I have a lot of ex-military friends who go work for Amazon, and it's not hard to see why after reading this article. Moonshot ideas are exciting, but untangling the nationwide chokehold of shipping failures would be such a tangible, rewarding project to work on.
It's really hard to work with people who don't put effort into their work after being in the military around people who put so much effort into getting things right. I'm not saying time equal effort, either, I'm a clock watcher at work, but at least when I'm working I focus on the goal at hand and I actually try to think about the problems I'll face after I finish some task, so that I'll do it more robustly. The military doesn't have a monopoly on this, I've met several great people who have never served, and there are many ways in which the military sucks (don't get me started). However, it's pretty unrivaled when it comes to people who try hard and perfect their craft, imo.
The military might also be one of the only other places where you deal with the physical scale and speed of Walmart. They train to go set up a medium-sized city on 24hours notice. I can see why a logistics company like Amazon would see that as valuable!
Yep, and logistics may not be glamorous but it does have interesting problems to solve w/ a lot of real-world impact.
Better world-wide logistics doesn't just mean getting your latest shiny gadget on time either: it also means better and more robust response times in humanitarian disasters or other serious situations.
Amazon is executing on an insane level. It’s kind of mind blowing how big it’s getting.
I see a lot of pundits talking about other retailers catching up. And I know that’s true to a degree. But I think they’re only catching up in some areas. Meanwhile you have Amazon building out a whole delivery fleet for their next moat.
Not surprising given the quote "Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics." by General Robert H. Barrow (then Commandant of the Marine Corps)
This is actually part of the shipping failure. Does Amazon have different ports and different workers unloading things? Read the article and you will see the answer is no.
What Amazon has bought is priority within the massive shipping complex (with ships and port both controlled by the 3-4 cartels). There's nothing they've accomplished here except get an immunity to the problems that actually means the delays get shunted onto other organizations trying to get their stuff. Basically, the very largest monopolies are protecting each other and screwing the medium-sized and little guy operator.
Is Amazon using the Port of Oakland when LA is ultra-busy? No, Amazon stuff is going quick through LA and this automatically means other stuff is going slower.
Amazon is such a remarkable company. I may have underestimated their long-term prospects. I've been skeptical they would be able to maintain a monopoly for a few decades, but even without Jeff Bezos at the helm, they got enough foresight to continue to expand their operations nonstop.
"The seasonal workers are unloading and loading, picking and packing at more than 250 new facilities Amazon says it’s opened in the U.S. just in 2021..."
250 new warehouse facilities opened in the United States in 2021. Five new facilties per state? And, obviously, some states would only have gotten 1 or 2 (or maybe less) - so some states would have been getting 10-15....
That just seems like a suspiciously high number to me, I'm not sure if I buy it.
> “Who else would think of putting something going into an obscure port in Washington, and then trucking it down to L.A.? Most people are thinking, well, just bring the ship into L.A. But then you’re experiencing those two-week and three-weeks delay. So Amazon’s really taken advantage of some of the niche strategies I believe that the market needs to employ,”
>They are doing over 10,000 containers per month of the small- and medium-sized Chinese exporters. Amazon’s volume as an ocean vendor — that’s right, you heard me correct, they’re considered an ocean vendor — would rank them in the top five transportation companies in the Trans Pacific,” Ferreira said.
This also doesn't add up. 10,000 containers is a single medium sized container ships.
> This season, a handful of other major retailers — Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, Ikea and Target — are also chartering their own vessels to bypass the busiest ports and get their goods unloaded sooner.
This article sounds more like a PR piece for Amazon. At this rate, I wouldn't be surprised if in the coming weeks Amazon singlehandedly saves Christmas.
I agree, everyone was thinking this. Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, and other giganta-corps can afford to charter their own ships and such. Your local mom and pop are screwed. Also worth noting, there were reports of the backlog of the ships on the US West Coast was getting smaller. Those ships are now just stuck off the shore of Mexico, Japan, and Taiwan.
First, this an article from CNBC, so I don't think the actual strategy is as simple as this (its coming from an external freight analyst).
