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Grocery Delivery Lowers Carbon Dioxide Emissions Over Individual Trips
vinces99 writes "Those trips to the store can take a chunk out of your day and put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But now University of Washington engineers have found that using a grocery delivery service can cut carbon dioxide emissions by at least half when compared with individual household trips to the store. Trucks filled to capacity that deliver to customers clustered in neighborhoods produced the most savings in carbon dioxide emissions, but there are even benefits with delivery to rural areas."
Will this grocery delivery service discriminate against "atheist" foods?
When I go to the grocery, I walk there. I doubt that any delivery service can be more efficient. However, to be able to shop in that way, the supermarket must be not more than 10-20 min away from home (by foot or by bike).
Really? A grocery deliver has less carbon emission than me using public transportation (tram) on my way back form work?
Yea yea I know... Most of Mureca has little in the way of public transportation, which would not be feasible anyway. (I grew up partially in Autin TX.) But still, swapping gas guzzling single cars with one gas guzzling tuck. How about each individual reduced their emissions by getting more efficient cars (electic car + wind/solar/hydro?) and making minor detour from trips you do anyway.
Breathe less and you reduce CO2 emission.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Jeez, is it so hard NOT to take the car for groceries?
I ride my bike to pick up my groceries like most sane people.
So it uses less gas and generates less emmisions if one truck comes from a single point into a area along a planned path and delivers to everyone instead of having all those individuals drive from the area to the single point?
WOW I would of thought it was the other way.
It is good that these people spent all this time and money to prove that common thinking was all wrong.
Well, the truck can deliver the goods to a local market. Then, you can go to that market using your feet or even a bike. I guess it is even more green. It is the way our grandparents did. Why do we different? Because we have plenty of cheap energy and it is more comfortable the other way.
It might change when the energy will not be that cheap, though. I am pretty pessimistic at the idea some environmental enlightenment will win against laziness...
Video of some good progressive thrash music
I've found that if you murder people, they stop emitting CO2 almost entirely. So really, serial killers are the best environmentalists.
Who shops at major groceries anymore? I get most of my food at the farmers market. I like to pick my own produce, not phone it in.
Grocery stores would fight it. There's no "oh i want it" to the same degree if you can keep a list in your phone every time you run out of something and it comes to the door twice a week. It would eliminate overhead, but who really needs grocery stores if a warehouse just loads the stuff on a truck and brings it to you. Now with fruits and veggies you'll probably want to pick them out so they dont give you the rejects.
For boxed stuff and canned goods, why not? I mean, my dad told me stories of the milk man/soda man in Brooklyn. Small towns have had a grocer kid who would bring you stuff for a tip. I even recall a similar service failing to gain traction here. I know there is Schwanns. That handsome delivery boy could be the bane of husbands everywhere!
I want the milk that is newest, the meat without marbling, the pear without bruises, and the beets without rotting leaves.
I'm sure it benefits the store to provide me whatever is oldest and/or least desired. If I don't buy more food to compensate, throwing out half of it, there may even be an environmental benefit. (less food waste if people eat the moldy food) No thanks. I want the good stuff.
Fundamentally, environmental problems are economic problems: how to minimize environmental damage at minimal cost. Economic theory points to pollution taxes as the best solution. So while I disagree with the articles conclusion that governments should give incentives for ordering groceries by delivery, this kind of study does point people and companies in the direction of how to efficiently reduce pollution once the right incentives (pollution taxes) are provided.
And of course, in the meantime it's good for people to know how to efficiently reduce their own pollution even though there is no financial incentive to do so.
I'll tell you who: normal people.
Only people with too much money and time on their hand will go buy high-quality meat or other farmer products regularly.
If you want to be even more efficient how about you do a "Foxconn" - live, eat, etc at your workplace and do away with most grocery trips completely.
You'd get greater economies of scale and reduce CO2 emissions. But is that the priority?
I'd personally prefer to leave the cooking to the pros and specialists. In general that's inefficient however it's not 100% guaranteed that eating out has to be more inefficient and environmentally unfriendly:
Eat in:
farm->distribution center/warehouse->supermarket->your kitchen/fridge->your dining table.
Eat out:
farm ->distribution center/warehouse ->restaurant kitchen/fridge->restaurant dining table.
