[GuB-42]

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]

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]

> 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]

> 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]

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]

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]

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.

[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.

[smelendez]

I don't know anything about Texas Roadhouse but in general I'd say a lot of processes got sloppy after technological changes repeatedly added complexity.

Decades ago, when OP worked there, I'm guessing Texas Roadhouse only took takeout orders over the phone and in person, and didn't receive that many. It was less common to order takeout from sit-down restaurants. There was one procedure, the steps made logical sense, it could be implemented entirely within the restaurant without a lot of IT. And it worked, and it probably didn't take that much staff time on a normal night.

Now, you can still order by phone, but I see you can also at least order online for pickup, order via UberEats for delivery, and order via DoorDash for pickup or delivery. They've likely added these various modes over time, and I'm sure each has its own subtly different procedure reflecting various IT systems nobody in the restaurant has any control over.

The three-part QC process might still work for phone orders but those are probably rare. Orders picked up by the actual end customer could use a two-part QC process, verifying the items against the receipt and presenting them for visual inspection. But orders getting picked up by a delivery person can practically only get a quick check as they're loaded in the bag, because the delivery person is in a hurry and won't want to stand there and help check the receipt against what's in the bag. They also may not be able to effectively do so if they don't know the menu (for instance, there are several sides that could be "steamed vegetables" at a quick glance https://www.texasroadhouse.com/location/457-countrysideil/di...) and aren't sufficiently fluent in English.

Rather than have a complex flowchart for the overworked staff maximizing QC for every case, it's very easy to default to the minimum which works in every case, which is hurriedly comparing the menu items that come out of the kitchen to what's on the receipt as they're loaded into the bag. It's very easy to get this wrong, especially if you're overworked and distracted and loading multiple bags at once.

[lotsofpulp]

It’s more expensive labor (for the same quality) and fewer redundant staff. I suspect demographics trends are part of the reason.

[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.

[lmm]

Hardly. Whether we are paying more for less is intimately linked to whether we are, in fact, paying more.

[citrin_ru]

> Sea transport isn't going to get any faster - probably ever.

It seems to me that modern freight ships are optimized for capacity/cost ratio and not for speed - hull shape is very close to a box with a short bow/stern attached. I'm not an expert but it looks like if you make the hull longer and a bow/stern narrow you can go faster. Military ships are optimized for speed and their hull shape is not a box.

[fennecfoxy]

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]

> 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]

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]

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.