Arriving Today

From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy

Christopher Mims

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780062987969
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Retail Industry
• Index: Business

Shortlisted for the 2021 Porchlight Business Book Awards, Current Events & Public Affairs

The Wall Street Journal technology columnist reveals the fascinating story behind the misleadingly simple phrase shoppers take for granted—"Arriving Today"—in this eye-opening investigation into the new rules of online commerce, transportation, and supply chain management.

We are at a tipping point in retail history. While consumers are profiting from the convenience of instant gratification, rapidly advancing technologies are transforming the way goods are transported and displacing workers in ways never before seen.

In Arriving Today, Christopher Mims goes deep, far, and wide to uncover how a single product, from creation to delivery, weaves its way from a factory on the other side of the world to our doorstep. He analyzes the evolving technologies and management strategies necessary to keep the product moving to fulfill consumers' demand for "arriving today" gratification. Mims reveals a world where the only thing moving faster than goods in an Amazon warehouse is the rate at which an entire industry is being gutted and rebuilt by innovation and mass shifts in human labor practices. He goes behind the scenes to uncover the paradoxes in this shift—into the world's busiest port, the cabin of an 18-wheeler, and Amazon's automated warehouses—to explore how the promise of "arriving today" is fulfilled through a balletic dance between humans and machines.

The scope of such large-scale innovation and expended energy is equal parts inspiring, enlightening, and horrifying. As he offers a glimpse of our future, Mims asks us to consider the system's vulnerability and its resilience, and who shoulders the burden, as we hurtle toward a fully automated system—and what it will mean when we are there.

Chapter 1

The Gathering Storm

On an equatorially sunny day in southern Vietnam, our banana-yellow speedboat carves a broad white wake into the Saigon River. Five of us—one pilot, one sailor, two port executives, and me, ever the hapless, bespectacled journalist—shout at one another over the roar of the engine and the wind. We race a lazy current carrying lilies and the occasional glob of trash, tracing the river’s sinuous curves, headed for its terminus in the South China Sea.

Jan Bandstra, a vigorous, middle-aged Dutchman who speaks “six or seven” languages and has managed ports in as many countries, observes that this must have been the same view American GIs had as they patrolled in PT boats, exchanging machine-gun fire with Vietcong hidden in the dense jungle that still lines both shores.

Soon after leaving the dock, we encounter barges with broad, V-shaped prows transporting shipping containers between small inland ports and their larger cousin abutting the ocean. We slalom between them, something nimble and out of place in this expanse of large things moving implacably.

The Leviathan that is the global economy has many hearts, each one a complex of ports, rail hubs, and highways pushing almost everything we consume across oceans and continents. We are in the antechamber of one of them. I am here for an audience with giants—cranes as big as buildings, ships as big as skyscrapers, conurbations of stacked shipping containers like cities unto themselves.

Meanwhile, a storm is brewing.

The day before, on January 20, 2020, the first case of coronavirus was confirmed in the United States. Three days after that, Wuhan, population 11 million, the capital of Hubei Province and the most important city in central China, will be locked down completely as the Chinese government races to enact the most draconian quarantine in history, including a complete prohibition of movement of anything but critical goods and persons. Eventually, it will expand to include all of Hubei Province and other areas, encompassing more than 60 million people.

Despite China’s warnings, not to mention decades of research by public health specialists and intelligence analysts all over the world, by March 2020 the failure to prepare for the coming pandemic on the part of nearly all governments outside of East Asia will cause global infection rates to skyrocket—in some countries, again and again. An explosion of illness in Italy and a near collapse of its health system, anecdotes about even the young and healthy being cut down in the prime of their lives, the knowledge that there may be no cure in time to save anyone, lead to another sort of pandemic, one of fear.

Gripped by a universal anxiety of a sort unknown since the capitulation of France and the specter of a fully Nazified United States of Europe, citizens will be told that they will have to stay home, that anyone is a potential vector, that they should prepare to “shelter in place” as if what is coming is not an invisible microbe but a hurricane, or the fallout from a nuclear blast.

And, oh, add the authorities, almost as an afterthought: you should probably have enough groceries to last for at least a couple of weeks.

Confronted by the stark reality of their powerlessness to do anything else and primed by a lifetime of consumerism into thinking the answer to the existential dread at the core of their being is to buy more stuff, Americans, along with everyone else on Earth with the means to do so, will go shopping.

They will buy things that make sense, like pasta, and things that do not, like adult onesies. Millions will read and for the first time take the advice of preppers, a subculture of survivalists whose well-stocked underground bunkers, remote “bug-out” cabins, and belief in the imminent collapse of civilization bring their paranoia into vogue every time it seems the thin veneer of civilization will crack open to reveal the Hobbesian reality coursing just beneath its surface.

