I just finished reading (well, listening to—that’s why I call these “semi-reviews”) Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door—Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy, by Wall Street Journal technology writer Christopher Mims.
I thought, initially, that it was mostly about Amazon and the logistics of one- or two-day delivery. Which it is. But it’s also about the whole supply chain and logistics process, from manufacturing to last-mile delivery, using the conceit that we’re following the journey, across that whole chain, of a single device: a USB charger.
There’s a chapter on container shipping (de rigueur in any such book; I’ve seen similar chapters in other books on this cluster of topics), on fulfillment centers and warehouses, on the history of factories and assembly lines touching on Taylorism and Fordism and Amazon’s version of these management philosophies, on last-mile delivery and the UPS and FedEx business models, and more.
It’s a good book, well put-together, mostly avoiding the tendentious narrativization that a lot of books like this end up doing. It frustrates me when an author uses discrete factual observations to tell a story that doesn’t quite hold water. Mims doesn’t do that. Sometimes his opinions come through, but the presentation of ideas is very fair and honest.
I think it’s fair to say that Mims is mostly fine with what he describes here—automation and AI, offshoring, globalization writ large. However, he is not uncritical, and does in particular question Amazon’s commitment to worker safety and general welfare. He doesn’t come across as a shill for big business, nor does he take cheap swipes at corporations. Mostly, he seems genuinely interested in the technology and business models at play.
Most of my thoughts about the book—and, more broadly, the ways in which it made me think—have little to do with Mims himself or any of his (apparent) opinions. Mostly I found myself reacting to the information he presented.
One thing I struggled with a bit was the segment of the book about boats and shipping. It’s kind of shocking to me, I guess, to hear about how dangerous and irreducibly, relentlessly real and physical this work is.
When I wrote a few years ago about a tour of Dulles Airport I got to go on, I recounted the same impression:
Looking at the simple firehouse break room and the cards and badges hanging up, the time clock in the maintenance barn, the array of doodads in the control tower—knowing as I took in each of these things that a normal human error somewhere in the long chain of responsibilities they represented could result in a deadly plane crash—I almost felt as though I’d never worked a day in my life.
That’s what I felt hearing about the global container shipping industry. There’s the silly sailor superstition and the stifling military-style hierarchy, which trigger my “Don’t tell me what to do” impulse. But of course, I understand that my ability to be completely ignorant of these things is a kind of privilege, and that it rests precisely on the fact that other people bear the brunt of it all. I can sit at my desk, in front of my laptop, and declare my opinions like a pope issuing an encyclical, because there are no stakes and no real-world impact, in the end. We need them on that boat.
Mims recounts that harbor pilots (I think he calls them “shore captains,” but I might be misremembering)—the land-based seamen who board container ships a bit out at sea and guide them to port—have a one in 20 chance of dying in service.
He gives another, more mundane factoid: inexpensive fish is caught in the United States, frozen, shipped to China to be defrosted and filleted, refrozen and shipped back to the United States, and then sold as frozen fish. He notes how cheap this is, partly because of the difference in labor cost, and partly because of how cheap container shipping is in general. The scale and volume of the enterprise is so massive that the marginal cost of shipping one more unit approaches zero.
Mims seems somewhat in awe of this all. I find it slightly horrifying and repulsive. Is it worth killing one in 20 maritime pilots so we can have cheap crappy electronics from East Asia? Is it worth eating twice-frozen fish to shave a little money off the price? Is it worth completely divorcing production and consumption, turning the citizens of the developed world into consumers with no conception of how or why or where the things we consume even exist?
Yes, it is all a logistical wonder, a marvel of engineering, one of the pinnacles of human invention. But what’s the point, in the end? Isn’t it nuts? And is it even true, in the end? How could it possibly cost less to send these things multiple times around the world? What is not being counted? What is not being valued?
