Book Review: Arriving Today

I looked up my order history on Amazon and the first thing I ever ordered on Amazon was on 28^th September 2014. That first order was a book, Dan Walsh’s These are the Days That Must Happen to You, which I quite enjoyed reading and which I still have in my small collection of books. That year, I placed a total of five orders on Amazon, all of which comprised only books. Since then, over the last 10 years, I have placed close to 1,100 orders, comprising books, clothes, shoes, watches, mobile phones, chocolates, cookies, headphones, power banks, random toiletries, chairs and tables, cupboards, air-conditioners… the list is pretty much endless. Whenever we need to buy something – almost anything – for the house, my wife and I automatically default to opening up the Amazon app on our phones. More often than not, we don’t even think of visiting local malls and markets – buying on Amazon is just so much easier. But I have to admit, I’d never given much thought to what buying on Amazon entails in the context of what happens behind the scenes, in terms of the global supply chain that kicks in when we place an order online, and the mind-boggling logistics that need to be worked out by ecommerce companies in order to get our orders delivered on time. And that is exactly what Christopher Mims tells us in his book, Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door - Why Everything HasChanged About How and What We Buy.

Published in 2021, Arriving Today is a deep dive into every aspect of what exactly happens after we place an order online, tracing the long, often convoluted path that many goods travel – sometimes across the globe – before those goods are delivered to a customer’s doorstep. He also tracks the human costs – armies of humans slaving away in warehouses across the world, in unimaginably difficult working conditions that are sometimes downright horrifying. In order to tell this story, Mims traces the journey of a hypothetical USB charger that’s been manufactured in Vietnam and is to be delivered to a customer in the United States, a distance of more than 13,000km. And so, the story starts with shipping – or more specifically, containerised shipping and how the now-ubiquitous 40-foot shipping container has transformed global business and commerce over the last few decades. Ferried across the world in gigantic cargo ships (the average ship being close to 1,200 feet long and 160 feet wide) that can be quite complex to operate, these standardised shipping containers have, to some extent, led to uniform and consistent loading, stacking, unloading and sorting practices in ports across the globe, which is incredibly important when you consider the fact that approximately 1,600 million containers were shipped in 2019, carrying goods worth more than US$4 trillion worth of goods. Mims writes about the complexities of the shipping industry and its many challenges, and also of the lives of the men and women who spend months out on the high seas, ferrying the world’s goods across the oceans.

As you may expect, the story then moves on to ports – large, commercial ports where thousands of ships dock every year and disgorge their precious cargo. With thousands of tons of containers that need to be taken off ships, stacked on the docks (and in a manner that would make it easy for them to be loaded on to trucks, for the next leg of their journeys) and new containers loaded on to ships, it’s hard work and involves some really, really heavy lifting, most of which is now done by robots. Algorithm-driven automation and hard-working robots are a big part of what happens on ports, and Mims does a good job of explaining this complexity, the details of which might surprise many readers. The story moves on to trucking – what happens once the goods, which have been offloaded from ships, are loaded on to trucks and driven across the country to get to their final destination. Trucking companies don’t have things too easy and work on thin margins, while truck drivers aren’t paid very well and have to spend long, tough hours on the road working under strict laws and exacting regulations. Mims, who travels with truckers for his story, writes about life on the road for long-haul truckers and the incredible challenges of this profession.

The story finally gets to Amazon warehouses, where stuff is offloaded from trucks, picked, sorted and readied for further dispatch. This is perhaps the most intense part, with humans working alongside highly automated systems and processes, in a system that’s downright brutal in terms of what Amazon expects from its workers. The speed at which Amazon’s workers are expected to work – tirelessly, relentlessly, without sitting down, without taking a break, doing monotonous work that’s repetitive in nature – is simply horrifying. This is slave labour at its worst, the shocking human cost of the convenience that ecommerce and online shopping have brought to the average consumer. Of course, nobody is forcing anyone to work for Amazon in its warehouses, but for hundreds of thousands of people across the world who may be looking for blue collar work, this might be the only option they have. Mims also writes about Frederick Winslow Taylor and his controversial management philosophy, which aims to extract every last bit of ‘efficiency’ from human workers, often at the cost of those workers’ mental and physical wellbeing. Nowhere is this more apparent than Amazon’s warehouses, where the very concept of ‘humanity’ seems to have been slaughtered and thrown to one side without a care in the world.

The story concludes with last-mile delivery, and how UPS and a bunch of other companies work with clockwork-like precision to ensure that hundreds of thousands of packages are delivered on time to customers, from Amazon’s storage facilities to customers’ doorsteps. Again, the sheer hard work put in by delivery drivers – dealing with traffic hazards, each person single-handedly picking up and delivering more than a hundred heavy packages every day while operating under severe constraints of time – is likely to be shocking for most people.

In the end, the story serves to highlight just how much progress the global supply chain and logistics and transport industries have made in recent years, a lot of which may well have been driven by ecommerce and the merciless behemoth that is Amazon. It also tells us that how, with the rise in automation and robotics, humans have been reduced to being slaves whose pace of work is dictated by AI algorithms – a scary reality for people working in Amazon’s warehouses across the world. It’s an interesting story, well written and incisive. Once they read this book, anyone who’s ever used Amazon’s services extensively will, if nothing else, be forced to at least stop and think about the human costs of ecommerce and online shopping. When our packages from Amazon arrive, they leave behind in their wake a global footprint and exact a human cost that numbs the mind in terms of its scale and complexity.

A truly remarkable book, highly recommended.   

Arriving Today is available on Amazon