Second, my understanding is that Amazon is essentially going to eat into its already thin profits to pull this off. So this is essentially a branding move - aka "we could deliver your christmas presents this year, trust us, others cant, why would you ever trust them?"
Coos Bay, Oregon (US west coast) is a deep water port with nothing really shipping in and out of it. It used to be busy when timber was being harvested madly and shipped out, but not anymore. The port is literally begging for shipping action.
The one negative? No major rail or road system in and out for delivery to the I-5 corridor.
Amazon probably has enough trade to commission an entire ship unlike most companies who are using containers, and why they can divert to other ports which is whats being reported here. TLDR they have the size to be flexible in logistics.
Sometimes you need to get someone with enough general knowledge to act as a troubleshooter though, like this chap.
https://youtu.be/OBu5ewmEP2E?t=27
Stagnation occurs everywhere, people get comfortable which is why some on here big up those with Military experience because the military will get you out of your comfort zone.
Unions often but not always drive stagnation, rarely do they come up with innovation because some of the bigger unions work across a variety of different companies or organisations and just work on pay and conditions which is sometimes harmful to a business during its life.
Unions can have their place against bad bosses, but a union which could work well is one that is operating in just a business or organisation and isn't solely focussed on pay and conditions, they should drive innovation and efficiency or work with innovation & efficiency because there are times management and boards can stagnate and then businesses organisation can decline.
Covid has certainly exposed the lack of stock holding in the Just In Time (JIT) system of doing business.
Dell is another business to look at when he was starting up in the early years, he used his contracts to shift stock holding onto the suppliers to keep "inventory" at the right levels for accountancy purposes so suppliers had trucks loaded with goods waiting in goods in to unload. He also recycled returns which he got into court trouble with, ie flogging components from returns in new pc's.
Quite often you will find businesses bending rules somewhere though and it could be anywhere, contracts and accountancy practices can be common but not the only way to get the books looking good.
What would be awesome is if instead of this we gave a fuck ton of money to the post office and tried to solve this problem for everyone and also eroded amazon's competitive advantage. That's the sort of infra we need, it's frankly embarrassing that we're not looking at amazon as a country and thinking "why don't we just enable remote commerce like this for everyone as a societal good".
P.S. Let the post office do banking too so we can take some wall street's pie as well.
It’s great wishful thinking but I really dont think our government can pull it off at this point. Maybe 30 years ago but not in today’s environment of everyone trying to screw the other side over at all costs.
Personally im happy we at least have one company who can get me stuff in a decent amount of time. But i gets it’s fun to throw out f the big company the government should do that. It’s not like it took thousands of well paid people years and years of work to develop that supply chain so im sure it’s as simple as “let the government do it”.
It’s the same in every Uber/Lyft comment thread. “It’s just a simple backend app why do they need so many people”. “I could do that in a year with a small team”. Yeah have fun dealing with every single state, city, country’s different regulations and requirements. “It’s JUST an app”.
I realize a lot of engineers have this problem. They oversimplify everything except the code they are working on and dismiss it as easy or unnecessary. I did early in my career as well but im surprised how prevent it is here.
The post office is unfortunately vulnerable to political pressure. Both from their unions, and from the federal government.
Imagine the nightmare of Pete Buttigieg sending down dictates to the post office as he tries to build political career. Look at what’s happening in CA right now: just park the ships far enough offshore that you can’t see them and then claim the problem is solved because there aren’t as many ships waiting, charge the people who are already losing money because they can’t get their containers out of the port fines, and punish them further, claiming this as a political win because it punishes the businesses.
Absolutely no thank you. This is an actual problem that needs real solutions, not politicians grubbing power.
Amazon doesn't send me shit I don't order and don't want. More than 95% of my mail is junk mail and there's nothing I can do about it. Circulating what the vast majority of people would consider as junk is the only thing really keeping the USPS in operation. Well that and they don't have to turn a profit and also have the protection of law to keep them going.
