13 ms·

Inefficient, but Smart

163 points by oftenwrong 6y ago

hogFeast 6y ago
Life definitely is easier when there is a large underclass of disenfranchised poor people willing to do anything. Why has no-one considered this before? (On a serious note, this is basically a meme at this point. Someone sees a thing, blames it on corporate greed. You may be a worker in a big-box store but you will make more money, you take less risk, and you get the opportunity to retire with some dignity rather than work yourself into a coffin. Poverty tourism is great fun but it is quite tragic when you see other people suffering and think there is nobility in that.)
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  I'm just a tourist, but from what I can tell, Ecuador has done a fabulous job of righting its ship economically and politically over the last 20 years. There is still a "large underclass of disenfranchised poor" because of Venezualen refugees though.
  - hogFeast 6y ago
    Their govt is very close to default right now. The only thing that has saved Ecuador was Correra not managing to bind his successor to his policies. Correra borrowed a ton of money, gave it out to win elections, and left the people with the bill. I am not sure how this can be called a success (it is true that lots of people think Ecuador is successful because they borrowed a ton of money and gave it out...this hasn't created a wealth, it has just created massive debt that can't be repaid).
- oftenwrong 6y ago
  That strikes me as an uncharitable reading of this article. The guys transporting appliances in a pickup truck are, in some sense, forced to do that to survive. However, the author's point concerns the opportunity they are capitalising on. In this environment, one can start an appliance transport business with a truck and some strong men. The environment of the USA has many more barriers to entry, and that influences the types of enterprises that exist there.
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    In the US, the truck and strong men exist, one just has to know where the local "day labour" hangout may be.
    - oftenwrong 6y ago
      Those sorts of operations are generally not compliant with regulations. This would seem to reinforce the parent's point. While it is great to have low barriers to entry, it is not so great to sacrifice worker protections, and to depend on people living in precarious financial situations.
  - ff317 6y ago
    They're inextricably linked, though. It's always much easier to start a small business in a relatively-unregulated environment, but that's because nearly zero thought or protection is being given to the drivers' or loaders' living wages, healthcare, eventual retirement, actual health (as in long-term occupational stress on the body), or even ability to be compensated for severe workplace injuries. All of the things we privileged Americans complain about in cases like Amazon's treatment of their warehouse and shipping workers are orders of magnitude worse, in practice, for most of these opportunistic workers in Ecuador.
    - oftenwrong 6y ago
      That's a good point. I suppose in countries like the US there is already a middle ground in play: small businesses are often exempt from certain onerous regulations.
    - codeadict 6y ago
      I lived in Ecuador, all these people will have retirement and healthcare thru the IES(https://www.iess.gob.ec/ https://www.iess.gob.ec/), equivalent to the US Social Security. It's not a perfect system but neither is US retirement if you don't have 401k or some kind of private retirement plan, the healthcare could be slow sometimes and you spend 30 mins to an hour to see the doctor but it works.
- amadeusw 6y ago
  You might have misunderstood the author. The author showed us that you can have an efficient system without the vertically integrated middleman corporate structure. He described how it is a novelty and runs differently than what he's used to, but it is the natural course of business in many parts of the world. He did not participate in poverty tourism and Ecuadorians are not disenfranchised poor people just because they don't follow the lifestyle that you're used to.
  - cameldrv 6y ago
    I think that you misunderstand HogFeast. The author drops in to town with American style money. The people who are serving him, for example, driving the furniture delivery pickup truck, are all almost certainly working for very little money. The convenience he experiences is possible because there are a bunch of underemployed drivers with pickup trucks all waiting for someone to buy furniture. Then they drive across town and come right back. The IKEA model would be to load up a truck at a distribution center, have a preplanned route, and a big truck, and knock out a whole bunch of deliveries at once. This is less convenient for the customer, because they don't get instant gratification, and they have to wait at home for the delivery in some 4 hour window. On the other hand, it's much more efficient for the delivery company, because they're probably delivering about 4x as much furniture per driver per day. That will lead to some combination of better wages for the driver, cheaper delivery, or more profit for the furniture company. You certainly could call up a moving company, have them come to IKEA with you, load up the furniture, and take it home, but it would cost a lot more than what he's paying in Ecuador. The reason is that the driver in Ecuador doesn't expect to make very much money by the standards of the author's western salary.
    - titanomachy 6y ago
      "That will lead to some combination of better wages for the driver, cheaper delivery, or more profit for the furniture company." Realistically: the driver will be paid close to minimum wage because he doesn't have any rare skills, and the customer will be charged as much as possible. The owners of the company will probably get decent return on their capital, though.
oftenwrong 6y ago
Here's a photo essay that is somewhat focused on the same subject: https://granolashotgun.com/2019/07/22/the-show-horse-and-the-work-horse/ https://granolashotgun.com/2019/07/22/the-show-horse-and-the... It was also discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20497711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20497711
mc32 6y ago
The biggest difference is bureaucracy and control/power it exerts. They have less of it, we have more of it. They may seem chaotic, but they are more agile because there is no (or little) bureaucracy. In the US things are standardized and predictable but at the cost of inefficient bureaucracy. Over there they have inefficiency of variability. Neither is good or bad, they just work differently and some people like one over the other.
- SQueeeeeL 6y ago
  Not taking a stance is sort of weak. Most of the time bureaucracy exists to crush those who don't have the time and money to play by the rules; think of regulatory capture. Similarly in CS, you'll see a lot of companies with "standardized" overly complicated Java business code so they can hire fresh devs out of college and not actually have to invest a lot of money in hiring and retaining a development team. Something that could be written in 1k lines takes 400k and is actually very difficult to work on, but at least they don't pay any devs over $100,000, which is really what they're optimizing for.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > Neither is good or bad, they just work differently and some people like one over the other. They like one over the other when both work out the same. If some accident happens and the bus explodes, killing the passengers, nearly everybody wants more regulation. People want the standardization and predictability, but they don't want the associated cost and lack of flexibility. That's understandable, but it's also naive.
  - mc32 6y ago
    It really depends on people’s tolerance for the negative results vs positive impact. Drug manufacturing, food product, yes you want more regulation because of impact. Where someone sells furniture and whether or not they have a valid business license much less so. Light regulation means more people are self employed. As economies develop and mature they also develop more regulation. When economies are less i institutional then they have less regulation. We can even see that within the CHOP. If you overregulate an emerging economy you risk suffocating it.
mac01021 6y ago
