As I see it, if I drive to target, buy 20 pounds of stuff, and drive home, I actually burned fuel to move a car many miles, both ways, to get that 20 pounds of stuff to my home. The weight of my car, myself, and the stuff in my car dwarfs the weight of what I’ve purchased..

If I buy the same stuff online, it comes to my door in a truck that’s specialized for efficient delivery of packages. It likely left a delivery facility that morning full, so the energy burned by that truck throughout the day can be devided among all of the packages that delivery truck delivered throughout the day.

This isn’t new thinking, but it is fairly difficult to quantify. One attempt by MindClick GSM outlined on TriplePundit came up with the following perspective on how the numbers play out during holiday shopping:

The researchers took these numbers and ran with them, calculating that the negative environmental impact of an in-store purchase made on Black Friday is 50 times that of an online purchase made on Cyber Monday. And in more general terms, it found that carbon emissions related to purchasing an item inside a store represents an increase of more than 15 times that of an online purchase.

There are a ton of variables at play here, including:

How much stuff did you buy in a physical shopping trip?
How far did you drive to do it?
Did you make additional stops to make your trip more efficient?
How efficient is your vehicle?

I’m not looking at how far items were shipped to you since I’m assuming that most of the crap one buys travels roughly the same distance, outside of the last few miles, whether you buy it locally or online.

Cool-Companies runs the numbers as well, looking at what’s involved in getting a book to your house. Interestingly, the point out that it takes a boatload more energy to climate control a retail store than it does to store books in a warehouse.

We calculated the ratio of building energy per book sold in traditional bookstores versus on-line retailer Amazon.com to be 16-to-1.

Then, they break down the transportation costs, pointing out that it may, at least in some cases, be less carbon intensive to toss a book on a plane, then truck, versus driving across town (and back) to transport a pound of goods to your home.

And contrary to what most people think, Internet shopping uses less energy to get a package to your house: Shipping 10 pounds of packages by overnight air – the most energy-intensive delivery -uses 40 percent less fuel than driving roundtrip to the mall. Shipping by truck saves 90 percent.

For more on this, check out the carbon impact scenarios Cool-Companies offers for planes, trains, and automobiles.

Personally, while I try to make a positive environmental impact when I can, my bigger motivators, in this case, are convenience and cost. I can buy stuff faster, and often cheaper, online than I can buy heading to a physical store. Commodity products such as, well, pretty much everything at Target, can be found online for cheaper (including, maybe, at Target.com if they ever get their act together).

If buying stuff while sitting on my couch is better for the environment, great. That’s one more excuse to avoid acres and acres of blacktop parking lots.

Target has been getting some national attention over this due to Emmer’s horrendous political record on GLBT issues. The Targeting GLBT blog is doing a great job rolling up the blowback. It sure looks like Target has receive more than $150,000 worth of negative publicity in over their $150,000 investment in political ads for Emmer.

Now that Best Buy has threw some money into MNForward as well, where should people who are not interested in supporting Target or Best Buy turn to buy household items and electronics? David Brauer brainstormed Amazon.com:

I think Brauer’s onto something there. In fact, I’m already there. I looked up my historical transactions at Target via my Mint.com account and found out that I’ve spent a whopping $151.88 at Target over the past 2.5 years.

Over that same time period, I had no credit card transactions at Best Buy, but I do remember using a gift card someone gave me.

Over the same time period, I’ve spent $22,479.07 at Amazon. How? Amazon is where I buy nearly all of my electronics. I buy granola bars, quinoa, bike supplies, travel gear, lots of books, laundry detergent, toilet paper, napkins, shavers, deodorant, crackers, toothpaste, hardware supplies, etc. Nearly everything I could buy at Target or Best Buy outside of soda. Nearly all of it ships to me for free in 2 days as an Amazon Prime member, which is clearly worth it based on how much I buy from them. (By the way, you can become an Amazon Prime member for free if you’re a student with a .edu email address. Seriously, do that now.)

Regarding Amazon’s political contributions, see for yourself at Open Secrets. And, here are the numbers for Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos.

Regarding the environmental impact, I don’t think it’s as large as Brauer seems to think. Think about this: If I buy something from Target, it makes its way all the way to the Target store via a combination of boats, trains, and trucks from all over the world. But then I use my car to make a 5 mile round trip to Target to move a few pounds of product the last few miles to my home. When I buy from Amazon, last few miles of delivery are via UPS or USPS delivery trucks that have much better products to vehicle weight ratios, which makes me think that the environmental cost of purchasing from Amazon may actually be less than Target or Best Buy. (I’d love to see more data on this theory.)

Either way, it’s good to know that there is at least one good alternative to Target and Best Buy for those who’d choose to spend their money elsewhere for a variety of reasons. For me, the switch to Amazon was due to convenience (I immediately buy stuff when I need it from my computer or phone, which saves time), price (Amazon is very competitive AND I only buy what I need rather than fill my cart with impulse buys), and customer service (I’d rather sample reviews sorted by quality on Amazon than talk to a random member of the Blue Shirt Nation).

Target and Best Buy’s moves into union busting, gay bashing, xenophobic politics isn’t what moved me away from these two retailers, but it certainly reinforces that I’ve made the right decision for myself.

Twice as many sports fan watches to sports watches? Do Americans prefer to watch rather than participate in sports? Based on the best seller lists, it seems like this skews to the South, with many of Amazon’s best selling sports fan watches tying to NASCAR, the Dallas Cowboy’s, or the U of Texas.

1. Go to Bing.com and join their Cashback program.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Bing, it’s the recently rebranded search engine owned by Microsoft. As a marketing deal, they’re running a Cashback program where you can receive rebates on items purchased on popular websites after clicking through from select ads on Bing.

2. Search for products on Bing. One suggested search is for “Nintendo Wii“.

3. Click the Bing Cashback ad for Ebay. Here is an example of what the ads look like:

At Ebay, you should see something like the following in the header:

4. Search for gift cards on Ebay. You’ll then need to click to filter for BuyItNow gift cards because they’re only offering CashBack bonuses on fixed rate items and not auctions.

5. Buy buy buy. You’re limited to $2500 in annual cashback savings, but you could stock up on, say, $25,000 in gift cards for retailers you plan to shop with anyway and call it a year.

It’s worth noting that this has caused some inflation in the gift card market. You’ll often see gift cards selling for above face value, so you may need to pay, say, $105 for a $100 gift card, which would net out to costing you $90-$95 each (still a great deal).

Clearly, a book with the subtitle, “How the World’s Hottest Retailer Hit a Bull’s-Eye” is going to present the company favorably at every opportunity.

So far, the writing has come across as elitist and mean to me. For example,

“Wal-Mart, which is the nation’s largest seller of apparel, may have Target in its crosshairs, but for the down-home discounter to actually compete on Target’s turf would take a cultural and image revolution – one that would risk alienating its traditional customers, who are far more interested in saving hard-earned money on toilet paper and snack food than seeking a Mossimo tee to pair with Armani slacks, or a Michael Graves toaster to complement a stainless steel Sub-Zero refrigerator.”

The author does seem to capture the Target culture with that spin.

In my opinion, Target’s specialty is their ability run up women’s Target credit cards by convincing them to measure their self-worth based on whether their napkins are in season, or what their can opener says about them as a person, rather than focusing on saving a few bucks on household staples.