I was amazed at a recent CSX Advert claiming that their freight trains move a ton of freight up to 423 miles on a single gallon of fuel.

Startling figures in anyone’s book. Let’s face it, we’ve all seen those freight trains – I was recently sitting in my car waiting for one to go by at the Flagstaff crossing – the train took 7 minutes from front to end!

And what was it full of? Not crude oil, not live stock, not coal. It was full of orders for consumer electronics made over the internet by the likes of you and me.

So I wondered how much more fuel efficient is this compared to traveling to your local mall on a Saturday afternoon?

How far do you need to go to get that iPhone

Most consumers wouldn’t think twice about driving to the mall to pick up the latest iPhone. However, most malls over the past few decades have strategically placed themselves equidistance between metropolitan areas to boast a greater demographic density to their target audience – big name retailers such as Macys, JC Penney, GameStop, Victoria Secrets and so on. The downside of course is that you normally have to travel 20 – 30 miles to your nearest one. By today’s petrol prices, this could cost you $10 in fuel, based on an average traffic fuel efficiency of 15mpg.

Internet Shipping Costs will soon become a thing of the past

The shipping charge is a fly in the ointment for most of us when buying on the internet. However, the internet is becoming much more competitive, so much so that a growing number of internet stores now offer free shipping as standard.

So how can Internet stores charge less than the stores in your local mall? For starters, the internet store is not being charged up to $150,000 a year for a paltry 1,500 square feet of retail space - the average going rent for a second tear suburban mall. In addition, most malls also take up to a 15% levy once gross sales reach a certain figure. Yes, that’s gross, not net! Then there’s staffing costs to consider. A warehouse needs 4 times less staff to process the same amount of orders. Meanwhile an internet store is renting warehouse space at a tiny fraction of their costs – a saving which should go straight into your wallet.

The bottom line is that the electronics store in your local mall needs to charge you a premium just to break even and relies on the ‘shopping experience’ to get you to drive to the mall in the first place.

A friend of mine recently drove his 4×4 to the mall to by himself a Apple iPhone, the holy grail of consumer products. On returning home with his new iPhone after 40 minutes in traffic and $9 in petrol he discovered the same iPhone $45 cheaper on Amazon along with free shipping.

Being greener gives you more leisure time too.

But forget about the money, the petrol and the environment you’re saving for a moment, consider the precious leisure time you wasted driving to the mall in the first place – time you could have spent playing baseball with the kids, strolling in the park, playing tennis – come on – there’s a lot you could have been doing on a Saturday afternoon.

Getting back to the fuel efficiency of a freight train compared with the car. The train has to travel maybe 3000 miles cross states to get products to you – surely that counts for something? Well the freight train is also delivering goods to the shopping mall which you’ll be traveling to in your car, and an extra ton of internet freight to a cargo train is like a newspaper sitting in the back of your Toyota. The only excess fuel being used is your car’s when you buy it from the mall.

But what about the UPS vans? Good point – these vans seem to be everywhere these days, and for good reason – most of their deliveries are solely dependent on the rise of internet sales. But there’s one thing you may not have considered about these vehicles: 70% are either hybrids or run on ethanol and make an average of 50 deliveries in a single trip. They also calculate the most fuel efficient route because as you’d guess, less fuel costs equals more profit to their shareholders.

Bottom line - it’s about time us consumers started to think more about how we make our purchases. Consider 30 million Americans on an average Saturday afternoon driving to the mall to get something they could have bought over the internet.

For me it’s a no brainer: buy your iPhone on the internet and you’ll help to save trillions of tons in Carbon emissions, save money, and importantly, save your precious leisure time, which these days is more valuable than gold dust.