There are only 10 cities in the USA with populations equal to or greater than the size of Quito's. I suspect, living downtown in any of those, your furniture-buying experience would likely be quite similar to the Quito experience in terms of the size of the vendors visited and the modes of transportation used for people and furniture. You probably wouldn't legally be able to ride in the pickup bed next to your fridge, though.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  Yeah, I was going to say you could absolutely recreate most of this experience in a large US city. They will all have furniture districts, with custom made furniture you can look at and buy. Now, most people don't go to them, because IKEA is cheaper and easier
dvaun 6y ago
This reminds me of an essay on Ribbonfarm about legibility[1] and the construction of cities based on a false sense of order. See [2] for a discussion on this. [1]: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21996377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21996377
ogre_codes 6y ago
The idea here of how you furnish a place in the US doesn't match my personal experience. He does mention Craigslist in passing, but simultaneously dismisses it, but I think that's a bit trite. We bought a ton of fixtures, furniture, and even construction materials from Craigslist, St. Vinnies, and our local Habitat for Humanities and saved a pile of cash. We didn't deal with the whole big-box experience. Furniture is similarly dealt with. Even before Craigslist, there were old fashioned classified adverts and garage sales which weren't as convenient as a single giant market, but gave us options. From the sounds of it, our luck with Craigslist/ second hand sources was just about as good as his was in Ecuador with one out of our many purchases being a bit of a disappointment. Also, this paragraph bothered me: > Here, the process always involves a drive to a big-box store (few of these are convenient via transit, especially if you need to make multiple stops), a credit check, some paperwork to commit to a multi-month payment plan, a scheduled delivery a week or two out, and often some hassle with the delivery company requiring a phone call in which I sit on hold. I don't pay for anything other than my car/ house on monthly payments and nobody should. This article is more a criticism of the US culture of debt rather than looking at what options we genuinely have. We've always had the option to pay in cash and not deal with the financing, it's just a bit less convenient. Likewise, if you are willing to deal with second hand goods, we have the option to get second hand goods, you just have to search a bit harder to find them. Really, the big difference between experiences is the expectation in the US that you will have your own transportation, and that is the real story here in my eyes. In Ecuador public Transportation and casual truck rental works. In the US, it's quite a bit tougher to exist without a reliable car or truck. I also don't understand why he dismisses CL, yard sales, and recycling stores out of hand because they are right up his "Inefficient, but Smart" alley.
- ebg13 6y ago
  > I don't pay for anything other than my car/ house on monthly payments and nobody should You should if there's no additional cost for doing so, because that's a free loan. The same quantity of money a few months down the road will be worth a little less than it is today, so you should give it to them then instead of now when you can do slightly more with it. If you can get either 1X and 2Y now or 1X now and 1Y later, you'd be foolish to do the latter. And if you're thinking "but prices go down, not up", you're both wrong on average and also probably thinking about the exact category of goods (tech gear) that tends to offer interest-free financing.
andrewmutz 6y ago
I think that the differences between the two models can be attributed to the difference between the cost of human labor in the two countries. Everything mentioned in the Ecuador example is labor intensive: private sector busses driving around plentifully, moving laborers just parked next to the furniture market standing around waiting, many small proprietorships in close proximity haggling over prices, etc. The big box model is better in the US where labor is very expensive. The "bazaar" model is better in Ecuador where labor is much cheaper.
- Ar-Curunir 6y ago
  The big box model in the US just outsources the labour involved in producing goods to countries where that labour is cheaper; it's not like any of the big manufacturers of anything manufacture locally in the US.
  - tomrod 6y ago
    Mostly, yes.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  Labour costs are a factor only when trading internationally or across markets. Within a single market, they're not so relevant. In this case, everything is cheaper. The furniture is cheaper, so there's less money to pay people with. So the proportion of costs for labour is about the same. Assume 10% of the cost of the furniture goes to paying people - in the USA that's a larger number than in Ecuador, but still 10%. It doesn't really affect the model. I think the real difference is the consolidation of the supply chain in the US (and other developed economies). In the US, the first "big box" stores were able to squeeze savings from the supply chain and offer lower prices. Customers liked that, bought more, and soon every furniture store had to either go very up-market or adopt the same strategy. A few decades and a lot of acquisitions later, and the entire new furniture market consists of half a dozen completely vertically integrated superstore chains, plus a few up-market retailers. The second-hand market is not so consolidated. The article doesn't say whether they were buying new or second hand furniture. It'd be interesting to find out why the second-hand market isn't subject to the same market forces. How come there isn't a few large second-hand furniture stores?
netcan 6y ago
The "Bureaucracy vs Markets" or "Top-Down vs Bottom-Up" debates are stale. These ideas had purchase a generation ago, when these ideas were proxies for Soviet vs American ideological sparring. That ended 30 years ago. Meanwhile, it seems trite to have these conversations in the abstract... comparing Ecuador to the US. It's not like these ideas haven't penetrated the political realm. They've been paramount in politics, policy and political thought for decades. Local, National & International. This is positively naive: "a swing back toward a messy city and a messy marketplace full of small proprietors—what I've heard called "capitalism with more capitalists"" We need to either find new ideas, and importantly, new terms. At the least, we could mine some new old ideas. How about Khaldun instead of Smith for a change... he was the original anyway.
- Ar-Curunir 6y ago
  Both the Soviet economy and capitalism as we know it are centralized economies; neither are bottom-up planned. Sure, maybe capitalism has some competition between large companies, but that's the extent of it.
JackFr 6y ago
This is not a compelling article. It doesn't even rise to the level of anecdata.
cactus2093 6y ago
> You don't find many small proprietors selling furniture and appliances in the U.S.; it works in cities like Quito because of the physical model of an open-air marketplace with many small retail spaces in close walking proximity to one another. I'm very skeptical of this claim, it seems like the author has the cause and effect backwards. The physical marketplaces don't exist because there just isn't as big of a market for small furniture makers since labor is much more expensive in the US. (Plus as other commenters point out, few metro areas in the US are as large and dense as a city like Quito, so whatever selection there is will also be scaled down proportionally in most areas). My now-wife and I still talk about the time years ago when we first moved in together. We needed a couch and walked into a small boutique furniture store in Brooklyn. They had this oversized, soft leather couch that I still to this day remember as the most comfortable couch I've ever sat on. The salesperson came over and started explaining how these are hand-made by one guy in North Carolina, we can choose the exact leather in the color/style we want and the craftsman will sit down at his bench and begin building the couch specifically for us. It was quite a compelling pitch but the couch was almost $6000 which we couldn't afford, so we thanked her and went over to Macy's where we bought a still very nice leather couch for under $800 to be delivered 3 days later. You can absolutely get a boutique, small-batch, hand-made version of almost anything in the US. But we're so used to the prices that mass-production make possible that the vast majority of people are unwilling to pay for it. One interesting thing though, is with the internet and direct to consumer brands, and improvements in manufacturing (or at least in easier access to cheap manufacturing), it seems like there are more affordably priced alternatives to big box stores now than there have been for the past few decades. It's a little weird to write an article about furniture buying habits in 2020 that ignores the massive rise of companies like Casper, for instance. The last time I bought a couch I bought it on Wayfair, which was incredibly simple and it arrived just as I expected. It sounds like the author had quite a memorable adventure in Ecuador, but it definitely also sounded like a stressful day of running around, and at least to me ordering online is a much more pleasant alternative.
