Technology

First, things are a lot more compact here. It takes me five to seven minutes to reach the nearest local supermarket on foot. That makes it a lot easier to shop at higher frequency but lower load - good exercise too. Of course, that won't work for larger or special items. For larger loads, locally in Denmark, we've got these wonderful things. Obviously, nobody's going to transport a new fridge or a 1-tonne pallet of wood briquettes on one of those. For that sort of thing, almost all retailers of such things do delivery. It's more efficient. Instead of everybody having to own their own trucks that are used (relatively) infrequently, stores or manufacturers either independently maintain vehicles that are in constant use or out-source that service to companies specializing in handling logistics. It uses less resources for one company to handle maintenance of say, five vehicles servicing the needs of a hundred customers than for all those 100 customers to all have to own their own vehicles with the same capacity.