If everyone drives a car to restaurants and makes many such trips then it generates more CO2. But if most customers can walk in or its just a short detour from their main journey then it might actually be more efficient.
My groceries consist mostly of perishable goods (haven't bought cans or frozen foods in recent memory, rather low on boxes, packets or jugs). One has to wonder: how much do damaged fruit that rot before they can be eaten, contribute to carbon emissions (ok, ok, methane)? I often stop by the shop on my way from work to home, so not much extra fuel used there. But I select my produce for maximum freshness (so they last as long as possible). The more they are handled (unloading, packing, bagging, ...) the more the quality is impacted, because it seems where I live most laborers doing these low-wage, low-training chores just don't care. I somehow doubt that the delivery truck will take the same extra care to get me the freshest stuff.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
You could cut emissions even more if the trucks could solve the travelling salesman problem :).
This article/research has "fucking obvious" written all over it. How is this even news?
Here's my grocery getter, loaded down with groceries. I doubt that truck beats me in the carbon department.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
I've worked at a company located in Seattle and made a few trips there. Seattle was strange since everything is close together. It's a tightly packed city with irregular population distribution. Many of the cities in the US this is not the case. In South Florida, where I live, houses are spread apart far enough that a delivery truck would have traverse more distance than if individual people went to the grocery. It's also a good 10 minutes to a grocery store.
Now that's south Florida. I also visit my family in Israel where grocery stores abound and you can walk to several in a matter of minutes. When I'm there I don't emit any more carbon than I normally do when procuring groceries. So a delivery service doesn't make sense in a "European" style city where one doesn't have to shop at a giant mega-mart.
There is also a great variance in grocery shopping intervals. I go about twice a month. Some people with lots of kids and a big family go once a week or more. This seems like very myopic science to gather statistics like this on a small scale and assume it applies equally well on a large data set. It smells of questionable science to me.
If you're single and living by yourself, and there's a store within walking distance near your home or workplace, and you're physically fit, and the weather is half-decent, fine. How much can you lug in a couple of shopping bags? A week's worth of groceries for 2 or more people is not going to fit in a shopping bag, or in the itty-bitty basket on your bicycle.
My initial reaction to the article is... like... dohhh. This is what's known as "The travelling salesman problem". No, it's not a joke or a movie... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem
> The travelling salesman problem (TSP) or travelling salesperson problem
> asks the following question: Given a list of cities and the distances between
> each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly
> once and returns to the origin city? It is an NP-hard problem in combinatorial
> optimization, important in operations research and theoretical computer science.
In this case substitute residences in the same city for locations in multiple cities. But the principle is the same. Given today's computing power, it should be easy to plan an optimum route for delivering groceries to several customers in a geographic area. Depending on how the truck is loaded, and how many doors it has, the groceries will need to be loaded in either the same order as the deliveries, or the reverse order.
While we're at it, hasn't this problem been addressed by other delivery systems? TV/furniture/bed stores (or the companies they subcontract out to) will obviously want their delivery guys to deliver pieces of furniture to multiple customers, in the shortest time possible, assuming hourly pay.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
boink
It looks like I'd have to fill that bike about 8 to 10 times per week to feed my family. Each week I have about 4 large carts of food, overfilled top and bottom. Sometimes I hang things off the side. Sometimes I get a second cart.
I don't even bother with beer or bottled water. Each day is about 2 gallons of milk, 2 half-gallons of orange juice, perhaps 8 eggs on average (highly variable, can be about 2 dozen), 10 to 15 bananas, a pair of chickens or a turkey or a goose or similar...
Motor vehicles are behind about 15% all CO2 emissions. Out of that I have seen numbers ranging from 40-75% coming from private transporation, the typical definition of car. Let's assume the upper range and say that private car transportation emits about 10% of all CO2 in the world. How much of that is done buying groceries? I know personally it is less than half, but for fun, lets say my work and my kids spare-time activities are really close and my grocery store is really far away, and I spend half of my driving to and from the grocery store. That would mean that 5% of all CO2 emissions come from driving to and from grocery stores. This is most likely exaggerated quite a bit, but let's stay with the upper boundaries.