- oftenwrong 6y ago
  My impression of Brooklyn is that there are a lot of small (but high-end) "makers" based there, or at least selling their goods there. It is not so different from what the author is describing, but on a higher tier of affluence. You can start a small operation in whatever small space you can find, and have many potential customers within walking distance.
addicted44 6y ago
This is pretty much completely anecdotal, and not very useful, to be honest. The informal stuff doesn't work well. I'm guessing they went to buy their furniture off the informal buses during off peak hours. So they didn't have to deal with the crowds the majority of people have to deal with during regular rush hours, where you will find people hanging off the buses, and others struggling to get in. Sure, the bus may come every 5 minutes, but you may have to wait a few buses to get in. Further, these are private buses. In the US you can get a cab exactly where you want that takes you exactly where you want. You could also "rideshare". The reason you dont have buses to do that in the US is because people can afford single occupancy cabs. What the person is really complaining about is the fact that the US is richer and things are more expensive. A cab is a proper analogy to the private transport that is being compared to. And the real complaint is that earning dollars and then paying in dollars in the US is more expensive than earning dollars and then paying in local currency in the 3rd world.
- danaris 6y ago
  > The reason you dont have buses to do that in the US is because people can afford single occupancy cabs. It's much more complicated than that, though. Public transport is looked down upon in the US—not just in the same classist way it is looked down upon in many places, "that's for the plebes", but like many public institutions, it is viewed by many to be inherently worse than private solutions, both ideologically and practically. To a large extent, it is a victim of the deliberate practice of the American right wing, over the course of at least the last several decades, of reducing funding for public services (because Big Government Bad), then decrying their ineffectiveness (well, duh, they're not doing great because you took away half their budget), and pushing for them to be privatized.
  - oftenwrong 6y ago
    Most roads in the US are public, and funded with taxation. Granted, it requires a private car to benefit from them. Still, this suggests that anti-government sentiments can only partially explain this aspect of US transportation.
duxup 6y ago
I feel like this is the sort of story you hear from a diplomat about how great it is that in some other country they can hire a gardener, nannies, and etc for very cheap. Then they move home to a different country and they bemoan their lack of cheap help. Is this a great thing? I'm not sure for the folks getting paid very little it is ... Granted every system somehow relies on cheap labor somewhere so there is more to it than that.
- Swizec 6y ago
  > Every great society was built on the backs of a disposable workforce ~ Bladerunner The question is what could those other people do instead? Are they happy with the pay? $7/hour might seem chump change to you but as a high school kid getting $7 bucks to build websites at an agency I was fucking ecstatic. Nowadays I’d laugh at that rate and yet I still think it was the best thing I couldve done for my career at the time.
  - duxup 6y ago
    I'm not sure "happy with the pay" is a good measure if the alternative is not working / serious problems. So yeah they'll take what they can get. I'm also not sure the cheap delivery guy is likely working themselves up to much more for each table they carry like you were with each website.
    - Swizec 6y ago
      Yeah so if you pay someone $7/h in a country with $5 minimum wage. Are you paying well or not for a menial job?
  - nicbou 6y ago
    This is because your parents were subsidizing that wage by covering your expenses
    - Swizec 6y ago
      No $7/h was a damn good hourly rate in my neck of the woods back then. Still is for people in menial jobs. Minimum wage is $5.2
empath75 6y ago
I'm absolutely fascinated by the bus system in Guatemala and other central american countries. It's incredible and blows away any system in the US, in terms of price and convenience, if not in safety and comfort. Even the most remote places have regular bus service, and there's a whole economy around bus stations and vendors selling things on buses. You can get from one end of the country to another for a couple of dollars and for not very much more, there are pullman bus routes between major cities that are a better traveling experience than amtrak.
- zip1234 6y ago
  The buses are often just American school buses which have been bought second or third hand, painted garishly, and reused.
  - Viliam1234 6y ago
    That just underlines the point. Second-hand American school buses can be put to great use... in a different country... but something prevents using the same solution in USA.
    - empath75 6y ago
      Well I think a big part of it is that Americans are a lot taller than Guatemalans.
danans 6y ago
> There are of course now online options for small vendors—Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, etc.—but that model has its own substantial downsides for something you really want to be able to touch and test out before purchase. While in general I am a fan of the "small l" hyper-local libertarianism of Strong Towns (I'm a contributor), at least when it comes to things like housing zoning and small scale commerce, I think this demonstrates that the writer has a fundamental unfamiliarity with how Craigslist works for used goods purchases today. Here's my recent anecdote to support this: I just sold a clothes dryer and furniture set on Craigslist. Both transactions involved meeting potential buyers on site and demonstrating to them that the goods were functional, and even helping them load the goods into their vehicles. One of the items was loaded into a beat-up pickup truck either borrowed or rented by the purchaser from another individual. The biggest issue with the Craigslist process was that as a seller I received multiple scam requests, and as a buyer at other times, I've found that the item I inquired about was a scam. But it's very much an in-person commercial experience. Where I do think Latin America is leaps ahead is in creativity in using items in design that our US-based market-segmented big-box consumer mentalities don't get a chance to ponder. Examples are the Acapulco chair - made of simple plastic PVC thread and a metal frame [1], which was turned into high design (vs the terrible PVC lawn chairs designs of the 70s and 80s in the US), and the many examples of use of upcycled materials to build homes in Mexico [2] 1. https://www.patioproductions.com/blog/patio-furniture/iconic-history-of-the-acapulco-chair/ https://www.patioproductions.com/blog/patio-furniture/iconic... 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52TLLZz6lq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52TLLZz6lq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hl6iDHm3yk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hl6iDHm3yk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVqM6ZTaXbE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVqM6ZTaXbE
munificent 6y ago
