Amazon delivery lockers increase the physical disorder of a city by making shoppers do the final leg of the journey.
Amazon delivery routes behave like gas molecules governed by the laws of statistical mechanics. Traditional home delivery concentrates the work within a single carrier's highly optimized path. Centralized lockers reduce the carrier's burden and lower the complexity of the driver's manifest. Total system entropy actually rises because the burden of transport shifts to the individual consumer. This mathematical shift means companies are not creating efficiency, they are simply hiding the cost of labor. Consumers pay for this hidden inefficiency through their own fuel, time, and carbon footprint.
On the Entropy in Last-Mile Logistics
arXiv · 2605.00008
Last-mile logistics (LML) is characterized by high fragmentation, yet existing research treats this as an exogenous constraint rather than a quantifiable and optimizable system property. This paper introduces a framework for measuring LML complexity using structural entropy, derived from Boltzmann's statistical mechanics. Unlike traditional KPIs such as distance or cost, structural entropy quantifies the cardinality of the configuration space, providing a diagnostic of inherent system disorder.