If they can cut grocery-related emissions by half, that would mean a 2.5% reduction in emissions give an absolute perfect scenario. The real number is probably closer to somewhere between 0 and 1%.
The people doing this research are not morons for doing the research, but they are morons for publishing it thinking it adds to the debate about AGW.
In fact, given that private car transportation is the source of 10% or so of carbon emissions, any person who uses changes in private car transportation as a solution to AGW is mathematically retarded and should be removed from the discussion. The reduction in CO2 emissions that can be achieved targeting private transportation are statistically insignificant, and most of the "solutions" are far worse than the problem. Electrical cars for example, would increase CO2 emissions in most of the world, not reduce them since most of the electricity they run on is being produced by coal-fueled power plants.
It's very popular in the UK, everyday you see many supermarket delivery vans/trucks driving around. Plenty of our neighbours use this system. People seem to like using the smartphone apps to top up their order or schedule a time slot for delivery etc.
I guess it is saving people from having to physically travel to the supermarket themselves.
Since it put out less carbon that plants need to survive.
Fuck you. Yes, it is so hard to NOT take the car for groceries. Good days I don't use the gimp spot. Bad days, I don't go grocery shopping. Just because you're 19 and living in the dorms really isn't relevant to the rest of the population. It's 2 miles to the grocery store. Not far on a bicycle, if you can use one. My husband does when the weather isn't shitty, but feeding 4 people and not having the hipster diet, we buy things like flour and sugar and potatoes that come in bulk. Those, also, don't do well on a bicycle.
The bike
- cuts carbon emission dramatically compared to any fossil fuel based vehicle
- keeps you good condition / lowers health costs to the community
- saves roads and preserve public infrastructure
- favors social interaction (try to say hello and stop for a quick chat with a friend driving a car when you're driving yourself; you wouln't even notice she/he is around ; - )
- and to shop big or heavy items, use a trailer or a long john...
Enjoy your ride!
You still don't have much of a family. If the kids leave home at age 18 and don't come back, an unimpressive rate of 1 kid every other year should get you to about 9 kids. With decent performance you can have 15 kids. Again, this is assuming they leave the nest at 18 and don't come back.
This is old news for Catholics, Mormons, Muslims, and Orthodox Jews. Protestants are starting to get on it too now, with the Quiverful movement. You may have to start your own movement if you don't believe... call it the "r-selection movement" maybe. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-selection for why)
I don't get it. Having a truck loaded with groceries going around and delivering is more efficient then multiple cars. Why is a study needed to know something so obvious?
Regular people? Is this a trick question?
I get my groceries on a bicycle. Beat that.
Let's worship the self, the icon of western consumerism. "I want" "I want" "I want" ... music to the ears of the capitalists destroying our society, coming from the spoiled progressives feeding them.
Oh by the way, the dirty capitalists want your money. It doesn't benefit them to provide you the oldest or least desired. You're the customer most likely to leave them for a competing service. They're smarter than you.
walk to the store? ever tried that?
This study assumes of course that you are at home, go to the store by car and get back. But people will also streamline their transportation routes. I, for example, always go to the store when coming back from work. It's on the same way, so the added emissions here are just me stopping and starting my car.
I'm sure many other people are in the same case.
Yes, but can you tell us where you get your hemp sandles, tight lady-jeans, and smug sense of self-satisfaction?
Congratulations, now go make^H^H^H^Hlose a billion $$$!
Safeway is starting to offer this as a service; however, like WebVan, they reserve the right to substitute "equivalent" goods when they feel it's necessary.
When WebVan did that, we ended up with something with peanut oil in it instead of canola oil, which it's lucky we caught, or someone could have died.
When Safeway does it, it's going to be replacing name brands with Safeway brands, and it is more or less *always* be necessary, since they are sending the vans from the distribution center, which only stocks a few name brands. Toilet tissue? You get Safeway. Kleenex? You get Safeway tissue.
The asinine thing is that Safeway *already* does not use the frequency marketing card data to datamine it and say to themselves "Hmmmm... this card never buys anything containing peanuts, and hasn't for 10 years; let's flag them so that if they accidentally get something that has peanuts in it, they get an 'are you sure?' at the checkout". This despite the databases they already have on product ingredients and everything the card has *ever* been used to buy make this type of mining *trivial*.
