It's been æons since I've mailed a letter, so I decided to look up the current lettermail rate on canadapost.ca. Fifty-two cents. (Hmm, I have pristine memories of stamps in the 30-cent range; o the bygone days.) To my brief surprise, I noticed that the CPC solicits the customer to "buy stamps online." Hmm; makes sense these days I guess. I wondered what surcharges would be applied to such an order but quickly figured that of course, delivery's gotta be free – it's the postal service, right?

Nope... two bucks. And that's for "standard delivery (3-8 business days)." Three to eight business days; i.e. up to a week and a half?! (One can also opt to pay five bucks for "express" three-business-day delivery. Wowee.) What an endorsement for their own service. In contrast it would take mere minutes to walk to the damn store, get some fresh air, and spend a toonie on something else.

I ordered some light bulbs from homedepot.ca last week because I was feeling lazy and also happened to be at my computer when I read about their "free shipping for online orders" promotion. Seemed like a genius occasion to me; I could replace some fading bulbs around here that otherwise wouldn't be tended to for more distant weeks. Well, by the time my bulbs arrived over a week later – shipped casually by UPS all the way from Concord, Ontario – one of them was non-functional, and the wait had mitigated what savings I foolishly thought I'd gained.

Far more waste was generated here than had I simply headed down to a store: excess packaging, shipping costs which likely outstripped the profit margin on the items I ordered, and the fuel consumption and incident pollution created by hauling these items fully across the country rather than from a local warehouse around here.