Amazon nixes green shipping plan to avoid alienating shoppers

Bloomberg

A few years ago, Amazon.com Inc’s quick delivery team debated doing something radical for the e-commerce giant: asking shoppers to consider the environment.
The team building Amazon’s Prime Now same-day delivery service knew that the quickest delivery options tended to be the worst for the planet. A guaranteed one-hour delivery window sometimes meant sending couriers in mostly empty vehicles darting to far-flung neighbourhoods, all the while emitting roughly the same greenhouse gas emissions as a fully loaded truck or van. Someone on the team proposed showing customers a “Green” shopping delivery option, a slightly slower delivery speed designed to give Amazon more time to cluster orders together and send out densely packed vehicles, saving on fuel, driver salaries and carbon emissions.
The idea was one of at least two instances in recent years when Amazon teams debated telling customers more about the environmental impact of their shipping choices, according to two people familiar with the episodes. Neither was implemented, in part, because of the risk that shoppers would think twice before clicking “Buy Now,” the people say.
“It was all efficiency and bottom-line focussed,” says one of the people, who requested anonymity to discuss an internal matter. “If you don’t have top-down goals around sustainability, there are always going to be tradeoffs.”
Amazon in the last year has made some big climate commitments, following calls from shareholders, activists and employees to do more to offset the company’s contribution to the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for warming the planet. In September, Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos pledged to erase Amazon’s contribution—some 44.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2018—and make Amazon’s business carbon neutral by 2040. Last month, Bezos raised the stakes, saying he would spend $10 billion of his personal fortune on projects to combat climate change.
But Amazon’s push to make its operations more climate friendly is at odds with elements of the company’s core business practices, some current and former employees and outside observers say. Bezos’s company is, in many ways, designed to promote consumption. From one-click shopping to one-day shipping, many employees are encouraged to focus on a set of goals geared towards removing barriers to shopping and inventing new ways of pleasing customers before they think to ask. That obsessive focus has helped make Amazon the largest online retailer in the world. It also makes climate activists and sustainability experts—many of whom cheer the company’s bold new goals—skeptical of Amazon’s odds of success.
“What they’re trying to do is create a climate and a culture of consumption,” says Raz Godelnik, a professor at the New School’s Parsons School of Design who focusses on sustainability. Amazon says its commitments represent “a very aggressive and important goal.”