When you don’t buy local

Travel the U.S.’s interstate highways, and you’ll see the new wagon trains: not single-trailer transport trucks, not even double-trailer trucks.

No, you’ll see the triple-trailer UPS and FedEx monster freights, barreling along to their next distribution point, thousands of packages heading from here to there.

Travel the most remote roads you can find — like the virtually no-turn-off 100-mile dirt stretch through northern Nevada desert known as the Jungo Road, and the modern version of the pony express may rush right by, a delivery company’s van on a pell-mell trip to hand over a parcel to someone for whom the word “neighbour” is a foreign concept.

Closer to home, if you travel the byways of social media around this time of year, and you’ll see the plaintive messages of the bereft, bewailing the fact that their latest purchase is still apparently logged as being located in a distribution warehouse in Dieppe, N.B. Wayfair is sending you furniture and carpets, Amazon’s sending your Insta-Pot, someone else is getting your semi-legal weed to you.

It’s fast, it’s convenient, and it’s often cheaper than other options — free shipping alone can be the bait that sets the e-purchase hook.

But it’s more than just the perfect gift for someone else or for yourself. There’s what’s winging its way towards you: your purchase, of course, along with part of the one billion trees Amazon uses every year for corrugated carboard alone. Shipping waste for homedelivered packages — just like the kind you unpack with that fine purchase — now accounts for 30 per cent of the waste going into U.S. landfills.

And there’s what is winging its way away: dollars that vanish almost without a trace from your local economy. Just about the only money spent in these transactions in your city or town is at a distribution hub, and the salaries and overhead of the last few miles of the delivery chain.

When a dollar comes into your province, it spins around for a while, travelling from hand to hand; from employee to business to supplier, to employee again. When a dollar goes out of your province to a foreign website, you’d be lucky if pennies came back. Heck, two of the largest internet-sales-driven companies in the U.S., Amazon and FedEx, made huge profits in 2018, but paid little or nothing in taxes. That’s even though their fleets used roads, airports and a whole host of local infrastructure to make their profits. None of that may matter to you.

The instant reward may be more valuable, both financial and internally. Finding what you want, having it sent to your door in less than two days and never having to leave the comfort of your computer chair (except to answer the doorbell before some lowlife snatches your parcel right off your step) may feel priceless.

But for local economies, there’s a huge price to pay.