With so few data points in the anecdote, there are many narratives you can apply to it that all fit, each with it's own little facet of truth. One that resonates with what I'm going through in my life right now is that it seems that US culture optimizes for preventing unexpected bad experiences with the consequence that unexpected good experiences are lost too. There is very little serendipity to life in the US today. When you get a couch from Ikea, you know exactly how it's going to go. Every meal at McDonald's is like every meal there you've ever had. There are, of course, pockets of delight you can find. But, overall, it seems that our culture has trended towards risk-aversion, safety, familiarity. There's a sort of constant infantilization going on where we're trained to believe we can't handle surprises and thus we should avoid them. Millions of adults read nothing but "Young Adult" fiction. All of our biggest box office movies are comic book adaptations. Millions are on anti-anxiety medication. Because we avoid taking risks, we never learn to handle them. We never witness ourselves being resilient and gain the self-respect that that garners. So the feedback loop keeps us nestled tighter and tighter in our bubbles.
- zip1234 6y ago
  Massive amounts of boring, repetitive, blandness.
  - msla 6y ago
    Funny that anyone would choose to live in a hellscape, innit?
    - mediaman 6y ago
      It's a hellscape of boredom, not of pain. And many do choose boredom. A life of boredom was preferential to the alternative for much of human history.
      - msla 6y ago
        > It's a hellscape of boredom, not of pain. > And many do choose boredom. Then maybe it isn't a hellscape for them.
zip1234 6y ago
The American suburban model of separating structures out by usage type is not efficient in the least. It is orderly, but that is about it.
rootusrootus 6y ago
It seems like a bit of a contrived example. If I wanted to outfit a house, I could easily go down to the local appliance store (a small one, maybe a couple thousand square feet of retail space), and have something delivered in a couple hours. There are a number of random furniture stores in town that carry a variety of items nothing like the big box stores. And if I did want to go to a big box store, like Home Depot, I could just rent their truck for the afternoon. If I needed to hire some help, that's pretty trivial too.
_bxg1 6y ago
It's funny that the United States prides itself on being the heart of capitalism, where anybody can allegedly strike out on their own and make their own way thanks to The Market. But in reality, Ecuador sounds much more capitalistic (in the positive sense) than the United States. Today's United States is just as elite-ruled and hostile to the little guy as the next developed nation - possibly more so - it's just that in our case, many of the elites are overly-powerful capitalists instead of government officials or (nominally) oligarchs. But the end result is the same. I think the basic fallacy that so many voters have in their heads is that that big businesses and small are on the same side politically. But the reality couldn't be further from the truth.
jpm_sd 6y ago
This reminds me of "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast,_Cheap_%26_Out_of_Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast,_Cheap_%26_Out_of_Control Spoiler alert: the FC&OOC approach to robotics did not succeed. It has been superseded by more expensive, more sophisticated, more reliable systems that have gradually come down in price through economies of scale.
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  Very roughly speaking, fast and cheap things can be great end products, but bad ingredients. If you want to buy a cabinet for normal use, fast and cheap is probably better, as long as it doesn't fall apart. But imagine that you would want to buy hundred cabinets and build a huge block out of them, or something like that. At that moment the weaknesses of individual pieces add up, and the whole structure is likely to collapse. To make the structure not collapse, you need to build it from reliable and thus more expensive pieces. (And, as you said, economies of scale can sometimes do something about the high price.) I think the frustration many programmers feel at their jobs also has a similar origin. We use dozens of "fast and cheap" tools, and each of them individually is better than nothing, but using them all together means you spend a lot of time angry about this or that problem. (And when finally most of the annoying problems get fixed, a new programming language appears, and everything needs to be rebuilt again.)
wccrawford 6y ago
This is an article about someone who was forced to shop in a way they found surprising and sub-optimal before trying it, and found out that there are upsides to it as well. Then they proceed to say that they could have done a lot of this via Craigslist, etc, but there are hefty downsides to that. Yeah, there are hefty (possible) downsides to thgis experience, too. I'd bet that if there were no big box stores and no small market like this article has, they'd use Craigslist and write an article about how wonderful that experience was after all. I don't consider myself a big risk-taker, but it seems to me that I'm more of one than the person in the article. I often buy things dirt-cheap and take a chance that they might not be quite right for my needs. I'm often happen with them, regardless of cost. Sometimes I have to take the price into consideration, too, before I'm happy. And rarely I'm just out some money for something that didn't work right. As for the transportation, I'm betting if the price was higher they'd be unhappy with it. We actually have at-will transportation in all our cities: Taxis. And now that we have Uber/Lyft/etc, there are actually alternatives that are cheaper and arguably better. We even have for-rent bikes and scooters that will often be better than any automobile ride in the city. Yes, I agree that people should open their eyes and welcome surprises more often... But I don't think the author has really taken that to heart themselves.
lacker 6y ago
Something seems wrong about this analogy. Scarcely any U.S. city can compete with Quito—a place I was told would be poor and dysfunctional—in the ease of getting around on public transit. The network of these informal bus lines has not been coordinated from above. These aren't "public transit". They are private bus lines. The right comparison is how easy it is to get around the US using private transit like Uber. In the US, it's also quite possible to furnish your house over the internet, by getting furniture and other items delivered. Far more efficient than traveling about, either on public or private transit.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > These aren't "public transit". They are private bus lines. The right comparison is how easy it is to get around the US using private transit like Uber. I agree they aren't public transit in the classic/ US sense, but comparing them to Uber/ Lyft isn't right either since the cost difference is an order of magnitude different. Uber and Lyft very wasteful compared to a busy bus line. Bus transportation in Quibi is $0.25-0.50 by comparison, an affordable amount even where incomes are much lower. If Uber was $1-2, then it would be more comparable. For lower income workers, the $5.80/ trip minimum Uber fair is simply not an option for daily transportation.
  - lacker 6y ago
    Income is also an order of magnitude different between the US and Ecuador. So the cost is pretty similar between the two options in terms of peoples' ability to pay.
- rcoveson 6y ago
  > The right comparison is how easy it is to get around the US using private transit like Uber. In my experience (Santa Ana, El Salvador), it's still not even close. The bus routes are smart and frequent, the city is eminently walk-able, and you can always just hop in a Bajaj rickshaw ("tuctuc") if you need to go somewhere far off a route. You'd never pay more than 50 cents for any trip in town. Uber can be extremely slow (I've waited up to an hour and often around half an hour for trips in some big US cities). It's also absurdly expensive, and it seems that the more expensive it is the slower it will probably be (cities with low driver counts).
gok 6y ago
I have to laugh at the author's delight in the informal bus system. At home I'm sure he'd love to shout about the evils of "illegal ride sharing" but in Quito: "if there is demand for a trip (in the form of overcrowding on buses between points A and B), someone is going to figure it out and capitalize on it." Imagine that! The words "regulation" or "law" do not appear anywhere in the article. Why are there no open air appliance markets in the US selling maybe-working gas stoves? Surely not safety or consumer protection laws. No, the obvious explanation is that the owners of capital are wish it to be so.
gbronner 6y ago
Many buildings in NYC require people delivering furniture to have certificate of insurance, and to schedule deliveries 48 hours in advance. This creates a lot of overhead, and makes it hard for 2 guys with a truck to compete, as they often lack the administrative skills necessary to operate in this environment

