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

So the landscape right now is very weird Americans have been on a shopping spree ever since about May of 2020 and global supply chains just we're not designed to accommodate this much demand especially in the US

You know, on top of that you have the great resignation which you mentioned and, you know, part of that is hitting jobs that are specifically kind of not great jobs in general like trucking

So we're all just kind of like on this grand journey together where we find out that if chip packaging in Malaysia shuts down for a month you can't buy a, you know, Ford F-150 or whatever two months later in the US

Well, recession is always a quick and dirty solution to these kinds of problems We don't like that That's a bad solution

Yeah, I mean Amazon You know they The same way that Apple has this tremendous lead over everybody in terms of chip design which you know is happening as we record this as they announce a new faster than ever MacBook Pro and everything Amazon has a lead over everybody in terms of like warehouse design the software that runs warehouses the robots that populate those warehouses

I've got a great interview today I'm speaking of Christopher Mims he's a technology columnist the Wall Street Journal he's also authored Arriving Today from Factory to Front Door why everything has changed but how and what we buy.

The book is called Arriving Today it's about how everything gets from the factory to the front door also if you don't have the patience for a 300 page book it's also now a documentary on YouTube and on WSJ.com called Chain Reaction.

The book is called Arriving Today it's about how everything gets from the factory to the front door also if you don't have the patience for a 300 page book it's also now a documentary on youtube and on wsj.com called chain reaction it's this hour-long documentary we send producers all over the world and it gives you a really good visual feeling and I think a sense of empathy for the workers involved in these supply chains that you know I couldn't even capture in a book so you know go check out the documentary to start with it's chain reaction and uh it's on wsj.com and on youtube

So supply chain, you know, the term originated in the military because it was just how you kept an army supplied, of course, in our globalized economy supply chains are how we get everything that we buy, everything we consume.

Globalization is definitely not over but I think it's the right question to ask. I think the question everybody who is a supply chain professional is trying to answer is how do we continue to leverage what's good about globalization which is that you know when different regions of the world specialize in certain things it can lead to rapid innovation.

For the last 50 years, what companies have been trying to do is how do we just squeeze all the cost out of our supply chain that we possibly can and so you know let's consolidate to one big factory wherever wages are lowest or where that industry is concentrated so usually somewhere in Asia.

So the book is called Arriving Today, it's about how everything gets from the factory to the front door also if you don't have the patience for a 300 page book it's also now a documentary on YouTube and on WSJ.com called Chain Reaction it's this hour-long documentary we send producers all over the world and it gives you a really good visual feeling and I think a sense of empathy for the workers involved in these supply chains that you know I couldn't even capture in a book.