Counterargument: as someone who doesn't live in the US, I personally benefit from the international logistics infrastructure built by private US companies fed mostly by demand from US private citizens. But I don't benefit at all from well-funded US public domestic logistics services.
International logistics can't really be solved at the national level, because the interests involved aren't national/unilateral — they're international/multilateral.
(You could maybe make an argument for treatied multilateral investment into public logistics infrastructure tied to said treaties, maybe led by the Universal Postal Union — something similar to the Paris Agreement, but with global-economic goals rather than global-ecological ones. But that's a very different thing from just saying that one country's citizens should demand their own government nationalize a particular service.)
Unless the Post office has some strong incentive to compete, such as a private company, there’s no reason to believe the Post office would be even half as effective as Amazon.
Amazons incentive, whether you agree with it or not, is to grow their company and show value to stakeholders. It’s quantitative numbers. They can certainly lie, but at the end of the day the market will punish them.
The USPS is driven by what incentives? Politics? Future pension obligations?
In reality, government ends up being a bloated mess, waste of tax payer dollar. Don’t believe me?
How many campaigns have we seen just in our own lifetimes of candidates promising “change”, “making America great”, fixing healthcare, infrastructure, reforming education. One of the two parties does win every election. Fundamentally, what has changed?
Regulating private companies might be the answer. But government has proven itself to NOT be the answer.
> What would be awesome is if instead of this we gave a fuck ton of money to the post office and tried to solve this problem for everyone and also eroded amazon's competitive advantage.
Amazon solved a problem and reaped a reward.
Your response to that is to take everyone’s money, and give it to someone else in the hopes that they can solve the problem. Sure, I suppose, no reason for it not to work.
On the other hand “why don’t we just enable remote commerce like this for everyone as a societal good” is beyond simplistic and naive. Amazon is very good at what they do and what they do is not easy.
Post offices in Europe did banking for many years. Most of them have been broken up now though.
I think there should be an even more general effort made to remove the competitive advantage that comes from simply being big. Small enterprises suffer from the lack of economy of scale. As a private individual or sole trader it is more expensive for me to send a parcel than it is for a large company, this gives the incumbent an advantage.
Amazon uses USPS for small and rural cities. Only USPS delivers my Amazon packages at my business. Amazon vans delivers at my home. My business & my home is 20 miles apart.
Great for Amazon, bad for everybody else. You think Amazon is going to share that cargo space with competitors? Absolutely not. While other retail stores run dry on stock because they're all competing over the same shipping lanes, Amazon will have plenty of supply with its own fleet of ships and planes. The world takeover of Big Tech just took another leap forward.
That is zero-sum thinking. It's my impression from the article that by building their own stuff they are adding to total capacity, at least to some extent.
For example, imagine how bad it would be if Amazon were competing for space with all the other container ships going to LA, instead of going to another port.
Or suppose they were competing for cargo containers instead of building their own?
There are probably still bottlenecks in different places, though.
Who's to say they don't turn around and sell the space and infrastructure as a service. Clearly there's a premium to be paid to get goods into the states by non-traditional means.
> Great for Amazon, bad for everybody else. You think Amazon is going to share that cargo space with competitors? Absolutely not.
Well, think about it. This is almost like how AWS started. Build infrastructure that can support yourself, then productize it, and sell it. Private ports, private airstrips, private boats, private planes… a container is a container!
I have and claim zero expertise in this area but it seems that there is an emerging trend towards supply chain contraction with hard goods. Certainly the lesson of the last 24 months seems to be that lack of strategic risk management in the supply chain can cripple you when things go south. This was always obvious conceptually but the discipline seemed lacking.
Yet software and software-based services seem to be going the opposite direction. Certainly supply chain security issues are beginning to surface but I don't see anyone contracting the dependency graph with stacks on stacks of SaaS products.
News to me. I bought a pair of headphones in early September and they still haven't shipped. Since then I've had chats with Amazon support thrice, and the first two times I was lied to with "it's just being packed for shipping now".
