Amazon did not "invent" home delivery [View all]
Younger people fell in love with the idea, and older folks re-embraced it. That's why Amazon succeeded.
Home delivery used to be the norm.
Early Boomers were probably children when it started to end, but people living in my grandparents' era were delivered to..
Grocers delivered, and if necessary, most neighborhoods had a Mom & Pop "store" in the downstairs front room of their house where you could get some canned foods/spices/candies.
There was a bread truck that made scheduled deliveries and also sold from the truck.
Pharmacies delivered. Doctors made house calls.
Milk, cheese, butter was delivered.
Ice Cream was delivered, and of course, there was "the ice cream man" who sold it individually from his truck.
People ordered from Sears, Penneys and Mongomery Wards catalogs and their merchandise was sent to the closest store or was delivered through the mail
People living in larger cities had meals delivered from take out places.
Back then people only had one car (if they even had a car) so deliveries made sense. Actual in-person shopping was an event. "going downtown" was a special day involving window-shopping, real shopping, and eating at a restaurant.
Produce was often grown in back yards or people knew someone who grew stuff.
Post-WWII advertising agencies (Think Mad Men) created the NEED for bigger, better, shinier, and just MORE MORE MORE.
We were told that we DESERVED better. Fattened up by the war machine, our factories were raring to go and with the rest of the world in shambles, we had "the only show in town"..
We had become consumers, and we've never stopped, until recently.
It will be interesting to see how eager people are to go back to the way things were recent;y, or how many will have had enough time to start to back off the mega consumption and may have learned to appreciate the unscheduled free time. Maybe also they will put more value on what they have instead of what new shiny thing they "want".
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