163 points by oftenwrong 6y ago

Life definitely is easier when there is a large underclass of disenfranchised poor people willing to do anything. Why has no-one considered this before? (On a serious note, this is basically a meme at this point. Someone sees a thing, blames it on corporate greed. You may be a worker in a big-box store but you will make more money, you take less risk, and you get the opportunity to retire with some dignity rather than work yourself into a coffin. Poverty tourism is great fun but it is quite tragic when you see other people suffering and think there is nobility in that.)

bryanlarsen 6y ago
I'm just a tourist, but from what I can tell, Ecuador has done a fabulous job of righting its ship economically and politically over the last 20 years. There is still a "large underclass of disenfranchised poor" because of Venezualen refugees though.
- hogFeast 6y ago
  Their govt is very close to default right now. The only thing that has saved Ecuador was Correra not managing to bind his successor to his policies. Correra borrowed a ton of money, gave it out to win elections, and left the people with the bill. I am not sure how this can be called a success (it is true that lots of people think Ecuador is successful because they borrowed a ton of money and gave it out...this hasn't created a wealth, it has just created massive debt that can't be repaid).
oftenwrong 6y ago
That strikes me as an uncharitable reading of this article. The guys transporting appliances in a pickup truck are, in some sense, forced to do that to survive. However, the author's point concerns the opportunity they are capitalising on. In this environment, one can start an appliance transport business with a truck and some strong men. The environment of the USA has many more barriers to entry, and that influences the types of enterprises that exist there.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  In the US, the truck and strong men exist, one just has to know where the local "day labour" hangout may be.
  - oftenwrong 6y ago
    Those sorts of operations are generally not compliant with regulations. This would seem to reinforce the parent's point. While it is great to have low barriers to entry, it is not so great to sacrifice worker protections, and to depend on people living in precarious financial situations.
- ff317 6y ago
  They're inextricably linked, though. It's always much easier to start a small business in a relatively-unregulated environment, but that's because nearly zero thought or protection is being given to the drivers' or loaders' living wages, healthcare, eventual retirement, actual health (as in long-term occupational stress on the body), or even ability to be compensated for severe workplace injuries. All of the things we privileged Americans complain about in cases like Amazon's treatment of their warehouse and shipping workers are orders of magnitude worse, in practice, for most of these opportunistic workers in Ecuador.
  - oftenwrong 6y ago
    That's a good point. I suppose in countries like the US there is already a middle ground in play: small businesses are often exempt from certain onerous regulations.
  - codeadict 6y ago
    I lived in Ecuador, all these people will have retirement and healthcare thru the IES(https://www.iess.gob.ec/ https://www.iess.gob.ec/), equivalent to the US Social Security. It's not a perfect system but neither is US retirement if you don't have 401k or some kind of private retirement plan, the healthcare could be slow sometimes and you spend 30 mins to an hour to see the doctor but it works.
amadeusw 6y ago
You might have misunderstood the author. The author showed us that you can have an efficient system without the vertically integrated middleman corporate structure. He described how it is a novelty and runs differently than what he's used to, but it is the natural course of business in many parts of the world. He did not participate in poverty tourism and Ecuadorians are not disenfranchised poor people just because they don't follow the lifestyle that you're used to.
- cameldrv 6y ago
  I think that you misunderstand HogFeast. The author drops in to town with American style money. The people who are serving him, for example, driving the furniture delivery pickup truck, are all almost certainly working for very little money. The convenience he experiences is possible because there are a bunch of underemployed drivers with pickup trucks all waiting for someone to buy furniture. Then they drive across town and come right back. The IKEA model would be to load up a truck at a distribution center, have a preplanned route, and a big truck, and knock out a whole bunch of deliveries at once. This is less convenient for the customer, because they don't get instant gratification, and they have to wait at home for the delivery in some 4 hour window. On the other hand, it's much more efficient for the delivery company, because they're probably delivering about 4x as much furniture per driver per day. That will lead to some combination of better wages for the driver, cheaper delivery, or more profit for the furniture company. You certainly could call up a moving company, have them come to IKEA with you, load up the furniture, and take it home, but it would cost a lot more than what he's paying in Ecuador. The reason is that the driver in Ecuador doesn't expect to make very much money by the standards of the author's western salary.
  - titanomachy 6y ago
    "That will lead to some combination of better wages for the driver, cheaper delivery, or more profit for the furniture company." Realistically: the driver will be paid close to minimum wage because he doesn't have any rare skills, and the customer will be charged as much as possible. The owners of the company will probably get decent return on their capital, though.

oftenwrong 6y ago

Here's a photo essay that is somewhat focused on the same subject: https://granolashotgun.com/2019/07/22/the-show-horse-and-the-work-horse/ https://granolashotgun.com/2019/07/22/the-show-horse-and-the... It was also discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20497711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20497711

mc32 6y ago

The biggest difference is bureaucracy and control/power it exerts. They have less of it, we have more of it. They may seem chaotic, but they are more agile because there is no (or little) bureaucracy. In the US things are standardized and predictable but at the cost of inefficient bureaucracy. Over there they have inefficiency of variability. Neither is good or bad, they just work differently and some people like one over the other.

SQueeeeeL 6y ago
Not taking a stance is sort of weak. Most of the time bureaucracy exists to crush those who don't have the time and money to play by the rules; think of regulatory capture. Similarly in CS, you'll see a lot of companies with "standardized" overly complicated Java business code so they can hire fresh devs out of college and not actually have to invest a lot of money in hiring and retaining a development team. Something that could be written in 1k lines takes 400k and is actually very difficult to work on, but at least they don't pay any devs over $100,000, which is really what they're optimizing for.
luckylion 6y ago
> Neither is good or bad, they just work differently and some people like one over the other. They like one over the other when both work out the same. If some accident happens and the bus explodes, killing the passengers, nearly everybody wants more regulation. People want the standardization and predictability, but they don't want the associated cost and lack of flexibility. That's understandable, but it's also naive.
- mc32 6y ago
  It really depends on people’s tolerance for the negative results vs positive impact. Drug manufacturing, food product, yes you want more regulation because of impact. Where someone sells furniture and whether or not they have a valid business license much less so. Light regulation means more people are self employed. As economies develop and mature they also develop more regulation. When economies are less i institutional then they have less regulation. We can even see that within the CHOP. If you overregulate an emerging economy you risk suffocating it.

mac01021 6y ago

There are only 10 cities in the USA with populations equal to or greater than the size of Quito's. I suspect, living downtown in any of those, your furniture-buying experience would likely be quite similar to the Quito experience in terms of the size of the vendors visited and the modes of transportation used for people and furniture. You probably wouldn't legally be able to ride in the pickup bed next to your fridge, though.

