Arriving Today by Christopher Mims

ARRIVING TODAY by Christopher Mims is an extremely timely book (particularly on Black Friday) in which the Wall Street Journal technology columnist discusses “From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy.”  Mims offers a fascinating look at global supply chains – even though he started his research well before the current crunch.  Early chapters focus on shipping and production in Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam; Mims notes how outsourcing from the US first led to production in the “Asian Tigers” whose own rising wages have “pushed manufacturing down to the next and most geographically proximate countries on the economic ladder, including India, Thailand, Philippines, and Vietnam.” He also explores productivity from “Taylorism” to “Bezosism.” In tracing products around the world (how is it possible that salmon are caught near Scotland, filleted in China, and then returned to Scotland for sale?), Mims looks at numerous points in the distribution channel: container ships and ports; trucking and highways; warehouses and robots. He argues that tapping a button on your phone to order a consumer good that can arrive within 24 hours requires innovations and people who use them to “come together in a planetary-scale clockwork mechanism whose behavior is impossible to understand without building it up from the smallest constituent parts.” The detail is impressive (did you know that shipping containers are only 0.075 inches thick but can be stacked 8 high?): more than ten percent of the book is devoted to notes on supporting data, plus a helpful index. Mims encourages readers to recognize that “In the twenty-first century, how things get to us matters as much as how they are made… in many ways the supply chain and the factory floor are now indistinguishable.” ARRIVING TODAY received a starred review from Publishers Weekly which says: “Readers will be hooked by Mims’s ability to turn what could’ve been a dry supply-chain explainer into a legitimate page-turner.”  I have ordered a copy for a Junior Theme student – it’s arriving on our shelves soon!