The third time I was given $20 in Amazon credit and told that a ticket had been lodged about my purchase. That was a week ago, and it still hasn't shipped.
I could easily have cancelled and bought another product, but I'm pissed off that they sold me a product they didn't have, and now I'm invested in seeing how this plays out.
Companies can move faster because they don’t spend public money so have fewer rules to follow.
If we let USPS function in the same way Amazon does (eg scrapping unprofitable activity) you’d see changes but USPS is providing a service for the public good.
Plus arguably politicians don’t benefit from creating an amazing USPS though who knows why.
“Who else would think of putting something going into an obscure port in Washington, and then trucking it down to L.A.? Most people are thinking, well, just bring the ship into L.A. But then you’re experiencing those two-week and three-weeks delay. So Amazon’s really taken advantage of some of the niche strategies I believe that the market needs to employ,” Ferreira said.
Well that's exactly the thinking that created FedEx (and which "right thinking" people, like the founder's professor, "knew" would obviously never work. Until it did.
If you remember the job is about results rather than simply repeating existing rituals and habits, this kind of solution becomes obvious. Most people can't be bothered to live beyond rituals and habits.
Alternate reading, Amazon is worsening the supply chain chaos by buying up transport.
I guess it depends on whether you are waiting for a finished article that is already produced and sold from Amazon, or your waiting for a supplier (of a supplier, of a supplier...) to deliver some intermediate part to the factory that makes what you want or something that isn't sold on Amazon.
What makes the problem tricky is the interconnectedness, so I feel any "solution" that comes from one source is likely just adding to the problem, like "solving" a bus getting stuck in traffic by taking the car instead. The collective solution is more people on the bus, and the individual solution makes the wider problem worse.
You can easily argue their hegemony lasted at least 60 years.
Amazon's public IPO was 1997. We are now ~20+ years in to their life as a public company.
How do you view Amazon if you believe they have another 40 years of unfettered leadership? How big does this company get? There are very few structural limits to their growth other than this logistics issue. (Ford was hardly unfettered, but as a public company performed much better, over a longer period of time, than the other auto makers).
This will work well for some domestic transportation and land locked rural areas, but for everybody else... I don't think this will do anything. It just sounds like a massive expense.
I live right next to perhaps the largest inland port in the US and cargo here doesn't sit for very long because the only options are air, trucks, and trains and there is anywhere for excess cargo to sit. This is called the inter-modal system of logistics, the ability to rapidly move shipping contains between air and train via short truck routes or immediately onto trucks for long haul truck distribution. In this case the Amazon plan can skip sea ports and directly reach inland ports that don't have congestion. But, that will only work efficient for domestic transport.
The solution ignores the cause of the problem for sea ports, the point of congestion to which they are likely a massive contributor.
The problem for the congestion is that ports have run out of space, mostly from empty containers taking space needed by filled containers on ships. This problem is not a labor shortage, tracking inefficiency, or distribution failure.
This problem is intentional and created by the vendors most severely impacted from the result. Empty shipping containers take up space and have to be stored somewhere. If not at a port then at a vendor's warehouse clogging operations closer to the business. Parking contains costs money. Whether you are going to park them at a port or your own warehouse there is an expense to that lost space.
Parking at the port was, until about a month ago, tremendously cheaper. It takes fuel to drive that empty box around and it takes money to pay for a filled warehouse of your empty containers that is needed for actual operations. So just leave it at the port for a massive discount.
Parking at the ports worked well... until there was a massive pandemic and everybody starting shopping online, even from places like WalMart.
The Port of Los Angeles is solving this problem on their end with rate increases that increase per day (or week, I don't remember). I suspect their neighbor at the Port of Long Beach is following on that plan as well. Only time will tell if this actually solves the problem at those ports. Even the mere announcement of this price hike resulted in one vendor removing 5000 empty containers. That is a mind boggling amount of space, and from just one company.
[+] [-] tbihl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ok_dad|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curiousllama|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ineedasername|4 years ago|reply
Better world-wide logistics doesn't just mean getting your latest shiny gadget on time either: it also means better and more robust response times in humanitarian disasters or other serious situations.
