The Everything Town in the Middle of Nowhere | Hacker News Reader

The Everything Town in the Middle of Nowhere

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126 pointsthomasjudge46 comments

I've had one instance with amazon where they clearly drop shipped the product and didn't even take it out of the box. I purchased a single hang-on-back aquarium filter which came in an absolutely massive amazon box, containing another hugely oversized walmart box, containing an unlabeled/unbranded box which was still too large, and then finally the aquarium filter in it's own box and packaging. It almost seemed like it had been shipped from some supplier, to walmart, to amazon, and they just kept sticking the package in a larger box. The amount of waste for a single small filter was absurd

The alternative would be to throw away the two extra packages, which would reduce the waste a bit, but would still be absurd if you think about it...

Yes, I suppose either way the waste is being created, I'm just not always confronted with it at that level

No, the alternative would be to put a new shipping label on the original package.

Which they do. I received an office/break room trashcan, from Amazon, in its Walmart box.

All so that each one can have their own branding. Ugh.

Just put a huge sticker on top instead.

This looks like a retail goods analogy for SWIFT type system for connecting different retail marketplaces to one another.

I always thought the economics of drop shipping would never work but looks like it is profitable even with a processing middleman.

I am curious to know what kind of inefficiency is being exploited here, because this seems to be from one online retailer to another (unlike ebay). I have a couple of guesses but I would like to know if there are others:

* information gap on the customer side (doesn't want to cross shop)

* product won't ship to target market through competitors website

* competitor's website wont accept user's preferred mode of payment

* wants a competitor's house-brand product on amazon

* some kind of customs loophole

> * information gap on the customer side (doesn't want to cross shop)

From the article:

> Amazon has made buying stuff so frictionless and habitual, delivery so fast — and for Prime members, free — that many shoppers don’t bother checking prices anywhere else.

I do cross shop for most things. I usually check Ebay, Newegg, etc. But the majority of the time I end up buying from Amazon due to straight up better prices, or only slightly higher prices plus more convenience. I think there are enough of us that do that to keep Amazon's prices competitive.

Those are all great guesses, and I bet all of them come into play.

I wonder how many externalities aren't being accounted for yet in the process, like the new landfill Roundup will need to construct to handle all the excess packaging being disposed of.

I think a lot about how tech companies talk about being green, when underneath them is devices that go in the trash after two years because they aren't supported anymore or the amount of packaging and shipping and fuel waste that happens to provide you a perfect one-day shipping experience.

I wonder how different Amazon and the like would seem from an oil company in terms of environmental impact, when all is taken into account.

I think one of the things that stands out to me from this article is how little the actual cost of physical goods account for the in the price of commodity consumer goods.

I think one of the reason why this system works is the different costs of financing inventory different players enjoy, and the relative time constraints they have for holding inventory.

Back when I originally started using Amazon it got me in the habit of not checking prices elsewhere because Amazon was usually the cheapest, and that was also before I started having to pay my states sales tax. Nowadays, I find the prices are generally not very good, not to mention all the other issues Amazon has, so I do compare prices with other sites before making any purchases. However, I imagine a lot of customers never broke their habit of just purchasing without checking elsewhere which has likely contributed to this.

I find that many other sites, surprisingly, don't have anything close to the variety available for many specialty items.

I recently needed some 2 part epoxy glue in larger containers. Amazon has dozens of different brands and quantities, mostly at competitive prices.

I checked walmart.com and only found a few options from 3rd party sellers that was way overpriced. I even tried a few specialty sites. But no one else was even close. Kind of a sad state of affairs.

I would add...

* Supplier relies on middleman because they can't write convincing sales pitch in the target market's language.

* Supplier relies on middleman so they can get into (and out of) business more quickly; don't need an end-to-end plan to get started.

> The end result is a bizarre, looping supply chain. Some hair conditioner might get sent from a Walmart warehouse in Grantsville, Utah, to Roundup, then from Roundup to an Amazon fulfillment center in Joliet, Illinois. Finally, Amazon sends it out to a customer.

> Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe another seller buys the item and sends it to another prep center. The preppers are constantly getting packages from Amazon, which they unbox and repackage and send back to Amazon.

Ah, the efficiency of capitalism.

More seriously, this is a weirdly organic process. Just as anything edible will be infested with life within a short time, a huge algal bloom of businesses develops to feed off this arbitrage. It shouldn't make sense to do all this, but the endless search for ever-tinier market inefficiencies to live off somehow calls it in to being.

I'm reminded of https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scheme-Full-Employment-reissued/dp/... , a novel in which vans endlessly circulate among a series of depots carrying parts for other vans, until someone discovers that the whole thing has no underlying purpose and the scheme collapses.

"Ah, the efficiency of capitalism."

Also...the Emergent Systems that rise up to gain from these efficiencies of capitalism. The companies created to help others get those efficiencies...more efficiently...

