Alexander Torrey lived much of his adult life following the same patterns of consumption that many other city dwellers do. When a household staple like hand soap or laundry detergent runs out, he’d place an order online and end up with a pile of cardboard boxes the size of his kitchen table at the end of the month.

“I started to think, ‘OK, there are 500 other people that live in this apartment building in Center City, and we all use hand soap, and we’re all probably throwing away these empty plastic bottles that have absolutely nothing wrong with them when they run out,” he said. “And a lot of us end up placing an order on Amazon or some other site and these packages just come in throughout the month. You don’t have to have an operations P.hD. to see that’s not working.”

The current Wharton School MBA candidate figured instead, there ought to be a closed loop system that could deliver all the household items someone might need, but in a way that could cut down on the wastefulness of traditional mail-in delivery. It could also eliminate some of the decision fatigue of having hundreds of brands of toothpaste or shampoo to choose from, he said.

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