[+] [-] thathndude|4 years ago|reply
I see a lot of pundits talking about other retailers catching up. And I know that’s true to a degree. But I think they’re only catching up in some areas. Meanwhile you have Amazon building out a whole delivery fleet for their next moat.
[+] [-] petschge|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gumby|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lyime|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtdev|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] joe_the_user|4 years ago|reply
What Amazon has bought is priority within the massive shipping complex (with ships and port both controlled by the 3-4 cartels). There's nothing they've accomplished here except get an immunity to the problems that actually means the delays get shunted onto other organizations trying to get their stuff. Basically, the very largest monopolies are protecting each other and screwing the medium-sized and little guy operator.
Is Amazon using the Port of Oakland when LA is ultra-busy? No, Amazon stuff is going quick through LA and this automatically means other stuff is going slower.
[+] [-] DantesKite|4 years ago|reply
Color me completely impressed.
[+] [-] ghshephard|4 years ago|reply
"The seasonal workers are unloading and loading, picking and packing at more than 250 new facilities Amazon says it’s opened in the U.S. just in 2021..."
250 new warehouse facilities opened in the United States in 2021. Five new facilties per state? And, obviously, some states would only have gotten 1 or 2 (or maybe less) - so some states would have been getting 10-15....
That just seems like a suspiciously high number to me, I'm not sure if I buy it.
[+] [-] EMM_386|4 years ago|reply
But Amazon has now gotten into the airline business, with a purchase of 11 Boeing 767s.
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-makes-its-first-aircr...
[+] [-] ghostly_s|4 years ago|reply
What? Surely, everyone is thinking of this?
[+] [-] treis|4 years ago|reply
This also doesn't add up. 10,000 containers is a single medium sized container ships.
[+] [-] judge2020|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbavaria|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rootusrootus|4 years ago|reply
Exactly my thought. Amazon hardly has a monopoly on good ideas. They may have a culture that rewards impulsive strategies, though.
[+] [-] Forge36|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Consultant32452|4 years ago|reply
https://www-freightwaves-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.frei...
[+] [-] mbesto|4 years ago|reply
Second, my understanding is that Amazon is essentially going to eat into its already thin profits to pull this off. So this is essentially a branding move - aka "we could deliver your christmas presents this year, trust us, others cant, why would you ever trust them?"
[+] [-] pugworthy|4 years ago|reply
But are they doing this?
Coos Bay, Oregon (US west coast) is a deep water port with nothing really shipping in and out of it. It used to be busy when timber was being harvested madly and shipped out, but not anymore. The port is literally begging for shipping action.
The one negative? No major rail or road system in and out for delivery to the I-5 corridor.
[+] [-] Terry_Roll|4 years ago|reply
Amazon probably has enough trade to commission an entire ship unlike most companies who are using containers, and why they can divert to other ports which is whats being reported here. TLDR they have the size to be flexible in logistics.
Sometimes you need to get someone with enough general knowledge to act as a troubleshooter though, like this chap. https://youtu.be/OBu5ewmEP2E?t=27
Stagnation occurs everywhere, people get comfortable which is why some on here big up those with Military experience because the military will get you out of your comfort zone.
Unions often but not always drive stagnation, rarely do they come up with innovation because some of the bigger unions work across a variety of different companies or organisations and just work on pay and conditions which is sometimes harmful to a business during its life.
Unions can have their place against bad bosses, but a union which could work well is one that is operating in just a business or organisation and isn't solely focussed on pay and conditions, they should drive innovation and efficiency or work with innovation & efficiency because there are times management and boards can stagnate and then businesses organisation can decline.
Covid has certainly exposed the lack of stock holding in the Just In Time (JIT) system of doing business.
Dell is another business to look at when he was starting up in the early years, he used his contracts to shift stock holding onto the suppliers to keep "inventory" at the right levels for accountancy purposes so suppliers had trucks loaded with goods waiting in goods in to unload. He also recycled returns which he got into court trouble with, ie flogging components from returns in new pc's.
