[DavidPeiffer]

Not who you responded to, but I've listened to a number of interviews from the former CEO (highly recommend the Odd Lots podcast for his interviews and many other supply chain related conversations). A couple concepts, some details may be a bit off and I'm very open to correction.

There is a lot of administrative cost. IIRC, you might have something like 1 dispatcher for every 50 drivers. You have other people giving quotes via phone, decently high turnover for truck drivers, slow loading warehouses that cause a cascading effect when the driver can't complete all the stops planned for the day, and a strict limit on hours worked for truckers.

Some of the pandemic port congestion was truckers arriving at a port to pick up a particular load, but that load wasn't ready right then. Flexport has an app which basically let drivers on their platform arrive at a port, grab any container that's part of their platform, and take that to the destination. This prevented countless hours of idle trucks in ports.

[bambax]

There was an article I think on HN a couple of days ago, wondering why Uber and Lyft still couldn't turn a profit after all these years, while cab companies are still around and thriving, and wondering where all the money went.

Isn't it possible that tech simply overpromised, and that a couple of guys here and there smoking, typing numbers in spreadsheets on old computers, yelling over the phone and writing things down on post-it notes are simply cheaper and just as "efficient" as an army of AWS EC2 instances spilling out logs on S3 under the supervision of highly-paid engineers and dev op guys?

[coffeebeqn]

If you think about it you still need the same amount of drivers but a lot more administrative staff in the form of a world class engineering team. How could it be cheaper?