cortesoft 6y ago
Yeah, I was going to say you could absolutely recreate most of this experience in a large US city. They will all have furniture districts, with custom made furniture you can look at and buy. Now, most people don't go to them, because IKEA is cheaper and easier

dvaun 6y ago

This reminds me of an essay on Ribbonfarm about legibility[1] and the construction of cities based on a false sense of order. See [2] for a discussion on this. [1]: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21996377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21996377

ogre_codes 6y ago

The idea here of how you furnish a place in the US doesn't match my personal experience. He does mention Craigslist in passing, but simultaneously dismisses it, but I think that's a bit trite. We bought a ton of fixtures, furniture, and even construction materials from Craigslist, St. Vinnies, and our local Habitat for Humanities and saved a pile of cash. We didn't deal with the whole big-box experience. Furniture is similarly dealt with. Even before Craigslist, there were old fashioned classified adverts and garage sales which weren't as convenient as a single giant market, but gave us options. From the sounds of it, our luck with Craigslist/ second hand sources was just about as good as his was in Ecuador with one out of our many purchases being a bit of a disappointment. Also, this paragraph bothered me: > Here, the process always involves a drive to a big-box store (few of these are convenient via transit, especially if you need to make multiple stops), a credit check, some paperwork to commit to a multi-month payment plan, a scheduled delivery a week or two out, and often some hassle with the delivery company requiring a phone call in which I sit on hold. I don't pay for anything other than my car/ house on monthly payments and nobody should. This article is more a criticism of the US culture of debt rather than looking at what options we genuinely have. We've always had the option to pay in cash and not deal with the financing, it's just a bit less convenient. Likewise, if you are willing to deal with second hand goods, we have the option to get second hand goods, you just have to search a bit harder to find them. Really, the big difference between experiences is the expectation in the US that you will have your own transportation, and that is the real story here in my eyes. In Ecuador public Transportation and casual truck rental works. In the US, it's quite a bit tougher to exist without a reliable car or truck. I also don't understand why he dismisses CL, yard sales, and recycling stores out of hand because they are right up his "Inefficient, but Smart" alley.

ebg13 6y ago
> I don't pay for anything other than my car/ house on monthly payments and nobody should You should if there's no additional cost for doing so, because that's a free loan. The same quantity of money a few months down the road will be worth a little less than it is today, so you should give it to them then instead of now when you can do slightly more with it. If you can get either 1X and 2Y now or 1X now and 1Y later, you'd be foolish to do the latter. And if you're thinking "but prices go down, not up", you're both wrong on average and also probably thinking about the exact category of goods (tech gear) that tends to offer interest-free financing.

andrewmutz 6y ago

I think that the differences between the two models can be attributed to the difference between the cost of human labor in the two countries. Everything mentioned in the Ecuador example is labor intensive: private sector busses driving around plentifully, moving laborers just parked next to the furniture market standing around waiting, many small proprietorships in close proximity haggling over prices, etc. The big box model is better in the US where labor is very expensive. The "bazaar" model is better in Ecuador where labor is much cheaper.

Ar-Curunir 6y ago
The big box model in the US just outsources the labour involved in producing goods to countries where that labour is cheaper; it's not like any of the big manufacturers of anything manufacture locally in the US.
- tomrod 6y ago
  Mostly, yes.
marcus_holmes 6y ago
Labour costs are a factor only when trading internationally or across markets. Within a single market, they're not so relevant. In this case, everything is cheaper. The furniture is cheaper, so there's less money to pay people with. So the proportion of costs for labour is about the same. Assume 10% of the cost of the furniture goes to paying people - in the USA that's a larger number than in Ecuador, but still 10%. It doesn't really affect the model. I think the real difference is the consolidation of the supply chain in the US (and other developed economies). In the US, the first "big box" stores were able to squeeze savings from the supply chain and offer lower prices. Customers liked that, bought more, and soon every furniture store had to either go very up-market or adopt the same strategy. A few decades and a lot of acquisitions later, and the entire new furniture market consists of half a dozen completely vertically integrated superstore chains, plus a few up-market retailers. The second-hand market is not so consolidated. The article doesn't say whether they were buying new or second hand furniture. It'd be interesting to find out why the second-hand market isn't subject to the same market forces. How come there isn't a few large second-hand furniture stores?

netcan 6y ago

The "Bureaucracy vs Markets" or "Top-Down vs Bottom-Up" debates are stale. These ideas had purchase a generation ago, when these ideas were proxies for Soviet vs American ideological sparring. That ended 30 years ago. Meanwhile, it seems trite to have these conversations in the abstract... comparing Ecuador to the US. It's not like these ideas haven't penetrated the political realm. They've been paramount in politics, policy and political thought for decades. Local, National & International. This is positively naive: "a swing back toward a messy city and a messy marketplace full of small proprietors—what I've heard called "capitalism with more capitalists"" We need to either find new ideas, and importantly, new terms. At the least, we could mine some new old ideas. How about Khaldun instead of Smith for a change... he was the original anyway.

Ar-Curunir 6y ago
Both the Soviet economy and capitalism as we know it are centralized economies; neither are bottom-up planned. Sure, maybe capitalism has some competition between large companies, but that's the extent of it.

JackFr 6y ago

This is not a compelling article. It doesn't even rise to the level of anecdata.

cactus2093 6y ago

> You don't find many small proprietors selling furniture and appliances in the U.S.; it works in cities like Quito because of the physical model of an open-air marketplace with many small retail spaces in close walking proximity to one another. I'm very skeptical of this claim, it seems like the author has the cause and effect backwards. The physical marketplaces don't exist because there just isn't as big of a market for small furniture makers since labor is much more expensive in the US. (Plus as other commenters point out, few metro areas in the US are as large and dense as a city like Quito, so whatever selection there is will also be scaled down proportionally in most areas). My now-wife and I still talk about the time years ago when we first moved in together. We needed a couch and walked into a small boutique furniture store in Brooklyn. They had this oversized, soft leather couch that I still to this day remember as the most comfortable couch I've ever sat on. The salesperson came over and started explaining how these are hand-made by one guy in North Carolina, we can choose the exact leather in the color/style we want and the craftsman will sit down at his bench and begin building the couch specifically for us. It was quite a compelling pitch but the couch was almost $6000 which we couldn't afford, so we thanked her and went over to Macy's where we bought a still very nice leather couch for under $800 to be delivered 3 days later. You can absolutely get a boutique, small-batch, hand-made version of almost anything in the US. But we're so used to the prices that mass-production make possible that the vast majority of people are unwilling to pay for it. One interesting thing though, is with the internet and direct to consumer brands, and improvements in manufacturing (or at least in easier access to cheap manufacturing), it seems like there are more affordably priced alternatives to big box stores now than there have been for the past few decades. It's a little weird to write an article about furniture buying habits in 2020 that ignores the massive rise of companies like Casper, for instance. The last time I bought a couch I bought it on Wayfair, which was incredibly simple and it arrived just as I expected. It sounds like the author had quite a memorable adventure in Ecuador, but it definitely also sounded like a stressful day of running around, and at least to me ordering online is a much more pleasant alternative.