Quite often you will find businesses bending rules somewhere though and it could be anywhere, contracts and accountancy practices can be common but not the only way to get the books looking good.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] errantspark|4 years ago|reply
P.S. Let the post office do banking too so we can take some wall street's pie as well.
[+] [-] bogota|4 years ago|reply
Personally im happy we at least have one company who can get me stuff in a decent amount of time. But i gets it’s fun to throw out f the big company the government should do that. It’s not like it took thousands of well paid people years and years of work to develop that supply chain so im sure it’s as simple as “let the government do it”.
It’s the same in every Uber/Lyft comment thread. “It’s just a simple backend app why do they need so many people”. “I could do that in a year with a small team”. Yeah have fun dealing with every single state, city, country’s different regulations and requirements. “It’s JUST an app”.
I realize a lot of engineers have this problem. They oversimplify everything except the code they are working on and dismiss it as easy or unnecessary. I did early in my career as well but im surprised how prevent it is here.
[+] [-] thepasswordis|4 years ago|reply
Imagine the nightmare of Pete Buttigieg sending down dictates to the post office as he tries to build political career. Look at what’s happening in CA right now: just park the ships far enough offshore that you can’t see them and then claim the problem is solved because there aren’t as many ships waiting, charge the people who are already losing money because they can’t get their containers out of the port fines, and punish them further, claiming this as a political win because it punishes the businesses.
Absolutely no thank you. This is an actual problem that needs real solutions, not politicians grubbing power.
[+] [-] cronix|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derefr|4 years ago|reply
International logistics can't really be solved at the national level, because the interests involved aren't national/unilateral — they're international/multilateral.
(You could maybe make an argument for treatied multilateral investment into public logistics infrastructure tied to said treaties, maybe led by the Universal Postal Union — something similar to the Paris Agreement, but with global-economic goals rather than global-ecological ones. But that's a very different thing from just saying that one country's citizens should demand their own government nationalize a particular service.)
[+] [-] ozzythecat|4 years ago|reply
Amazons incentive, whether you agree with it or not, is to grow their company and show value to stakeholders. It’s quantitative numbers. They can certainly lie, but at the end of the day the market will punish them.
The USPS is driven by what incentives? Politics? Future pension obligations?
In reality, government ends up being a bloated mess, waste of tax payer dollar. Don’t believe me?
How many campaigns have we seen just in our own lifetimes of candidates promising “change”, “making America great”, fixing healthcare, infrastructure, reforming education. One of the two parties does win every election. Fundamentally, what has changed?
Regulating private companies might be the answer. But government has proven itself to NOT be the answer.
[+] [-] JackFr|4 years ago|reply
Amazon solved a problem and reaped a reward.
Your response to that is to take everyone’s money, and give it to someone else in the hopes that they can solve the problem. Sure, I suppose, no reason for it not to work.
On the other hand “why don’t we just enable remote commerce like this for everyone as a societal good” is beyond simplistic and naive. Amazon is very good at what they do and what they do is not easy.
[+] [-] kwhitefoot|4 years ago|reply
I think there should be an even more general effort made to remove the competitive advantage that comes from simply being big. Small enterprises suffer from the lack of economy of scale. As a private individual or sole trader it is more expensive for me to send a parcel than it is for a large company, this gives the incumbent an advantage.
[+] [-] newhotelowner|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Thorentis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skybrian|4 years ago|reply
For example, imagine how bad it would be if Amazon were competing for space with all the other container ships going to LA, instead of going to another port.
Or suppose they were competing for cargo containers instead of building their own?
There are probably still bottlenecks in different places, though.
[+] [-] ericcholis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hbosch|4 years ago|reply
Well, think about it. This is almost like how AWS started. Build infrastructure that can support yourself, then productize it, and sell it. Private ports, private airstrips, private boats, private planes… a container is a container!
[+] [-] jcims|4 years ago|reply
Yet software and software-based services seem to be going the opposite direction. Certainly supply chain security issues are beginning to surface but I don't see anyone contracting the dependency graph with stacks on stacks of SaaS products.