Instead, the assholes print out $0.50 off coupons for exactly the products that we've been avoiding for 10 years, every time we buy an "equivalent" non-store brand version of the item. Of course it's cleverly based on the fact that on our next trip we are likely to be picking up one of the "equivalent" products that don't contain what amounts to rat poison, or might as well, for the allergic person.
Seriously, this is a stupid idea.
Nice. You're hittin' the "hipster foodie" stereotype out of the park, man!
I get most of my food at the farmers market
How's that February local produce working out for you? Or are you talking about a "farmer's market" that has stuff brought in from thousands of miles away? Or is it possible you're talking about a region with a climate that isn't like many other places?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I commute to work every day. Why don't eco-people pressure companies into allowing more telecommuting? If my little trip to the grocery store is so damaging to the environment, then I can't imagine what my daily commute is doing.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
Adoption of grocery delivery services is very, very low in most areas (I am familiar with), so if the truck is to leave the store "filled to capacity" it will be covering a very large area, the customers will not be "clustered in neighborhoods" - this will have an impact on the reduction in carbon dioxide achieved.
Where I live (suburbs) it seems that most people stop at the supermarket on their way to/from somewhere else (not a single trip to the market and back), a delivery service may eliminate the stop, but it won't eliminate the car trip, a trip that will likely involve driving past the market on the way to the dry cleaner, book store, office/work, etc.
Ken
They build the supermarkets near major arteries because that's where the people are...
Ken
I live within walking distance to three grocery stores. I'll keep using my own two feet, thank you very much. 100% reduction over even the truck delivery method. There's still have greenhouse emissions getting the food to the store, but that's unavoidable.
It baffles me how many people make special trips for things, i never go just one place, if i need one thing it can wait until i have more places to go. Go to the grocery store 2-3 times a week, theres 3 on the way home from work. We do big grocery shopping for staples and nonperishables at one further away probably every other weekend, but we also go to target, the hardware store and sams club on those trips.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
So instead of reading the country of origin on the label you get to bury your head in the sand and not know at all!!*
*note I have worked several farmer's markets. No real farmers sell their food in such small venues. It is all gardeners or importers. Unless you know them personally, they wont tell you which they are and it is really hard to tell the difference unless you get sick off banned pesticides.
Great. Now stop charging outlandishly unreasonable delivery fees and I might consider using these services.
Ok, this is more of the same avoidance tactic. Having groceries delivered might be more efficient as far as the environment is concerned but it simply perpetuates the inevitable. It is the same issue as making cars that burn less fuel. That sounds great but it also makes it very easy to keep adding more and more cars to the problem until efficiency really yields no improvement. If we reduce the number of cars as well as the number of miles driven as well as the efficiency of each car then we have done something. Runaway population growth that is enabled by science and technology work a rounds causes more population growth. More people means more sprawl, more asphalt surfaces, less forests, less crops lands, less clean air, less clean water, less health for people and animals etc..
If we could slowly reduce the number of people in the world by rigid birth control and get the population down to 20% of current levels there might actually be a future for people in this world. Less population would mean we need less chemicals in our food supply, cleaner air and water, less addictions and insanities, less poverty and unemployment, less cancer, less issues with retirement, less destruction of our land and water and abundant supplies of natural resources for all. The world can not be much improved by grocery deliveries. But the world can be vastly improved by population containment.
How many of us go to the grocery store across from our kid's school?
How many people stop at a store when they're going to Home Depot?
Honestly, if you can't bundle trips into places you're already going, you're paying a stupid tax already.
Let's go one step further and say that people who are on a budget are killing the environment by going to more than one supermarket to save (sometimes a LOT of) money. How about those of us who only buy produce at a certain supermarket because it's fresher there?
Seriously, let's over analyze one minute detail and say it's good for us. SCIENCE!
This has been known for some time. The biggest energy cost associated with many food products is moving the 2-ton family SUV to and from the grocery store to move 25 pounds of merchandise. Moving a fully loaded semi isn't that expensive per unit weight.
Webvan is coming back. Amazon owns it now. Webvan was popular, but the operating costs were too high. One of Webvan's executives realized that what they needed was robots. He went on to found Kiva Systems, which makes robots for warehouse operations. Kiva robots handle fulfillment at Walgreens.com, Gap.com, Staples.com, and many other big retailers.
