In the US, most people don't their shopping near the office. In Renton (commute into Seattle), it was commute to and from, then optionally local grocery stores to and from. WFH has dramatically reduced our driving which is a bonus over time saved.

I could imagine Amazon incentivizing reusable containers on their own TBH. If I was living in a house and not an apartment, I could easily imagine putting the Amazon bins back out so the next time I get a delivery, they take those, and we are constantly cycling bins back and forth.

Even environment aside, from a purely self-interested perspective, I would much prefer it to dealing with the recycling Amazon deliveries entail.

That idea is intriguing but brings up a lot of questions. If I live out in the middle of nowhere, order something but take a long time to open it, when does the Amazon truck come back to take the packaging? If there's a million of us procrastinators, is it really that much better than normal centralized garbage collection? Milk bottle delivery and collection only worked because the product naturally had a time limit, and once home refrigeration took off, the practice went away because people didn't consume on the same schedule.

FWIW most Amazon packages I get nowadays are just heavy paper anyways.

In fairness, Amazon does seem to have improved in this regard. There's less plastic and fewer comically oversized boxes.

Amazon already delivers to the house next door to yours. The incremental cost of an extra stop is near zero. The efficiency of home delivery vastly exceeds people going to the shops themselves, even if they are stopping at multiple shops.

Anything to avoid walkable neighborhoods, naturally.