[+] [-] markdown|4 years ago|reply
The third time I was given $20 in Amazon credit and told that a ticket had been lodged about my purchase. That was a week ago, and it still hasn't shipped.
I could easily have cancelled and bought another product, but I'm pissed off that they sold me a product they didn't have, and now I'm invested in seeing how this plays out.
[+] [-] Waterluvian|4 years ago|reply
Can you helicopter airlift 40’ crates off a ship?
[+] [-] wayanon|4 years ago|reply
If we let USPS function in the same way Amazon does (eg scrapping unprofitable activity) you’d see changes but USPS is providing a service for the public good.
Plus arguably politicians don’t benefit from creating an amazing USPS though who knows why.
[+] [-] xyzzy21|4 years ago|reply
Well that's exactly the thinking that created FedEx (and which "right thinking" people, like the founder's professor, "knew" would obviously never work. Until it did.
If you remember the job is about results rather than simply repeating existing rituals and habits, this kind of solution becomes obvious. Most people can't be bothered to live beyond rituals and habits.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|4 years ago|reply
I guess it depends on whether you are waiting for a finished article that is already produced and sold from Amazon, or your waiting for a supplier (of a supplier, of a supplier...) to deliver some intermediate part to the factory that makes what you want or something that isn't sold on Amazon.
What makes the problem tricky is the interconnectedness, so I feel any "solution" that comes from one source is likely just adding to the problem, like "solving" a bus getting stuck in traffic by taking the car instead. The collective solution is more people on the bus, and the individual solution makes the wider problem worse.
[+] [-] jimnotgym|4 years ago|reply
I know people on here might think it is wrong to 'punish success', but how is a small business supposed to compete?
[+] [-] jmacd|4 years ago|reply
You can easily argue their hegemony lasted at least 60 years.
Amazon's public IPO was 1997. We are now ~20+ years in to their life as a public company.
How do you view Amazon if you believe they have another 40 years of unfettered leadership? How big does this company get? There are very few structural limits to their growth other than this logistics issue. (Ford was hardly unfettered, but as a public company performed much better, over a longer period of time, than the other auto makers).
[+] [-] austincheney|4 years ago|reply
I live right next to perhaps the largest inland port in the US and cargo here doesn't sit for very long because the only options are air, trucks, and trains and there is anywhere for excess cargo to sit. This is called the inter-modal system of logistics, the ability to rapidly move shipping contains between air and train via short truck routes or immediately onto trucks for long haul truck distribution. In this case the Amazon plan can skip sea ports and directly reach inland ports that don't have congestion. But, that will only work efficient for domestic transport.
The solution ignores the cause of the problem for sea ports, the point of congestion to which they are likely a massive contributor.
The problem for the congestion is that ports have run out of space, mostly from empty containers taking space needed by filled containers on ships. This problem is not a labor shortage, tracking inefficiency, or distribution failure.
This problem is intentional and created by the vendors most severely impacted from the result. Empty shipping containers take up space and have to be stored somewhere. If not at a port then at a vendor's warehouse clogging operations closer to the business. Parking contains costs money. Whether you are going to park them at a port or your own warehouse there is an expense to that lost space.
Parking at the port was, until about a month ago, tremendously cheaper. It takes fuel to drive that empty box around and it takes money to pay for a filled warehouse of your empty containers that is needed for actual operations. So just leave it at the port for a massive discount.
Parking at the ports worked well... until there was a massive pandemic and everybody starting shopping online, even from places like WalMart.
The Port of Los Angeles is solving this problem on their end with rate increases that increase per day (or week, I don't remember). I suspect their neighbor at the Port of Long Beach is following on that plan as well. Only time will tell if this actually solves the problem at those ports. Even the mere announcement of this price hike resulted in one vendor removing 5000 empty containers. That is a mind boggling amount of space, and from just one company.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Wolfenstein98k|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] authed|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hisyam|4 years ago|reply