Amazon recently bought Kiva. Amazon's CEO is an investor in Rethink Robotics, which makes robot arms and hands. (The Kiva robots move shelf units to human pickers, where a laser pointer shows them what to pick. It looks like eliminating the human pickers is next.) Amazon is opening local warehouses in major cities. Amazon is starting to offer same-day delivery. This time it will be profitable.
Small retailers who are aware of this are very afraid.
I keep hearing about farmer's markets being better than supermarkets, and it simply isn't true.
Is your "supermarket" some low-end discount place that caters exclusively to the poor? There is one place that that near me. I never shop there. There are indications: They don't offer bags or they charge you for them, and they won't help you out to your car. Cans are dented. They sell junk food and soul food, but not a full selection of fruits and vegatables. The store has signs that offer to send money to other countries. Uh, to mention an awkward issue, the shoppers are more likely to be obese and black.
The place I go to will always ask if I want paper or plastic, and always ask if I want help getting my stuff to the car. The place I shop at offers minimally processed meat. They sell USA-grown rabbit. They sell tomatos on the vine. They sell bags of super-ripe indoor-grown tomatos. They stock goose, star fruit, at least a half dozen kind of pears including Asian pears, shiitake mushrooms, a full selection of organic stuff, etc. You can get non-rotting fresh fish, or you can get minimally-processed (no phosphates or carbon monoxide or colorings) frozen fish. You can get live lobsters and shellfish. You can get European-style Mars bars, both Marmite and Vegemite, german pasta (spaetzle), german bread (rye), and French jam/jelly. You can get tortillas with just 5 ingredients, all simple and natural, or you can get ones loaded with omega-3 fatty acids and fiber.
The differences are like night and day. If your supermarket sucks, find a better one. Look for a wealthy suburban zip code and go there.
Also lottery tickets and tobacco. In much of the US, mom&pop corner stores have been replaced by 7-11 or similar chains, but the functions are still similar. Ethnic neighborhoods are more likely to have mom&pop stores with a bit more specialized food varieties, but they're still selling the high-profit-margin goods that keep them in business.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Good bread can last just fine if you treat it well (and don't eat it all, of course.) Refrigeration keeps it from going moldy, plastic bags keep it from drying out in the fridge. And here in the San Francisco Bay Area (or up in Seattle), there's lots of choices of good bread, even if you don't like sourdough. (Maybe soft spongey breads don't last as long without preservatives, but I don't eat those.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Just sell the groceries off the trucks, so customers can pick up whatever they want, which ever brand etc. Load some trucks in the morning, and each of them cover like a few block radius, encouraging people to walk. My grandma and mom did this back when in a third world country. First few weeks there would be some miss and hit as far as location and merchandise supply and demand. That is OK. Collect data from this few weeks experience and optimizes it over time.
1) i generally do not make a separate trip to the store, it is on the way to or from something else (usually work). So the environmental impact of my "shopping trip" is more minimal.
2) $10 for the service is a non-starter. Spending >$50 on groceries is rare for me (I'm single). This amounts to a 20%+ markup. Also, I expect in the US there will be a tip expected eventually.
3) Substitution is also a non-starter. I generally would pick the store brand for stuff where that was acceptable. Where isn't not, i would prefer nothing to the store brand, and reducing the purchase order pushes up the effective markup %. Never wait till your out of TP to buy more.
4) Produce purchases (particularly bananas) are dependent on the quality of the produce - requires inspection to ascertain.
When my mother was growing up, the ice man delivered ice for the icebox; they didn't get mechanical refrigeration at home until after the war (and that was in a medium-large city.) If you drank milk, it didn't keep very long, and most people didn't have cars, so delivery made sense.
When I was growing up, milk companies still delivered in the suburbs, and some bakeries delivered, as well as a few more specialized products like potato chips. Most Americans didn't have two cars, and they tended to do large grocery shopping runs on Saturday. My mom learned to drive around 1960 so she could haul us to pre-school, and my dad carpooled to work; they probably got a second car in the late 60s, and they switched over to supermarket milk around 1970, and supermarkets were starting to have enough shelf space by the late 70s to carry more variety of products like potato chips than corner stores could.