Emergences: A Talk by Danny Hillis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20879366

It also reminds me of cargo ships carrying commodities. They apparently change destination and heading numerous times before their final arrival at port, as their cargo gets bought and sold by a sequence of different entities long before it's even unloaded.

Do you happen to have the source? I always thought that the destination of the commodities stayed constant, and that it was the burden of the final buyer/commodity holder to organize shipping logistics once it arrived at port.

Not one I can easily point you to - my in-laws' neighbour apparently used to be an engineer on board such ships. It's possible this is no longer accurate as this would have presumably been some decades ago.

Entirely tangential to the main thrust of the article, but this threw me:

a noose dangling from “the hanging tree,” which a plaque explains was used to execute three cattle rustlers and two unlucky bystanders, cattle rustling being “considered one of the lowest forms of crime.”

Wait, WHAT? Can anyone with more knowledge about the Old West explain what crime these bystanders would have been committing? Am I interpreting this correctly that these "bystanders" had nothing to do with or to gain from the theft of the cattle but were thought to be in the vicinity and didn't prevent it?

The implicit assumption you’re making here is that there was a court, trial, or even evidence. “Frontier justice” doesn’t always care about those things. Sometimes the “crime” is that you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, maybe with the “wrong“ skin color...

This part of history contains a lot of ugliness. It’s also part of the present. Extrajudicial killings are still very much a thing in the world.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montana_Vigilantes contains some leads for this specific history, I’d guess.

Thanks for the link. I guess I was aware of the general lawlessness of that part of the world at the time, but the part about "cattle rustling being “considered one of the lowest forms of crime.”" seemed like a reference to some specific, well-known rule with which I was not familiar.

Ah.

So, I am not super educated on this history, but I am the product of at least three generations of beef cattle farming. My understanding is that this phrase is true, and I think it makes some intuitive sense: if your community is based around herding cattle, stealing cattle is literally stealing the your livelihood. Furthermore, there's an "outsider" aspect to this kind of crime; it's not like there's farm A, and farm B, and farmer B steals some of A's cattle and now they have more. It's someone sneaking in from out of town, stealing your stuff, and leaving. In general, people are more likely to be lenient to their neighbors than to strangers.

I believe, if memory serves, there's a sort of racial/settler component to this as well. It ties into the whole "cowboys and indians" thing. Goes along with the whole "insider" vs "outsider" dichotomy.

That makes sense, so I suppose the explanation might be that these bystanders were also outsiders, but, as turned out, presumably too late, they merely were in the wrong place at the wrong time as you say and guilty by proximity.

My initial reading was that they were known to be bystanders at the time of execution, which seemed a bit extreme even in that context. But you're right, it's equally possible to read their being bystanders as posthumous exoneration, which is much more likely.

(FWIW, I've been to Montana, and as a middle-class European, it certainly felt by far the most foreign of the 15 or so states I've visited in the US.)

Ah yes, my assumption was that it was later determined that they were bystanders, not that it was known at the time.

FWIW, I grew up in Roundup (and am shocked to see it on HN). I remember the hanging tree being put up downtown sometime in late 80s or early 90s to (I suppose) add some Wild West decor. It’s entirely possible the whole hanging cattle rustlers and bystanders tale is apocryphal or loosely based on actual events. That’s not to say such things didn’t happen in the days of open range cattle ranching.

Speaking of both the racial/settler component and the "cowboys and indians" thing, it's worth noting that the modern-day stereotypical "cowboy" is pretty thoroughly whitewashed; a substantial minority (if not majority) of actual cowboys during this time period were non-white (black, Latino, and/or Native American, mostly).

Cowboys were also generally pretty lowly-regarded - about as low-class as one can be short of being an outright outlaw. They also didn't usually have ties to a given town/settlement, so they were easy scapegoats. Combine that with settlers bringing their racial biases with them from home to their settlements, and you've got a perfect storm for a "hang 'em first and ask questions later" scenario.

Thanks for that; I had heard of this pretty recently, but didn't know a ton about it, and so didn't want to get into it myself in case I was mis-remembering.

Whenever I read 'drop ship', I think of the noun from "Starship Troopers".

It is disappointing, isn't it? That such a cool term has been co-opted to mean "forwarding some stuff to another person."

Unless that stuff being forwarded is a Morita rifle, of course.

This is some genuine late-capitalist dystopian activity: Ordering cheap plastic garbage, having it packed and shipped to low-tax jurisdictions, only to unpack it, cover up the barcodes and re-pack it to ship it again.

It's like if somebody read about drop-shipping and thought "How can we do something like this, but make it even more pointless and wasteful?"

> somebody read about drop-shipping and thought "How can we do something like this, but make it even more pointless and wasteful?"

...what's pointless and wasteful about dropshiping? In an ideal case the manufacturer has no interest/skills to do online presence and stuff, and the product is shipped directly from manufacturer to client which coordinate delivery, the dropshipper only operates website and handles customer support etc.

