Stop Believing in Free Shipping
There’s scarcely tastier bait for American shoppers than free shipping, and it’s been transformed from an occasional incentive into something that closely resembles a consumer requirement. But shipping isn’t free for the people who send packages, and an insatiable demand for this perk might be the thing that breaks mom-and-pop retail for good.
Online shopping, when it works best, is sort of like a duck. The part above the water—the algorithmically selected products, the simple checkout process aided by personal information stored on phones, the package that appears on your porch two days later—glides placidly along, setting off only the gentlest of ripples in your attention. The apotheosis of e-commerce is when people spend money without feeling like anything has happened at all.
Below the surface, the little webbed feet of retail paddle furiously. This holiday season, the United States Postal Service will deliver a projected 800 million packages. Early in 2020, FedEx will start delivering on Sundays all year, a service previously reserved for the holidays. In New York, where daily deliveries have tripled in less than a decade, trucks snarl streets and rack up nearly a half million parking tickets annually. In 2015, Amazon launched Amazon Flex, through which the company pays people to use their own cars to ferry boxes, assuming all responsibility for mileage and expenses.
