Arriving Today

Mims, a Wall Street Journal technology columnist, follows one product, a USB charger, from a factory in Vietnam through ocean shipping, a port, a distribution centre, long-haul trucking and last-mile delivery to a customer's door. Each stage becomes a chapter on how that part of the supply chain works and who does the work.

The reported material is the strength. He covers container ship operation and the economics of ever-larger vessels, port automation and the union agreements that constrain it, the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach as a bottleneck, the physical layout and algorithms of an Amazon fulfilment centre, the work of the associates who pick items, the robotics that move shelves, the trucking industry's driver shortage and the effect of electronic logging devices, and the economics of last-mile delivery contractors.

The analytical argument concerns work. Mims argues that automation in logistics has generally not replaced workers but has restructured their jobs so that the human performs the tasks machines cannot, at a pace machines set. He documents injury rates in fulfilment centres, the productivity monitoring, and the shift of employment risk onto contractors in delivery. He also traces the intellectual history from Taylor's scientific management through Toyota's production system to current warehouse practice, arguing that the current arrangement extends rather than departs from that tradition.

The book is reporting rather than analysis of supply chain economics, and it does not model costs or examine alternatives. It was written before and during the pandemic disruptions and captures the system just as it broke, which makes some of the detail a snapshot rather than a description of steady state. The treatment of Amazon relies substantially on former employees and on the company's public statements.