But this is literally how supermarkets provided cheaper prices than the local shops we all used to have. Customers swallow the external costs of last-mile transportation by driving to the business’s warehouse. They swallow the costs of service staff by serving themselves. You’re just describing their whole business model which, let’s not forget, we as a nation gleefully latched onto when it became available, forcing local grocers to close.

Well, yes. He works for the oil industry

Old man here… The first online bubble was probably the dot.com bubble of the late 90s, when lots of people first went “This internet thing is amazing and we’re all going to make millions!” I remember boo.com being one of the first high-profile crashes, but pretty soon a lot of that first wave of internet retail businesses folded, with notable exceptions like Amazon, of course.

It would be interesting to do a proper comparative lifecycle analysis. Treating, pumping and heating water isn’t zero-carbon (especially if you run it for a while waiting for it to get up to temperature) and I’d be curious to know when is the break-even point that the carbon costs of a bidet beat a few sheets of paper