oftenwrong 6y ago
My impression of Brooklyn is that there are a lot of small (but high-end) "makers" based there, or at least selling their goods there. It is not so different from what the author is describing, but on a higher tier of affluence. You can start a small operation in whatever small space you can find, and have many potential customers within walking distance.

addicted44 6y ago

This is pretty much completely anecdotal, and not very useful, to be honest. The informal stuff doesn't work well. I'm guessing they went to buy their furniture off the informal buses during off peak hours. So they didn't have to deal with the crowds the majority of people have to deal with during regular rush hours, where you will find people hanging off the buses, and others struggling to get in. Sure, the bus may come every 5 minutes, but you may have to wait a few buses to get in. Further, these are private buses. In the US you can get a cab exactly where you want that takes you exactly where you want. You could also "rideshare". The reason you dont have buses to do that in the US is because people can afford single occupancy cabs. What the person is really complaining about is the fact that the US is richer and things are more expensive. A cab is a proper analogy to the private transport that is being compared to. And the real complaint is that earning dollars and then paying in dollars in the US is more expensive than earning dollars and then paying in local currency in the 3rd world.

danaris 6y ago
> The reason you dont have buses to do that in the US is because people can afford single occupancy cabs. It's much more complicated than that, though. Public transport is looked down upon in the US—not just in the same classist way it is looked down upon in many places, "that's for the plebes", but like many public institutions, it is viewed by many to be inherently worse than private solutions, both ideologically and practically. To a large extent, it is a victim of the deliberate practice of the American right wing, over the course of at least the last several decades, of reducing funding for public services (because Big Government Bad), then decrying their ineffectiveness (well, duh, they're not doing great because you took away half their budget), and pushing for them to be privatized.
- oftenwrong 6y ago
  Most roads in the US are public, and funded with taxation. Granted, it requires a private car to benefit from them. Still, this suggests that anti-government sentiments can only partially explain this aspect of US transportation.

duxup 6y ago

I feel like this is the sort of story you hear from a diplomat about how great it is that in some other country they can hire a gardener, nannies, and etc for very cheap. Then they move home to a different country and they bemoan their lack of cheap help. Is this a great thing? I'm not sure for the folks getting paid very little it is ... Granted every system somehow relies on cheap labor somewhere so there is more to it than that.

Swizec 6y ago
> Every great society was built on the backs of a disposable workforce ~ Bladerunner The question is what could those other people do instead? Are they happy with the pay? $7/hour might seem chump change to you but as a high school kid getting $7 bucks to build websites at an agency I was fucking ecstatic. Nowadays I’d laugh at that rate and yet I still think it was the best thing I couldve done for my career at the time.
- duxup 6y ago
  I'm not sure "happy with the pay" is a good measure if the alternative is not working / serious problems. So yeah they'll take what they can get. I'm also not sure the cheap delivery guy is likely working themselves up to much more for each table they carry like you were with each website.
  - Swizec 6y ago
    Yeah so if you pay someone $7/h in a country with $5 minimum wage. Are you paying well or not for a menial job?
- nicbou 6y ago
  This is because your parents were subsidizing that wage by covering your expenses
  - Swizec 6y ago
    No $7/h was a damn good hourly rate in my neck of the woods back then. Still is for people in menial jobs. Minimum wage is $5.2

empath75 6y ago

I'm absolutely fascinated by the bus system in Guatemala and other central american countries. It's incredible and blows away any system in the US, in terms of price and convenience, if not in safety and comfort. Even the most remote places have regular bus service, and there's a whole economy around bus stations and vendors selling things on buses. You can get from one end of the country to another for a couple of dollars and for not very much more, there are pullman bus routes between major cities that are a better traveling experience than amtrak.

zip1234 6y ago
The buses are often just American school buses which have been bought second or third hand, painted garishly, and reused.
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  That just underlines the point. Second-hand American school buses can be put to great use... in a different country... but something prevents using the same solution in USA.
  - empath75 6y ago
    Well I think a big part of it is that Americans are a lot taller than Guatemalans.

danans 6y ago

> There are of course now online options for small vendors—Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, etc.—but that model has its own substantial downsides for something you really want to be able to touch and test out before purchase. While in general I am a fan of the "small l" hyper-local libertarianism of Strong Towns (I'm a contributor), at least when it comes to things like housing zoning and small scale commerce, I think this demonstrates that the writer has a fundamental unfamiliarity with how Craigslist works for used goods purchases today. Here's my recent anecdote to support this: I just sold a clothes dryer and furniture set on Craigslist. Both transactions involved meeting potential buyers on site and demonstrating to them that the goods were functional, and even helping them load the goods into their vehicles. One of the items was loaded into a beat-up pickup truck either borrowed or rented by the purchaser from another individual. The biggest issue with the Craigslist process was that as a seller I received multiple scam requests, and as a buyer at other times, I've found that the item I inquired about was a scam. But it's very much an in-person commercial experience. Where I do think Latin America is leaps ahead is in creativity in using items in design that our US-based market-segmented big-box consumer mentalities don't get a chance to ponder. Examples are the Acapulco chair - made of simple plastic PVC thread and a metal frame [1], which was turned into high design (vs the terrible PVC lawn chairs designs of the 70s and 80s in the US), and the many examples of use of upcycled materials to build homes in Mexico [2] 1. https://www.patioproductions.com/blog/patio-furniture/iconic-history-of-the-acapulco-chair/ https://www.patioproductions.com/blog/patio-furniture/iconic... 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52TLLZz6lq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52TLLZz6lq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hl6iDHm3yk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hl6iDHm3yk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVqM6ZTaXbE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVqM6ZTaXbE

munificent 6y ago

With so few data points in the anecdote, there are many narratives you can apply to it that all fit, each with it's own little facet of truth. One that resonates with what I'm going through in my life right now is that it seems that US culture optimizes for preventing unexpected bad experiences with the consequence that unexpected good experiences are lost too. There is very little serendipity to life in the US today. When you get a couch from Ikea, you know exactly how it's going to go. Every meal at McDonald's is like every meal there you've ever had. There are, of course, pockets of delight you can find. But, overall, it seems that our culture has trended towards risk-aversion, safety, familiarity. There's a sort of constant infantilization going on where we're trained to believe we can't handle surprises and thus we should avoid them. Millions of adults read nothing but "Young Adult" fiction. All of our biggest box office movies are comic book adaptations. Millions are on anti-anxiety medication. Because we avoid taking risks, we never learn to handle them. We never witness ourselves being resilient and gain the self-respect that that garners. So the feedback loop keeps us nestled tighter and tighter in our bubbles.

