5 ms·

When "free shipping" is what consumers expect, do you think people are ready to pay for better service? It the package is lost, it is often cheaper to write it

by GuB-42 10mo ago

When "free shipping" is what consumers expect, do you think people are ready to pay for better service? It the package is lost, it is often cheaper to write it off as a loss and send another item or refund. If you need overnight shipping, you can have it, but it is not cheap, so most people won't do it. As for documents, is is all electronic now. Logistics is very much alive, but it is adapted to our needs, that is massive containerships for worldwide trade, local warehouses for fast delivery of common items, reliability that is in balance with the cost of losing items, speed matching what people are ready to pay for, and specialized services for special needs, like overnight shipping. EDIT: It made me think about the "Lettre Verte" in France, named after the green stamp, and also supposedly because it is good for the planet. It was introduced early 2010s as a cheaper, slower (2 days instead of 1) alternative to the "priority" red stamp. And now the red stamp is gone, replaced with an electronic service and the green stamp is now 3 days instead of 2. Mail has become much slower overall, because there is much less mail than before, and fast service is not economically viable nor essential on a day-to-day basis. La Poste used to have a dedicated high speed train, equipped with sorting center for overnight mail across the country, now decommissioned, not enough mail to fill a train.

IAmBroom 10mo ago
Agreed. The author seems to think that logistics should be like memory and Moore's Law, but in fact there are very rigid limits on the system. Sea transport isn't going to get any faster - probably ever. Air transport is subsonic. Ground transport is limited to highway speeds for trucks, and about the same in the US for rail (because we suck and can't have nice things). These hard limits mean that the improvements in delivery speeds are asymptotic to a significant, nonzero value. Product delivery throughput is profit to logistics companies; they aren't sitting around just hoping their trucks see all the green lights on their next trip. Storage management is being aided by robots, but no one expects them to start retrieving packages 10x faster than humans. We've had robotic inventory control for at least three decades in many factories, and the possible gains are probably already technically realized.
- HWR_14 10mo ago
  > Sea transport isn't going to get any faster - probably ever. Sea transport could be sped up by 50% with current ships just by turning the engines to full, but that increases the fuel cost dramatically. With an EV ship that fuel cost increase would probably be negligible. The issue with speeding up sea transport is that the ports at either end are already running close to or at capacity, so increasing the number of ships arriving each day just leads to more time at anchor.
  - IAmBroom 10mo ago
    > With an EV ship that fuel cost increase would probably be negligible. The batteries are still charged by fuel onshore. The cost increase would double, plus engine fatigue would increase. How is that negligible?
    - rcxdude 10mo ago
      Electricity is dirt cheap compared to the useful output you get from fuel, even before you consider buying it wholesale and at times when demand is otherwise low.
      - amoshebb 10mo ago
        We should run electric third rail along the Mississippi. It’s already barges with tugs so a few electric tugboats mostly running during daylight hours, we could electrify most of this by just replacing a few tugboats. Make the lines high capacity enough to run along the coasts, and a fleet of tugs could be a huge dispatchable load, slow steaming could free up a lot, and going just a few kts faster would mop up a ton of what may be otherwise curtailed
        HWR_14 10mo ago
        Tugs could afford the weight of a bunch of even lead-acid batteries and go electric without the need for a huge amount of infrastructure going the entire length of the Mississippi.
fennecfoxy 10mo ago
This is not it. Services are bad because month by month year by year, capitalism demands that they produce endless growth. When there's nothing legit left to strip down then they start taking out the floorboards. Exact same thing as shrinkflation; make the product smaller for more money because there's no other way that the execs and shareholders get to jerk each other off this year. And then the next year, and the next. Delivery services/couriers have been having to deliver more packages faster for less money YoYoYoY.
- Tade0 10mo ago
  > make the product smaller for more money because there's no other way that the execs and shareholders get to jerk each other off this year. That's an amusing image but the real reason they're doing it is that often those assets are used as collateral to acquire debt and cannot, under any circumstances, decrease in value. It reached a point where it doesn't matter if the service is shitty or not rendered at all - as long as stock increases in value no one cares.
  - red-iron-pine 10mo ago
    Milton Friedman argued that the sole purpose of a company is to serve its shareholders and lampooned the idea that business has any responsibility for, and I quote, "providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers."
    - Tade0 10mo ago
      That is very in character for him, but I guess he was referring to the case which originally established this idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

by GuB-42 10mo ago

IAmBroom 10mo ago

Agreed. The author seems to think that logistics should be like memory and Moore's Law, but in fact there are very rigid limits on the system. Sea transport isn't going to get any faster - probably ever. Air transport is subsonic. Ground transport is limited to highway speeds for trucks, and about the same in the US for rail (because we suck and can't have nice things). These hard limits mean that the improvements in delivery speeds are asymptotic to a significant, nonzero value. Product delivery throughput is profit to logistics companies; they aren't sitting around just hoping their trucks see all the green lights on their next trip. Storage management is being aided by robots, but no one expects them to start retrieving packages 10x faster than humans. We've had robotic inventory control for at least three decades in many factories, and the possible gains are probably already technically realized.

HWR_14 10mo ago
> Sea transport isn't going to get any faster - probably ever. Sea transport could be sped up by 50% with current ships just by turning the engines to full, but that increases the fuel cost dramatically. With an EV ship that fuel cost increase would probably be negligible. The issue with speeding up sea transport is that the ports at either end are already running close to or at capacity, so increasing the number of ships arriving each day just leads to more time at anchor.
- IAmBroom 10mo ago
  > With an EV ship that fuel cost increase would probably be negligible. The batteries are still charged by fuel onshore. The cost increase would double, plus engine fatigue would increase. How is that negligible?
  - rcxdude 10mo ago
    Electricity is dirt cheap compared to the useful output you get from fuel, even before you consider buying it wholesale and at times when demand is otherwise low.
    - amoshebb 10mo ago
      We should run electric third rail along the Mississippi. It’s already barges with tugs so a few electric tugboats mostly running during daylight hours, we could electrify most of this by just replacing a few tugboats. Make the lines high capacity enough to run along the coasts, and a fleet of tugs could be a huge dispatchable load, slow steaming could free up a lot, and going just a few kts faster would mop up a ton of what may be otherwise curtailed
      - HWR_14 10mo ago
        Tugs could afford the weight of a bunch of even lead-acid batteries and go electric without the need for a huge amount of infrastructure going the entire length of the Mississippi.

fennecfoxy 10mo ago

This is not it. Services are bad because month by month year by year, capitalism demands that they produce endless growth. When there's nothing legit left to strip down then they start taking out the floorboards. Exact same thing as shrinkflation; make the product smaller for more money because there's no other way that the execs and shareholders get to jerk each other off this year. And then the next year, and the next. Delivery services/couriers have been having to deliver more packages faster for less money YoYoYoY.

Tade0 10mo ago
> make the product smaller for more money because there's no other way that the execs and shareholders get to jerk each other off this year. That's an amusing image but the real reason they're doing it is that often those assets are used as collateral to acquire debt and cannot, under any circumstances, decrease in value. It reached a point where it doesn't matter if the service is shitty or not rendered at all - as long as stock increases in value no one cares.
- red-iron-pine 10mo ago
  Milton Friedman argued that the sole purpose of a company is to serve its shareholders and lampooned the idea that business has any responsibility for, and I quote, "providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers."
  - Tade0 10mo ago
    That is very in character for him, but I guess he was referring to the case which originally established this idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.