Being late to this great debate about local v Mall v Amazon etc, I can all the various sides and the advantages of having next day or in some cases, same day deliveries if you happen to live in the right areas etc. The thing is, I suspect that it is actually much more complicated and I offer up another view on it.
I can remember when in my city, (at the time it was a small market town) had no less than 4 shops where you could go and buy all the electronic parts that you needed for whatever project or repair you were working on, at 2 shops selling spares for domestic appliances, kettles elements, iron elements, thermostats etc, and the repair culture was alive and thriving. We also had numerous shops selling new appliances and this was again repeated in the clothing / textile / sewing / knitting / building / DIY sectors as well.
Then it all began to change as some people become bored with making a reasonable and sustainable living for them and their families, and they became obsessed with making more money, Factories brought out other factories etc and consumer choice was reduced. Then they set about making things that were at least far more difficult to repair, and we entered the throw away era.
Retail sector followed suit, shops became chains, then came along malls then suddenly every mall and high street became boring and predictable with the same well known names being there and specialist shops squeezed out because these bigger names would pay more rent for their shops, so the local authorities would take advantage of that and increase rents to an extent that these small shops could no longer afford to stay in business and closed up allowing the bigger names to move in. Then these bigger names began a series of buyouts and mergers, Dixons, PC World, Currys, Car Phone Warehouse etc, my network of 4 electronic outlets dried up until Tandy moved in, then that went and Maplin came along, then that went to the wall, all the time consumer choice shrunk, repairs became almost a dirty word regardless of what it was being repaired as things became sealed for life etc.
So in the end as far as I can see the current situation has been slowly developing over the years, and we have sort of sleep walked to where we are today. Instead of making items locally to the market, we have gone to large international companies with factories in a few countries and then shipping the final product thousands of miles across the globe to markets everywhere as finished products whereas many years ago that would have been the raw materials being shipped.
In essence, I do think that man's greed, and in particular a few men with even bigger ambitions and greed have lead us to where we now find our ourselves, living in a corrupt environment, creating massive mountains of waste, be it plastic, E-waste etc that we don't know what to do with it and are slowly but surely chocking the earth to death, witness the global warming. It all has roads leading back to greed.
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