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

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

By Christopher Mims

"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"--.

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Book Information

Publisher: Harper Business
Publish Date: 09/14/2021
Pages: 336
ISBN-13: 9780062987952
ISBN-10: 006298795X
Language: English

What We're Saying

January 06, 2022

In the lead up to announcing the Porchlight Business Book of the Year on January 13th, we are sharing excerpts from each of the eight books on the shortlist for the award. Today, we have one from the Current Events & Public Affairs book of the year, Arriving Today by Christopher Mims. READ FULL DESCRIPTION

December 16, 2021

We didn't get everything we were hoping for out of 2021, but we got a lot of great books! READ FULL DESCRIPTION

December 09, 2021

Getting up his courage to dive into their anxiety-inducing subjects, Dylan Schleicher examines the best books 2021 had to offer in the Current Events & Public Affairs category. READ FULL DESCRIPTION

November 18, 2021

"The authors who make up this year’s Porchlight Business Book of the Year Awards longlist gift us with a feast of new ideas to explore and, even more valuable, a renewed sense of possibility.” READ FULL DESCRIPTION

September 13, 2021

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. READ FULL DESCRIPTION

Full Description

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.

About the Author

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.

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