What's wasteful about that, since the same merchandise is transported the same route as it would in a direct shipping case, and the coordination around custom labeling and delivery doesn't produce any waste and is not pointless.

You are describing a traditional online retailer.

I agree there is probably nothing inherently 'wasteful' about drop-shipping, but it is just another middleman and so it 'wastes' money for the buyer/seller, but that's probably a thin argument.

But of course the main wastefulness of the process is the whole system of constantly pushing people to consume tons of disposable useless crap.

"Moderately wasteful middlemen exist" is pretty mild as far as dystopian activity goes.

You can probably find equal or greater waste in the bureaucracies of any economic system you care to name.

This is how the government buys computers. The order goes to a Small Disadvantaged Business, who takes a 10% cut, with the computers being drop shipped from the manufacturer.

This is how a lot of government contracting works, too. The prime contractor is always some [I'll gently call it] Incentivized-Demographic-Owned company whose only job is to subcontract all their contracts out to a bigger company who actually does the work. The "IDO" company (often one person) does nothing but takes a small cut and passes the rest of the profits to the company doing the work.

They do more than that -- the prime contractors are as ridiculous as the government is. It's a sweet deal until it isn't... a black-swan event, usually a fuckup one of the parties means that the reseller is stuck with a bankruptcy-level bag of poo.

As vassals of the big company, they act as a buffer for whatever the goals of the big company are.

When the big co needs to make it's quarterly goals, they'll "ship" a bunch of software to the vassal company (which is at best a piece of paper) to hit their nut. With physical equipment, the same thing happens. Most notoriously, car dealers get stuck with accepting cars they don't want in order to get cars they need. A Ford dealer won't get an extra allocation of $75k F-150 trucks unless they take a load of Ford Focuses. If you get a great deal on a specific printer or something from a reseller, this is why.

On the other side of the transaction, the government sucks in terms of on-time payment. Wall St. doesn't like receivables from the customer, so the bigco will shaft the female-nativeamerican-disabled-veteran owned reseller with a Net-30 payment schedule, and they need to finance that receivable for the Net-180 paying government entity.

The other issue is terms and conditions. The government will demand most-favored nation status for price and impose onerous terms. The subcontractor company accepts that risk, deals with whatever wacky terms need to be dealt with, and enters the contract -- so big company doesn't get sued for fraud when the US Department of Agriculture gets a more expensive price than the Wyoming Department of Health for a product, or when the pallet used to ship a server includes wood sourced from Brazilian hardwood.

I can't speak to federal-level contracting, and I can't speak to much contracting outside the Pacific Northwest and parts of the east coast, but this is largely untrue.

In virtually every capital construction project I've seen or been aware of, the prime is always a regional, national, or multinational company, with capacity to do a lot of the work themselves; they do sub out work, but that is the layer at which they're expected to hire a certain amount of historically underutilized companies. Usually they're given goals of 30-40% contract spend on historically underutilized companies, and they usually miss it by about 10%.

This is considered a success, because in the past, they wouldn't hire such businesses at all. In the past, minority-owned and woman-owned businesses would simply never be hired for the ongoing well-paid government capital construction projects.

All of this is now extensively tracked, as well, though the information is not easy to come by. I know a few people who regularly FOIA their city procurement offices to get the information, and it's there, just not publicly distributed. It's tracked at the city level, county level, and always state DOT level (though not necessarily other departments; DOTs have extra tracking requirements because of their reliance on federal funding).

In deference to your story, I know several people who have an anecdote about "a woman who ran a business and added a 10% markup to contracts, passing everything through to someone else" -- the individual changes, the markup changes, but the story's the same, and the implication is always that it's a scam, the system is rife with fraud, tear it all down, etc., and that is simply untrue by the numbers. It's an anecdote to reinforce personal biases, not a reflection of the world.

It's tragicomic that there's an entire industry that's grown up around arbitrage to make logistics less streamlined.

My grandfather built skyscrapers. My father built houses. I build marginally-useful webapps. Will my son build anything? Or will his future be rearranging the detritus of robots?

The average person building nothing is essentially eventually destined from specialization yields rising unbounded - let alone complete automation. Your grandfather's grandfather almost certainly farmed for instance.

If anything this behavior is a throwback to “middleman minority”. It’s still very prominent in the Japanese economy[1], especially domestic, but also international.

[1]https://www.citeman.com/10218-japanese-distribution-structur...

Sounds a lot how computers work

This has nothing to do with late stage capitalism. I wish people would stop using that term without understanding what it means.

Right, this is actually an example of capitalism working well. These women and everybody else who started pack and ship businesses were able to identity a need of the market and build businesses to meet that need and have become relatively wealthy from doing it (50 bucks an hour in rural Montana goes a long way).

Late stage capitalism is more massive corporations with unlimited dollars buying up real-estate, pumping millions of dollars into advertising, and paying their employees low wages (McDonald's, Walmart, etc.) to the point where individuals can't compete and quality suffers.

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