Part of my issue with these accounts of free trade and globalization is the way they slip into the mode of describing bare reality. There is little discussion or analysis of the underlying assumptions which go into this system of global trade. The twice-frozen fish is presented not as a choice, but as a fact, as unassailable as gravity. The perspective of the free trade and globalization advocates is presented not as a perspective at all. They have no values, or ideas, or desires; they have no actual point of view. Only the skeptics have values, or ideas, or desires, or points of view. The free traders are evolutionary biologists, and the protectionists are creationists.
I should be clear that I am not against free trade or globalization. But nonetheless I don’t believe these are necessarily inevitable, much less mere descriptions of reality. Of course there is some ultimate viewpoint or value set behind this system. Of course valuing absolute rock-bottom prices over anything else is precisely that: a value. An idea. This is not just the simple economics of supply and demand and competition. Global trade is governed by incomprehensible thickets of regulation, and whatever those rules end up happening to be, and whatever outcome they lead to, is in no way the only possible rule set or outcome.
And of course, there are the questions of what cultures and citizenries value. The phenomenon of the double-frozen fish probably exists in the food supplies of all developed countries, but I’d be willing to bet the United States avails itself of these products to a greater extent. We simply don’t value food as highly. Yes, that process creates a cheap, affordable protein, but it also betrays our absence of a commitment to wholesome food for everyone, rather than as a luxury. Once again, a particular and Ameri-centric viewpoint is disguised as bare analysis.
I actually find my own reaction to this part of the book curious. It made me feel like the college environmentalist I used to be: just make do with less, pay more for better stuff made closer to home, embrace an anti-consumerist localism. Of course this is idealistic, but it looks more attractive to me compared to this strange modern globalized world where the only true value is cheap stuff at any cost.
And yet, another book I “semi-reviewed”—Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves—presented this kind of simple-environmentalist critique of the processed, refrigerated food supply. And…I found my reaction to that book to be opposite to its point of view. I found myself thinking, Come on, refrigeration is awesome! Convenience foods are great for busy families! What are you talking about, people can’t organize their fridges or control their food waste? You elitist environmentalists think the common people are morons, don’t you?
Then I read this book, which is much more positive towards modern technology and supply chains, and I sound like the author of that previous book! Am I just oppositional, or are there merits to both of these views which could be harmonized into a healthier and less passive approach to using technology overall?
In a recent link roundup, I featured an article about the Amish approach to technology, which I found illuminating. It basically argues that the Amish are not anti-technology, but that they’re jealous of their ability to use it intentionally, in a limited, useful way, rather than be passively shaped or controlled by it.
So I wonder whether something like the Amish approach is possible with globalization and the global consumer world it has produced. Not that we could “opt out” and pull up the drawbridges, but whether politics, policy, and values could shape these economic processes more than they do? Is economics really just reality, or is it, like the smartphone, a powerful tool which is all too easy to grant even more power?
I took a class on global trade in grad school, with a former United States Trade Representative who worked under George W. Bush. I asked her this question: can a country choose to just not fully participate in this? Her answer was basically, no. These are just forces, and there’s no other option. I suppose I find that difficult to believe.
Another part of the book I found particularly interesting was the section on Fordism and Taylorism, and the ruthlessness of efficiency and optimization they applied to our jobs and work. And, as Mims notes, even to our homes and domestic lives. Taylor’s ideas were applied to home kitchens and other domestic situations, for example, such that efficiency became a very self-conscious and explicit goal of any workflow.
Mims presents this not as exactly bad, but maybe as a bit unfortunate. He at least implies that the development of these ideas should be seen as a series of implicit choices about work and workers that were made at a point in time, and not just an inherent, obvious way of looking at tasks or workspaces. This willingness to interrogate a now-universal idea runs a bit counter to Mims’s less inquisitive presentation of the global shipping and trade system.
I found this interesting, and in fact I’m a bit more sanguine about the colonization of these efficiency ideas over domestic life than Mims seems to be. It may be true that Taylorism is the water we swim in with regard to thinking about processes, logistics, workflows—or even thinking of household tasks as “workflows” at all, which Mims suggests is itself a Taylorist innovation. But it struck me that this is a useful way to think about the bundle of tasks that fall under the umbrella of “housework” or domestic work.
