"Greg D. Moore (Strider)" wrote in message
ink.net...

"Jeff Findley" wrote in message
...
I know a guy at work who cringes when I order something online. He goes
on and on about how globally inefficient it is for a company like Amazon
to ship books all over the globe by, of all things, FedEx, UPS, and even
the USPS! It would be far more efficient for me to shop at the local
bookstores and take advantage of their globally more efficient
distribution system...

Huh, and how does he think the bookstores get their books? They magically
appear on the shelves?

No, but he feels that they're shipped by more fuel efficient means than by
overnight air. He does have a point there. If I always paid for ground
shipping, the fuel usage would be lower.

The part he's missing is that those thousands of bookstores are themselves
largely inefficient. Trying to locally stock thousands of books and
expecting them to be an exact match for local demand is wishful thinking.
In the end, the books that don't sell are either given a steep discount to
move them off the shelves, or they're shipped back to a warehouse where
they're sold to book liquidation stores, shipped to their warehouse, and
finally shipped to local discount stores where they're sold at a steep
discount.

Jeff
--
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor
safety"
- B. Franklin, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919)