If I had had kids, they would have grown up around the time of the internet boom. Webvan and Kozmo briefly delivered a wide variety of convenience foods (and weed :-) and while I never used them, my mother-in-law was elderly and less mobile and found them really useful; they improved her nutritional choices just as AOL improved her ability to socialize (and she'd quit smoking, so she no longer had to go to the store a couple times a week to get cigarettes.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Not going to work. If it did then home milk delivery would still be going strong but its not. Now if they could get my order ready at the store for me to pickup well then that might work.
Jack of all trades,master of none
The asinine thing is that Safeway *already* does not use the frequency marketing card data to datamine it and say to themselves "Hmmmm... this card never buys anything containing peanuts, and hasn't for 10 years; let's flag them so that if they accidentally get something that has peanuts in it, they get an 'are you sure?' at the checkout".
They don't do it because if people came to rely on the system and an item wasn't marked as having peanuts, or their datamining algorithm didn't detect that you never buy peanut products, or the system broke in some way, or the cashier didn't notice the warning...and someone died, they'd be liable.
Seriously, if you're allergic to peanuts, you can damn well check labels and/or ask.
Please help metamoderate.
How is this newsworthy?
We get our groceries delivered by a small company, mainly local (mostly organic) and it's fantastic. Good quality, and they are very friendly and personable. Despite the extra cost we spend less due to not going to the supermarket and getting sucked into buying what we don't need. I don't know about greener though, they send it by courier.
Maybe it's different in other parts of the world, but home delivered groceries in Australia are a no-win situation.
If you order your groceries online through one of the Big Two (Woolworths in particular) then the prices on offer are always the same (or more) than the shelf price in-store and then you have to pay a delivery fee on top! The online specials are disconnected from the in-store specials that you get in the junk mail and are rarely as good as those in-store.
If you try to do "The Right Thing" and order through someone like Aussie Farmers Direct, bypassing Coles and Woolworths, they cannot *ever* get an order correct. Every single order we've placed through them has had exchanged items (cheaper equivalents), extra items (rarely) or missing items (every time).
As other submitters have said above, you're far better off actually going to the supermarkets or specialty stores and picking out exactly what you want.
I can share the road with a human-powered vehicle (that's easier on the rare occasion a cyclist deigns to obey traffic signals)
Same here.
I dont mind sharing the road with other road users, even cyclists... I just wish they'd do the same.
Cyclists in Australia are so extremely militant about excising their "right" to ride on the road that they forget about anyone else's right to use the same road. The refuse to use bike paths or bike lanes that were installed expressly so they didn't interfere with traffic (or bypass it altogether) but they become very, very quite whenever someone mentions old Regulation 219 which I see cyclist in violation of at least once a day.
Cyclists are so busy exercising their "rights", they never stop to think if they are actually in the right.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
... If I didn't say this. It's Carbon Monoxide. Monoxide with an M. Not Dioxide. Carbon Monoxide is toxic to all forms of life and causes cancer. Carbon Dioxide is a source of nutrient for all plantlife on the earth. Carbon Dioxide good, Carbon Monoxide bad. mmmkay?
I doubt a delivery truck would cut down on my carbon emitions. I have to drive to work and home (no public transit is available) and there is a grocery store on my route home, so I stop every day or 2 to pick up what is needed. In essence, the only CO2 emitions are from when I start my car when I'm ready to go home, which should be less than what any delivery truck could emit while either starting in my yard, or idling while unloading, not to mention I have a LONG driveway, which would offset any savings if the truck could either start again or idle with higher efficiency than my relatively new car. I do have a lot of my purchases delivered, but it's all to my office, which sees delivery trucks from most courrier services daily, so truck is usually making a special trip to deliver one box to me. Definatly in urban areas, deliverys could be more efficient due to proximity of houses, and I suppose in rural settings it can help too, but in both settings, the biggest savings would be if people were more careful with scheduling their shopping and errands. I know people who will drive to town (20 minute drive) to pick up 3 things at the store, and other people that zig-zag back and forth around town to go to 100 places, when they could save time and gas by planning their trip first.
I don't see milk trucks delivering any more. And I buy groceries on the way home from work.