Why is it called "last mile" if the delivery distance is often more than one mile?

The "last mile" name comes from telecommunications, not from a literal distance measurement. In telecom, the final cable connecting a subscriber's premises to the exchange was called the "last mile" regardless of physical length — it was the final individual-serving segment whose infrastructure cost could only be amortized over one subscriber, unlike the main network trunk shared across thousands. Supply chain logistics adopted the same term to describe the same economic structure: the final delivery leg serves one recipient per stop rather than a consolidated bulk movement, creating a fundamentally different and more expensive cost profile regardless of the actual distance covered.