Delivery economy is changing way we live and do business

Last updated: 2024/12/13 at 1:01 PM

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E-commerce is projected to account for almost 12 per cent of all retail sales in Canada this year, more than $112 billion in total. Though the pandemic kickstarted the online sales phenomenon, the trend has stuck and is growing rapidly, affecting everything from traffic congestion to city planning to waste disposal.

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In The Delivery Economy, a special Down to Business podcast series, The Financial Post’s Gabe Friedman dives deep into e-commerce and how it has changed the way we live and do business, interviewing entrepreneurs, front-line workers and experts on the opportunities and challenges it presents

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In the first episode of The Delivery Economy, host Gabe Friedman explores the astonishing economics of e-commerce with the CEOs of two Canadian companies.

Sylvia Ng discusses her decision to leave Shopify Inc and found ReturnBear in 2021 as she watched a growing number of companies struggle with the high level of returns from online sales; and Mark Ang explains how his decision to co-found a self-storage company in 2017 inadvertently set him up to build the logistics infrastructure and software that allows the largest brands in the world to sell goods online.

In episode two of The Delivery Economy, Friedman speaks with Ivan Waissbluth. Fed up with traffic in Toronto, Waissbluth co-founded NRBI, which has been building a rapidly growing fleet of electric cargo bikes to deliver goods around the city’s dense core. Then a bike courier with decades of experiences tells Gabe about what it’s like to ride a bike around the city, and how conditions have changed for bike messengers in the past 30 years.

In the final episode of The Delivery Economy, Clarence Woudsma, a professor at the University of Waterloo’s School of Planning, joins Gabe to explain how e-commerce is evolving and the trends that may lie ahead, from growth markets such as grocery to the shifting labour landscape.