Let’s say you need a new comforter for your bed. If you drive to the store to choose and purchase your new bedcover, you use the gas in your car to get there, and you rely on the lighting and cooling in the store to make it a comfortable place to shop. Those factors have environmental impacts, related to the use of fossil fuels, both to fill up your car and to meet the energy demands of the retailer.

Instead, you might decide to shop for and order your comforter online, to avoid using gas and limit the need for physical stores. But in so doing, your order requires some additional actions with environmental impacts, including additional packaging to protect the comforter during shipping and the gasoline used by the delivery service to get the product to your house.

So what is an environmentally conscious consumer to do? According to one study, conducted in a single city in Delaware, there isn’t really a good option. The delivery demands associated with online shopping puts more trucks on the road, which increases diesel emissions, especially because the trucks make frequent deliveries, during which they idle and release more pollution into the air. They also cause more wear-and-tear on the roads, which means that local governments need to repave and repair their streets more frequently. Moreover, the study indicated that consumers did not actually drive less when they ordered online; they just went to different places. In our example, rather than making a run to a retailer to buy your comforter, you might take advantage of the time you saved by ordering online by driving yourself to the movies for the afternoon. The net effect in terms of consumer traffic thus appears about null.

It is risky to take all this information as definitive though. As noted, the study was conducted in just one city in the United States. More information would clearly be needed before we can answer the question of whether online or in-store shopping is more environmentally friendly. And perhaps the more important question to ask is whether consumers really think about such issues when they make their purchase choices.

Discussion Question:

1. What are the factors that affect the environment when it comes to shopping at stores versus online?

Source: Tom Ryan, Retail Wire, February 11, 2016