[ChilledTonic]

Fair points, but I think you're responding to an argument my piece isn't quite making.

The complaint isn't that logistics should follow Moore's Law or that we need same-day delivery for everything. It's that we're paying more for objectively worse service than we had a decade ago. Services aren't "adapting to consumer needs", its just objective decay being masked as optimization.

The Lettre Verte example actually reinforces the point: service got slower, then slower again, not because physics demanded it but because maintaining the previous standard became inconvenient. The dedicated sorting train wasn't decommissioned because trains stopped working; it was decommissioned because the institution decided the mail didn't matter enough to run it.

Nobody expects sea transport to break the sound barrier. But when 73% of consumers experience an outright delivery failure in a three-month period, that's not bumping against hard physical limits. That's drivers marking packages "delivered" that weren't, because lying clears the route faster. That's solvable. We're just in a system that doesn't incentive fixing it.

The asymptotic argument would land if we were approaching some theoretical maximum. We're not. We're sliding backward from where we were, while costs rise. I'm not asking for magic, I'm asking where went the reliability we already had, at the prices we're already paying.

[Denzel]

> It's that we're paying more for objectively worse service than we had a decade ago.

> I'm not asking for magic, I'm asking where went the reliability we already had, at the prices we're already paying.

My god thank you! My partner and I have been talking about this for the past 2 years in the context of food service and delivery service industry.

Greater than 50% of all our restaurant orders are straight up wrong or missing items, whether it’s from local places, chains, or fast food restaurants.

The unreliability is staggering, especially because we’re paying so much more!

It’s gotten so bad that we’re done with certain services and establishments for good now, or we make sure to QC before leaving the restaurant to ensure everything is in the bag.

Even more ironic, this happened a couple weeks ago at Texas Roadhouse — the same restaurant I worked in decades ago as a teenager, so I remember the process we had to go through for to-go orders.

First, we’d take the order over the phone. We’d repeat the order back to the customer to confirm everything (1st QC). When the food came up in the window, we’d pack the food in bags, crossing off every item on the receipt before stapling it to the bag (2nd QC). When the customer came to pick up their food, we’d have to take every box out of the bag, show the customer the food, and confirm that everything they expected in their order was there (3rd QC).

No customer. Every left. With an incorrect order. Simple.

That process is gone now. We paid more and came home missing my partner’s meal. Wtf.

[ChilledTonic]

I hear a lot of stories like this; but the question I always come back to is - what incentive is their to discard the working system? In your case its the 3qc step process, why is that just gone now?

The more I look into these systematic changes the less sense it makes.

[sam1714]

Logistics requires lots of humans, and worse, humans traveling. That's inherently risky and a difficult physical job. People simply would rather have an information economy job like a software developer where the danger is a severe coffee spill.

The humans who do work in logistics have been demanding higher standards of living and therefore better pay and healthcare in first-world countries.

UPS drivers are unionized in the US and their cost to the company (salary + healthcare + pension) is now over $170,000/year each.

[IAmBroom]

OK, but when I read your article, I see complaints that deliveries haven't sped up enough... along with some bizarre math claims:

> At its fastest, a message (Abraham Lincoln’s Inaugural Address) was carried between St. Joseph and Sacramento in only 7 days and 17 hours.

> With modern technology, the USPS estimates that a similar sized letter would take a maximum of five days. With planes, trains, and automobiles available to us, we’ve shaved off about two days.

> Two days. In 165 years.

You are comparing the best the Pony Express could do with the worst the USPS estimates could happen, and then rounding 2.7 down to 2 to make it look even worse.

But the improvement is really 5 days 17 hours (most mail is delivered in 2 business days), or nearly three times faster.

And your final statement reiterates this numeric fallacy... which again sounds like you think the problem is that things haven't improved enough in 165 years. I believe you wanted to make another point, but focused on something else instead.

[pif]

> The Lettre Verte example actually reinforces the point: service got slower, then slower again, not because physics demanded it but because maintaining the previous standard became inconvenient.

Well, it did indeed become inconvenient... for the customers!

Rule no. 0 of economics states that a decreasing demand yields decreasing prices, but rule no. 1 concerns fixed costs: when demand is too low, each customer has to bear a larger share of them.

[lmm]

Are we paying more? Or are we being lied to about the rate of inflation?

[IAmBroom]

A completely different topic.