People who own a standalone GPS

As fewer Americans have owned standalone GPS devices, the US Postal Service has delivered more packages, a correlation that exists primarily because the smartphone that killed the GPS also created the e-commerce infrastructure that buried the postal service in cardboard. The correlation is -0.956 across sixteen years, which is the kind of inverse relationship that tells a surprisingly coherent story if you know where to look. The GPS said turn left. The economy turned to online shopping. The mailman has been carrying boxes ever since.

Standalone GPS ownership declined from about 30 percent of households to under 10 percent as Google Maps and Apple Maps made dedicated devices redundant. USPS package volume, meanwhile, surged from about 3.1 billion parcels in 2007 to over 7.3 billion by 2022, driven by the e-commerce explosion that turned every American home into a delivery endpoint. The smartphone is the common thread: it killed the GPS by absorbing its function, and it powered the package boom by making it possible to order anything from anywhere with a tap. Amazon alone accounts for a significant share of USPS's package growth, and Amazon's app runs on the same phones that made Garmin obsolete.

Sixteen years of GPS devices declining and packages increasing is one of the cleaner stories on this site: the smartphone replaced the one and created the other, and the postal service absorbed the consequences. The GPS is gone, the packages keep coming, and the mailman's truck is heavier than ever. Navigation is free now. Delivery is not.