Sustainable Planet

Our Ambiguous Relationship with Amazon’s Subscribe & Save

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Businesses have long been using subscriptions as a strategy to keep customers coming back with regularity. Amazon latched onto this notion to compete with its brick-and-mortar competitors, launching its Subscribe & Save program in 2007. Jorden and Kimberly consider how a home delivery business model sustainably stacks up against in-store shopping.

Key Topics Jorden and Kimberly discuss include:

  • What newspapers, milkmen, and fruit have in common
  • To what extent Subscribe & Save can be ‘Set and Forget’ and a whole lot of other considerations about using this service
  • How the packaging and transportation makes or breaks it
  • The blessing and curse of Subscribe & Save for small businesses
  • To buy (and possibly return?) or not to buy: The innovative technologies that help customers better decide
  • How market-based incentives can encourage corporate sustainability practices and induce ‘coercive memetics’ in industry
  • Whether Amazon’s business model beats the brick-and-mortar stores on the sustainability bottom line


    • Recommended Resources

    • MIT’s Real Estate Innovation Lab 2021 report
    • Amazon’s 2024 Sustainability Report
    • For anyone who isn’t aware of the history of the ice industry in the U.S., it’s quite fascinating (to nerds like Kimberly, anyway)
    • It wasn’t Subscribe & Save, but it was the first Internet sale ever recorded
      • ...more
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      Sustainable PlanetBy Kimberly Weir