There are some things which should be aggressively, consciously “Taylorized”: doing the laundry, loading and unloading the dishwasher, parallelizing heating up a pan for eggs while brewing morning coffee while putting away the pots and pans from the previous night. Every second, every discrete step, every point at which a thing must be touched or retrieved or replaced—every bit of simplification you can squeeze out of these processes—makes them easier to autopilot and harder to screw up.1
But there are things which should not be Taylorized; cooking, which can be a joy, with a delightful human and social element; gardening; spending time together. These are not “tasks” in the same way that doing laundry or dishes are. And I found that hearing these ideas spelled out helped me to think explicitly of that distinction; to appreciate better which things should be slow and relaxing, which exist for their own sake, where the work is the point, where I might be missing out on something by trying to optimize them too much; and which have no emotional or intellectual content, and should be aggressively simplified.
And in fact, Mims notes, in his section on fulfillment centers, that focusing too much on efficiency can actually reduce productivity. These are not, he notes, the same thing. Workers can become demoralized and burned out, working more or less like machines all day. They can figure out what precisely is being measured, and find ways to cut corners that the efficiency metrics cannot see, which represents a decrease in the quality of the work overall. Mims defends the human element of work even as he presents automation as more or less welcome.
The book is too old, published in late 2021 and largely centered on the pandemic-era boom in e-commerce, to talk much about consumer-level AI. But the same distinction could be drawn with AI chat models: as useful tools to assist with certain tasks, but as pointless or harmful shortcuts for worthwhile effort. Again, where each person would draw that line might be different, but thinking explicitly of that distinction is useful.
There’s more in the book that I found interesting, mostly just in terms of how opaque the workings of the modern economy are, and how much raw human effort goes into making e-commerce and delivery function. I don’t imagine that any of this will go away. But in seeing it laid bare, I do hope it would be possible to slow it down.
Related Reading:
Sacramentalism and Consumerism
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Here’s a random, low-stakes example: I brew coffee in the morning with 500ml of water. I only have a jar with clear markings that goes to 300ml. So every morning I’ve been measuring 300 and then 200, for 500. I finally decided to just buy a glass pitcher that goes to 500, so I could pour the water with one instead of two pours.
This actually reduces the number of discrete steps from 11 (grab jar, turn on faucet, fill correctly, turn off faucet, open coffee maker tank, pour into tank, turn on faucet, fill correctly, turn off faucet, pour into tank, close coffee maker tank) to seven (grab jar, turn on faucet, fill correctly, turn off faucet, open coffee maker tank, pour into tank, close coffee maker tank).
This might sound neurotic, but if you can reduce the steps required to complete a whole assortment of tasks by 30-40 percent, that’s a big difference. And in the case of something like having to pour water twice, it reduces the chance of spilling the water, which then leads to another whole series of steps to clean up.
Consider this perspective, too. What if we turn around the question for the consumer: “Is it worth eating twice-frozen fish to shave a little money off the price?” to one for the producer: “Is it worth making twice-frozen fish to boost the profits for me and my shareholders?” Suppose for example that the invisible hand of the market says I can wholesale my frozen fish sticks for $8 a pound. If I make them in the U.S. the high cost of labor and infrastructure will cost me $6 a pound. If I make them in a foreign country, cheap labor and infrastructure combined with inexpensive shipping will only cost me $4 a pound.
While recognizing that the “consumer is king,” I would like to see the producers share in the moral and ethical choices that you identify.
What I’m noticing in our cheap consumer goods world is how everything looks the same. There’s so much of it but it’s all similar. That’s efficiency at work. It’s much easier to configure factories to make the same base and just add extras. So you get Oreos in 20 flavors or stacks of printed T-shirts or streaming shows that are so similar that you aren’t sure if you already watched them. We have more than we can ever consume but no one seems to be slowing down partly because this is what the great engine of the world runs on.