There will be a run on beans and eggs and milk. Hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes will become so valuable that black markets for them arise overnight, penetrating the national consciousness as pandemic profiteers gouge the quavering masses on Amazon, only to be shut down by a strongly worded edict from its jacked and newly divorced CEO, Jeff Bezos. Later, there will be runs on other items, like desks and web cameras and laptops, as members of the professional-managerial class are forced to work from home while their children, whose heretofore overstuffed lives mean they cannot possibly be left to their own devices, learn from teachers on the other side of Google Classroom conferences and Zoom calls.

As the first week of quarantine gives way to the second and third, diapers, tampons, flour, bread yeast, and any number of other items people either need or think they do will run out. In mid-March, Amazon will announce it will stop accepting all “nonessential” items from third-party sellers in its warehouses and focus solely on acquiring and distributing the items most essential to everyday life, like food and personal-health products. Within a year, the company will have increased its frontline workforce by half, pushing it past the million-employee mark.

Amazon’s vaunted promise to consumers, made only the summer before, that something like 10 million different items would be at their doorstep within one day will break down completely. The moment when an email or push alert from the company cheerfully announcing an order is “Arriving Today” begins to slip further into the future. Delivery dates for Prime-eligible items push out to a week, then a month, then snap back to as few as two days for items deemed essential, as the colossal supply chains of the world’s biggest e-commerce company stretch, convulse, and are re-formed by drastic and emergency measures.

Then things get worse.

The same supply chains that could not provide everyday consumer goods will prove equally incapable of delivering enough medical supplies to protect the frontline health-care workers who are now tasked with attending to a tidal wave of Covid-19 patients, their numbers eclipsing all efforts to test, trace, and lock down what is by now a pandemic beyond all means of conventional public health response. Some patients, it will later be revealed, are shedding virus at a rate far higher than those infected with comparable pathogens, their every breath a fountain of aerosolized infectious agents. Every one of them is both a biohazard in need of complete isolation, and all the tools and material that requires, and a human being in a state of wide-eyed, animal panic who might need sedation, intubation, and life-saving care.

In the country that invented the N95 mask, the only way to get them will be from shady third parties who bid their price to the highest possible level, in a system set up by a president who spends months downplaying the potential impact of the virus and then leaves all fifty states to battle one another for critical supplies.

In what will be compared, over and over again, with previous wartime mobilizations, American automobile manufacturers who once built 4-million-square-foot factories to churn out bombers to level the cities of the Axis powers remember their old reflexes. Partnering with health-care companies, Ford and GM will shift their factories to the construction of ventilators. Meanwhile, shoe manufacturers will pivot to making masks. Then everyone will pivot to making masks, first in America’s factories and then in their own homes, from patterns downloaded from the internet and YouTube videos and tutorials in the editorial pages of the country’s most read newspapers.

Still, it will not be enough to stop the virus.

As nonessential businesses remain shuttered and those that remain open begin limiting how many people can enter at any one time, long lines will form outside America’s big-box meccas, turning trips to the grocery store into masked, socially distanced processions in which everyone eyes one another solemnly, knowing that nothing will ever be quite the same again.

Hospitals will run out of supplies. First to go are disposable zip-up biohazard suits, then masks. Then they will run out of ventilators, then the sedatives that keep those lucky enough to be on ventilators from panicking as tubes are inserted in their throats to keep them from perishing from a lack of oxygen, as their lungs struggle against the antibody-filled broth that fills them so completely that on X-rays they take on the characteristic translucence of ground glass.

The governor of the state of New York will go on TV every day to talk about the virus. The president of the United States will appoint his son-in-law to a shadow team intended to manage the government’s response, sideline his own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and utter falsehoods that must immediately be corrected in official releases, as the chief of his scientific and medical response team shakes his head in the background of one of his national addresses. In states like Florida, peaks of infection will rise to heights not seen even in New York.

Food banks and state unemployment systems will experience record demand. The economic fallout will quickly appear to be even worse than the direct effects of the pandemic itself.

People will die, by the tens of thousands, and eventually by the hundreds of thousands, for lack of some critical item or another, be it the reagent to conduct a test for coronavirus, an item of personal protective equipment to stop the chain of infection three interpersonal leaps ago, or just a bed in which to convalesce.

* * *

When the coronavirus hammered the global economy, it hit supply chains hardest of all. For the first time since the oil crisis of the 1970s, the world experienced a “supply shock”—a shortage of goods, rather than a dearth of demand for them. Supply shocks cannot be fixed with rate cuts by central banks or floods of capital into the economy, as with other crashes. Supply shocks are what happens when there aren’t goods to be had at any price.

