Even in Amazon’s most automated warehouses, it is still humans that do the demanding physical work of sorting, picking, boxing and loading.
#Arriving today drivers#
If the lives of truck drivers are worrying, the plight of the Amazon warehouse workers that we all depend on is genuinely depressing. This is a development that both truckers and all of us will welcome as progress.įrom the truck, Mims then follows our USB charger deep into the Amazon warehouse system. The future of trucking will be drivers and technology working together, with truckers overseeing the driving and likely taking the wheel for last-mile deliveries to warehouses. When autonomous driving technology evolves to a point where it can be rolled out, the benefits to truck drivers in making their jobs less exhausting and less dangerous should be immense. Since the deregulation of the trucking industry in the 1970s, wages and working conditions for truckers have gotten worse, while the economy’s dependence on trucking has dramatically increased.Īutonomous driving technologies will be a long time coming for trucking, as truckers’ work is highly complex and variable. The job, as it stands today, is underpaid and dangerous.
Turnover among long-haul truck drivers is near 100 percent. Anyone worried that self-driving trucks will be coming soon and will displace the nation’s 3.5 million truck drivers should read Arriving Today. There are too few cranes and container chassis, dock space, warehouse space, and truckers to accommodate the COVID-driven surge in imports.Īs Mims documents, the supply chain problems worsen once the shipping containers clear the port and make it onto the trucks that deliver our goods to sorting and distribution warehouses. Decades of chronic underinvestment in port-related infrastructure will mean that the shipping backlogs will not be addressed, even with ports operating 24-7. Reading Arriving Today helps fill the picture out as to why these ports are so jammed up. The backlog at the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, where 40 percent of the nation’s imported goods arrive, has emerged as one of 2021’s top news stories. The first and longest leg of the supply chain is in a 40-foot container on a ship that can hold up to 12,000 of these boxes. That USB charger that we order will begin its journey on a truck outside the Vietnamese factory and then move to a river barge on its way to more trucks before finally being loaded on a container ship in a shipping port. China still dominates in many areas of electronics, but rising wages in China have pushed manufacturing out to lower-wage countries such as Vietnam.
For electronic goods, that place is almost always Asia. makes little of the physical goods that we consume, almost all the stuff we buy needs to get here from somewhere else. Written by the Wall Street Journal technology columnist Christopher Mims, Arriving Today traces the path of a USB charger from the factory gates in Vietnam to its final destination at our doorway.Īs the U.S.
supply chain is stressed, disrupted and delayed. Nowadays, each of us is a student of supply chain logistics.Īrriving Today is the go-to book to understand why the Asia-to-U.S. We mostly took it for granted that the stuff we ordered on Amazon would show up at our doors in a day or two. Pre-pandemic, the workings of the global supply chain were of little interest to most consumers. Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door-Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher MimsĪrriving Today could not be better timed.
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