Deliver it all

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the March-April 2016 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

March-April 2016

When I visit my millennial-aged daughter in Chicago, I’m amazed at the number of packages dropped off by UPS, FedEx and the USPS at her three-unit building on a daily basis. It’s as if she and her neighbors are single-handedly keeping Amazon in business. All those drop-offs got me to wondering: Does any of this make sense if you think about a carbon footprint? Rather than deliver millions of packages to one address at a time every day, wouldn’t it be more sustainable if we all just drove to the mall to do our shopping? After all, doesn’t research indicate that a signi cant percentage of consumers, especially millennial consumers like my…

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Readers who were teenagers in the 1980s may remember driving to a Sam Goody store to buy music. You probably also remember your disappointment when sometimes the tape or CD wasn’t in stock when you arrived. Perhaps you returned to your car and headed for Tower Records to try your luck there.

Your kids would probably find this story inconceivable today. The advent of the Internet has profoundly altered consumer expectations. Immediate gratification is getting closer by the day; you can now obtain your favorite song in seconds, and order and receive physical goods in as little as a few hours in some urban areas.

Today’s ninth-grader expects to find any product she wants in seconds and order it right away on her smartphone. What’s more, she expects that the order will be accurate, complete, well-packed, and easy to return if desired.

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