Those long, invisible supply chains snaking from our front doorsteps across the country, across oceans, all the way to factories 12,000 or more miles away, the ones many in the West had taken for granted almost since the day they were built, suddenly became terribly, viscerally apparent.

Almost overnight, people in the United States woke up to the fact that “made in China” didn’t mean just cheap trinkets or nice-to-have luxury electronics. It also applied to things with life-and-death consequences, like N95 medical masks and the chemicals required to manufacture antibiotics and other drugs. It meant materials required for 17,600 different products made by Procter & Gamble, everything from detergent and razors to cold medicine and shampoo. It was artificial sweeteners for Diet Coke, it was the iPhone and iPad.

Even before the dust cleared and the economic carnage could be tallied—a process that will not be finished even years after this book is published—it became clear that three in four U.S. firms would have their supply chains disrupted in some way.

No one knew all of this was coming, least of all me, on January 21, 2020, the day I stepped onto a boat with Mr. Bandstra. While the node in the supply chains of Asia I was about to tour had already been growing in importance and was fast becoming something like the next China—a hub of low-cost manufacturing rapidly transforming into a hot spot of high-tech expertise—what I couldn’t have predicted was that the black swan of the coronavirus was about to make everything I would see that day, and in the days following, so much more important.

Just as the Saigon River on which we traveled had shifted its course across the Mekong Delta countless times before, eradicating one shoreline as it built up another, its path dictated by forces beyond human scale, the supply chains that had until the global pandemic of 2020 seemed adequate were about to whipsaw into new configurations, a flood of goods reshaping them to fresh and urgent needs.

The day I stepped from our yellow speedboat onto the concrete pier of Cai Mep International Terminal, part of one of the largest container ports in Southeast Asia, shipping containers in its yard contained a not insignificant portion of the goods that people, businesses, and hospitals across the globe would be panic-buying in the months ahead. There were containers full of surgical masks and other personal protective equipment (PPE), and containers full of items no one had anticipated anyone would panic-buy, like Samsung refrigerators and freezers. There were also containers full of the miscellany of personal electronics required to work from home, like external monitors, power supplies, USB chargers, wireless headphones, and dongles for connecting one sort of cable to another.

It was all there, waiting on the docks, about to become part of history. And I had no idea. I thought I was there to write about an obscure but, to me, important topic: how things get from the factory, mostly in Asia, to the front doors of the homes and offices in the biggest consumer economies in the world, and specifically my own country, the United States.

But why go to Southeast Asia and not China, which is still, by volume, the number one producer of countless goods? Long before the coronavirus pandemic swept the globe, suppliers to Apple, Nike, and dozens of other multinationals had set up factories in Vietnam that are copies of their factories in China. Their reasoning, as one shipper confided to me, was simple: if tariffs or a shooting war suddenly made it impossible to get goods out of China, these companies need to be able to shift their manufacturing within days. The alternative, losing their ability to make goods at all for the months or years it would take to set up new manufacturing complexes in other countries, was a risk they felt they could not take.

Southeast Asia, and Vietnam in particular, is therefore a place that represents the future of manufacturing, as well as a much bigger portion of its present than most people realize. Many goods you have in your home and workplace are manufactured there already, from kitchen appliances and clothing to smartphones and AirPods. The shocks to the supply chain that were to come would only accelerate this dispersion of manufacturing capacity across the globe, wresting from mainland China its monopoly on the creation of countless objects.

This is not to say that the world’s multinationals, and Vietnam itself, were ready. In the immediate aftermath of the black dawn of the coronavirus, manufacturers tested the hypothesis that factories outside China could protect them from shocks to global supply chains, and in many cases found it wanting. What so many companies couldn’t get around, no matter where their factories were located, was that the parts and materials that are fed into today’s factories still so often come from China. Manufacturing in the twenty-first century isn’t material in, finished products out, as it was in the days of Bethlehem Steel and Henry Ford. Today’s manufacturing is waypoints on much longer supply chains, a string of factories transforming raw materials into parts and subassemblies before final assembly in some other facility.

Perhaps the most famous example of the sprawling nature of modern manufacturing and supply chains is the fact that cod caught off Scotland are transported to China to be filleted, then transported back to Scotland for sale in grocery stores. But a 20,000-mile journey for Scottish cod is but a puddle jump compared to the cumulative supply chain miles racked up by the average smartphone, which may include lithium from Australia transformed into batteries in Korea, microchips fabricated in Taiwan from silicon grown in Japan out of quartz harvested in Appalachia, shatterproof glass manufactured in Kentucky from sand mined in Minnesota, lasers manufactured in Texas, and as many other sources, and individual supply chains, for the more than 300 components in such a device.

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