Shortlisted for the 2021 Porchlight Business Book Awards, Current Events & Public Affairs
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 world’s busiest port, the cabin of an 18-wheeler, and Amazon’s 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 system’s 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.
Christopher Mims writes Keywords, a weekly technology column, for the Wall Street Journal. Before joining the Journal in 2014, he was the lead technology reporter for Quartz, and has written on science and tech for MIT Technology Review, Smithsonian, Wired, Atlantic, and Scientific American, among other outlets. He has a degree in neuroscience and behavioral biology from Emory University and lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
Table of Contents
Prologue 1
Chapter 1 The Gathering Storm 5
Chapter 2 The Box 13
Chapter 3 Ships and Other Cyborgs 25
Chapter 4 Coming to America 45
Chapter 5 Parallel Parking 1,200 Feet of Ship 57
Chapter 6 Longshoremen Against the Machine 67
Chapter 7 The Largest Robots on Earth 77
Chapter 8 The Little-Known, Rarely Understood Organizing Principle Of Modern Work 87
Chapter 9 How a Management Philosophy Became Our Way of Life 93
Chapter 10 Rime of the Long-Haul Trucker 107
Chapter 11 100 Percent of Everything 119
Chapter 12 How "Hitler's Highway" Became America's Circulatory System 127
Chapter 13 The Future of Trucking 141
Chapter 14 What Actually Happens Inside Amazon's Warehouses 159
Chapter 15 The Unbearable Complexity Of Robotic Warehousing 177
Chapter 16 Bezosism 197
Chapter 17 From Japan with Love: Origins of the Amazon Way 221
