How does Amazon Prime not lead to massive inefficiency in resource use?

No, they work really well for really common stuff, otherwise, kinda. Either way, they’d have to care to put the right data in as well as the objective, and AZ didn’t, because it prints money either way.

"The El Español report described Kwarteng and an associate as meticulous, saying that when he received a package, he would place the box on a scale and note its weight, unpack the product, fill the box with dirt until the weight was similar, then later put the item up for sale.

The report said that Kwarteng eventually had such a substantial turnover that he ended up founding a limited company, Kwartech, a portmanteau of his surname and the word “technology.”

Beautiful. I commend his entrepreneurial spirit.

One thing I didn’t see mentioned upthread during the discussion on delivery efficiency is that Amazon (and I presume the other delivery services) are moving to electric vehicles. I assume they’ll move there a lot faster than the bulk of their customers do.

Also not sure about delivery services, but a fair amount of companies switched from gasoline to natural gas or propane for their fleets of vehicles, which saved them money and is better for the environment.

My personal anecdote was working for the Canadian equivalent of Staples. I was processing the returns pile and came across a perfectly working expensive scientific calculator. Offhand I asked my manager, what do I write for this? It’s not broken? So he takes it, throws it on the ground, grinds it with his foot, and says ‘now it is’. I resisted telling him that obviously inflicted customer damage wouldn’t have passed our return criteria, but it clued me in a bit about some people’s attitude to waste.

I also remember we had some basic strategy for preventing students from buying a printer, printing out their homework or honors thesis or whatever, and returning it after a few days claiming there was a technical fault.

Offering to print it for them?

You know, we did do a printing service as well, so it’s possible there was outreach of that sort! Wasn’t my department. Certainly would have cost the company less.

I worked at Office Depot in college. The store owner was very by-the-book and said that tech returns needed to be tossed. But he wasn’t that militant about enforcing it, so many of the digital cameras and laptops we were supposed to throw away ended up in the hands of employees’ friends and families.