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

An investigative look at how the demand for convenience and instant gratification has changed online commerce, caused huge shifts in transportation and supply chain management and led to massive shifts in how industry uses labor. 50,000 first printing.
"A Wall Street Journal reporter travels the globe to tell the story behind the misleadingly simple phrase online shoppers increasingly take for granted: "arriving today." From factory laborers in Vietnam to longshoremen at the port of LA to truckers crawling our interstate highways to robots lurking in Amazon's "dark warehouses," here is an eye-opening investigation of the way online commerce is reshaping the globe, rewriting the rules of business, and redefining consumer expectations.
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 worlds busiest port, the cabin of an 18-wheeler, and Amazons 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 systems 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.