zip1234 6y ago
Massive amounts of boring, repetitive, blandness.
- msla 6y ago
  Funny that anyone would choose to live in a hellscape, innit?
  - mediaman 6y ago
    It's a hellscape of boredom, not of pain. And many do choose boredom. A life of boredom was preferential to the alternative for much of human history.
    - msla 6y ago
      > It's a hellscape of boredom, not of pain. > And many do choose boredom. Then maybe it isn't a hellscape for them.

zip1234 6y ago

The American suburban model of separating structures out by usage type is not efficient in the least. It is orderly, but that is about it.

rootusrootus 6y ago

It seems like a bit of a contrived example. If I wanted to outfit a house, I could easily go down to the local appliance store (a small one, maybe a couple thousand square feet of retail space), and have something delivered in a couple hours. There are a number of random furniture stores in town that carry a variety of items nothing like the big box stores. And if I did want to go to a big box store, like Home Depot, I could just rent their truck for the afternoon. If I needed to hire some help, that's pretty trivial too.

_bxg1 6y ago

It's funny that the United States prides itself on being the heart of capitalism, where anybody can allegedly strike out on their own and make their own way thanks to The Market. But in reality, Ecuador sounds much more capitalistic (in the positive sense) than the United States. Today's United States is just as elite-ruled and hostile to the little guy as the next developed nation - possibly more so - it's just that in our case, many of the elites are overly-powerful capitalists instead of government officials or (nominally) oligarchs. But the end result is the same. I think the basic fallacy that so many voters have in their heads is that that big businesses and small are on the same side politically. But the reality couldn't be further from the truth.

jpm_sd 6y ago

This reminds me of "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast,_Cheap_%26_Out_of_Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast,_Cheap_%26_Out_of_Control Spoiler alert: the FC&OOC approach to robotics did not succeed. It has been superseded by more expensive, more sophisticated, more reliable systems that have gradually come down in price through economies of scale.

Viliam1234 6y ago
Very roughly speaking, fast and cheap things can be great end products, but bad ingredients. If you want to buy a cabinet for normal use, fast and cheap is probably better, as long as it doesn't fall apart. But imagine that you would want to buy hundred cabinets and build a huge block out of them, or something like that. At that moment the weaknesses of individual pieces add up, and the whole structure is likely to collapse. To make the structure not collapse, you need to build it from reliable and thus more expensive pieces. (And, as you said, economies of scale can sometimes do something about the high price.) I think the frustration many programmers feel at their jobs also has a similar origin. We use dozens of "fast and cheap" tools, and each of them individually is better than nothing, but using them all together means you spend a lot of time angry about this or that problem. (And when finally most of the annoying problems get fixed, a new programming language appears, and everything needs to be rebuilt again.)

wccrawford 6y ago

This is an article about someone who was forced to shop in a way they found surprising and sub-optimal before trying it, and found out that there are upsides to it as well. Then they proceed to say that they could have done a lot of this via Craigslist, etc, but there are hefty downsides to that. Yeah, there are hefty (possible) downsides to thgis experience, too. I'd bet that if there were no big box stores and no small market like this article has, they'd use Craigslist and write an article about how wonderful that experience was after all. I don't consider myself a big risk-taker, but it seems to me that I'm more of one than the person in the article. I often buy things dirt-cheap and take a chance that they might not be quite right for my needs. I'm often happen with them, regardless of cost. Sometimes I have to take the price into consideration, too, before I'm happy. And rarely I'm just out some money for something that didn't work right. As for the transportation, I'm betting if the price was higher they'd be unhappy with it. We actually have at-will transportation in all our cities: Taxis. And now that we have Uber/Lyft/etc, there are actually alternatives that are cheaper and arguably better. We even have for-rent bikes and scooters that will often be better than any automobile ride in the city. Yes, I agree that people should open their eyes and welcome surprises more often... But I don't think the author has really taken that to heart themselves.

lacker 6y ago

Something seems wrong about this analogy. Scarcely any U.S. city can compete with Quito—a place I was told would be poor and dysfunctional—in the ease of getting around on public transit. The network of these informal bus lines has not been coordinated from above. These aren't "public transit". They are private bus lines. The right comparison is how easy it is to get around the US using private transit like Uber. In the US, it's also quite possible to furnish your house over the internet, by getting furniture and other items delivered. Far more efficient than traveling about, either on public or private transit.

ogre_codes 6y ago
> These aren't "public transit". They are private bus lines. The right comparison is how easy it is to get around the US using private transit like Uber. I agree they aren't public transit in the classic/ US sense, but comparing them to Uber/ Lyft isn't right either since the cost difference is an order of magnitude different. Uber and Lyft very wasteful compared to a busy bus line. Bus transportation in Quibi is $0.25-0.50 by comparison, an affordable amount even where incomes are much lower. If Uber was $1-2, then it would be more comparable. For lower income workers, the $5.80/ trip minimum Uber fair is simply not an option for daily transportation.
- lacker 6y ago
  Income is also an order of magnitude different between the US and Ecuador. So the cost is pretty similar between the two options in terms of peoples' ability to pay.
rcoveson 6y ago
> The right comparison is how easy it is to get around the US using private transit like Uber. In my experience (Santa Ana, El Salvador), it's still not even close. The bus routes are smart and frequent, the city is eminently walk-able, and you can always just hop in a Bajaj rickshaw ("tuctuc") if you need to go somewhere far off a route. You'd never pay more than 50 cents for any trip in town. Uber can be extremely slow (I've waited up to an hour and often around half an hour for trips in some big US cities). It's also absurdly expensive, and it seems that the more expensive it is the slower it will probably be (cities with low driver counts).

gok 6y ago

I have to laugh at the author's delight in the informal bus system. At home I'm sure he'd love to shout about the evils of "illegal ride sharing" but in Quito: "if there is demand for a trip (in the form of overcrowding on buses between points A and B), someone is going to figure it out and capitalize on it." Imagine that! The words "regulation" or "law" do not appear anywhere in the article. Why are there no open air appliance markets in the US selling maybe-working gas stoves? Surely not safety or consumer protection laws. No, the obvious explanation is that the owners of capital are wish it to be so.

gbronner 6y ago

Many buildings in NYC require people delivering furniture to have certificate of insurance, and to schedule deliveries 48 hours in advance. This creates a lot of overhead, and makes it hard for 2 guys with a truck to compete, as they often lack the administrative skills necessary to operate in this environment