery drivers block the
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side of the road to load and unload their packages. Streets are
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jammed and citizens suffer from air pollution.
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How will e-commerce handle the challenges in the next decade?
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Different ideas are being discussed: using drones, parachutes,
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autonomous vehicles or robots. Obviously, there is still a long way
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to go to make e-commerce more efficient and more eco-friendly.
Adapted from: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/now/21/how-our-home-delivery-habit-reshaped-the-world (22.11.2019)