Memes

To be fair, the delivery really is handy if you're shopping for something niche enough that it isn't sold locally, or if you don't have a car and are trying to buy something not sold within walking distance/within easy access to transit if available, or which is too heavy to carry without a vehicle. There's definitely a point here about local stores not being able to compete or with Amazon's monopolistic business practices though. The ideal thing I suppose would be some sort of website that local stores could sign up with to let people order stuff from to be delivered by the store or by a service the store uses, run as a non-profiting venture just at breakeven to avoid a motive to exploit stores that use it and have less individual power, combined with some kind of law against averaging shipping costs into the base costs of products and making shipping seem free, so as to ensure that local items are generally cheaper due to less needed transportation. In such a scenario, the central online shopping area wouldn't end up as a competitor to smaller local stores since it wouldn't actually sell anything itself, customers would be encouraged to buy items that take less transportation and thus fewer carbon emissions, and the convenience of having an online space in which almost everything for sale can be found and delivered can be preserved.