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Comment by ghostly_s | Hacker News Reader

> “Who else would think of putting something going into an obscure port in Washington, and then trucking it down to L.A.? Most people are thinking, well, just bring the ship into L.A. But then you’re experiencing those two-week and three-weeks delay. So Amazon’s really taken advantage of some of the niche strategies I believe that the market needs to employ,”

What? Surely, everyone is thinking of this?

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>They are doing over 10,000 containers per month of the small- and medium-sized Chinese exporters. Amazon’s volume as an ocean vendor — that’s right, you heard me correct, they’re considered an ocean vendor — would rank them in the top five transportation companies in the Trans Pacific,” Ferreira said.

This also doesn't add up. 10,000 containers is a single medium sized container ships.

Wow. I checked and its true. Largest capacity is around 24000 TEU (Twenty foot long containers, though 40 foot long ones are also used)

Its mind boggling how mich energy is spent in transporting stuff around the world. They produce 2.2% of green house gases (as on 2012), poised to grow from 50 to 250% till 2050. And this does not include further transport downstream to consumers.

Clearly concentrated manufacturing is environmentally disasterous. These are the kinds of challenges Silicon Valley ought to solve. Creating new technology to enable hyperlocal manufacturing.

It's been tried so many times esp when 3d printing got hot 8ish years ago.

Removing the shipping distance creates a host of other problems. Storing of raw materials, increased cost of non-shared tooling, local labor cost vs non-local just to name a few.

Storing of raw materials is not a huge problem, especially if they are distributed across the globe.

Also, manufacturing and distribution can happen at smaller geographical areas rather than country or continent wide areas. I think the overall impact of distributed manufacture and supply is lesser than concentrated systems.

Also, having a distributed system allows for greater innovation and investment into eco-friendly and sustainable processess. It is far easier to forget about the pollution happening halfway across the world, in a dictatorship that suppresses news than that happening in your backyard.

I'm not trying to argue against the eco-friendly nature and overall sustainability.

I used to live in Hong Kong from 2013-2015 and was directly connected to 2 startups that wanted to do this w/ 3d printing at the heart. One was a "container deployment" an ultra mini-manufacturing that fits inside a container that you would deploy in a specific city by "just hooking up power". Another was more a regional play, build a local factory via multi-container sets. Like how Starbucks deploys a store with X number of containers.

They did not work for the reasons stated above combined w/ 3d printing isn't that great. Except in high margin items, you'll never make up for the increased infrastructure cost. The local land and labor costs are non-trivial.

One thought experiment is setup manufacturing in East coast & West coast. If one coast decreases in demand, what happens? Likely have excess supply, which then requires storage or shipping it to the other coast.

Cost is the ultimate driver and eco-friendly solutions invariably drive costs up because they lack economies of scale.

So while agree with your goal, it doesn't work in the real world.

Its mind boggling how mich energy is spent in transporting stuff around the world.

What's truly mind boggling is just how little energy is used to ship things around the world. Container ships are crazy efficient.

I think this is looking at the wrong number. The atmosphere "cares" about emissions in absolute terms, not in terms of who or what put them there per unit of utility gained by their presence.

The fuel used in these container ships is truly nasty stuff, with marine shipping being solely responsible for double-digit percentages of certain greenhouse gases.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_effects_of_shipp...

Of which greenhouse gases? I skimmed through the linked section and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_IMO_Strategy_on_the_re... , without spotting a double-digit number that turned out to be a %-of-global-GHG-emissions. Or are you referring to all-time emissions? That would seem more probable, given the long history of coal-fired ships.

Per the linked Guardian article from 2009, shipping is responsible for 18-30% of all the world's nitrogen oxide (NOx) pollution and 9% of the global sulphur oxide (SOx) pollution.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping...

Absolute numbers here: https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2009.07.037

Yeah, technically those are indirectly greenhouse gases, but just to note, the article linked points out that "Maritime transport accounts for 3.5% to 4%".

It's double-digit percentages of some pollutants that are very bad for human health, but relatively minor in terms of climate change.

EDIT: I take it back. NOx is significant. SOx not so much.

Container ships are crazy efficient in shipping dollars per kilogram not emissions. They use the worst most Polluting fuel there is and because of their efficiency present a far more polluting option (ship across the world) as a logistic possibility to cut costs.

Container ships emit a lot of pollution (SO2, NO2), but not much more GHG, per pound of fuel burnt, compared to other ICEs.

They are quite efficient in terms of emissions per kg, too. Boats are a very energy-efficient way to transport heavy things.

The pollution of the last mile of trucking an item to the store and the consumer driving to said store are an order of magnitude more than the entire journey across the Pacific on the boat

>Clearly concentrated manufacturing is environmentally disasterous.

Distributing the same level of manufacturing would probably be worse because of loss of efficiencies.

> This season, a handful of other major retailers — Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, Ikea and Target — are also chartering their own vessels to bypass the busiest ports and get their goods unloaded sooner.

Then why is the title 'Amazon is'?. It seems that just mentioning Amazon brings more clicks, I guess.

I honestly probably would not have clicked if the retailer mentioned was Costco or Walmart. I assumed Amazon implemented some unique mind-blowing tech solution to the problem.

I had the opposite heuristic. If a headline has Amazon in it, then it is probably clickbait.

Yeah but it works (we're all "engaging" right now aren't we)

Submarine PR for Amazon.

This article sounds more like a PR piece for Amazon. At this rate, I wouldn't be surprised if in the coming weeks Amazon singlehandedly saves Christmas.

That would be a nice PR project! I think you are onto the right idea here. Let's seem what happens after the Christmas.

Singlehandedly? Of course not. But two years ago, they owned more than 50% of the holiday shopping [1]. It's fair to assume that the percentage has grown over time and especially this year given the supply chain issues that have affected their competitors more than Amazon.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-dominates-holiday-shopp...

In Australia right now I wouldn't trust AusPost to deliver a Christmas present as I'm struggling to find something for my son and my time is running out (#). They end up with massive pile ups of parcels in their distribution centers; it's all in shambles.

Amazon Prime? I'd feel very confident in their estimates. They are almost always bang on. They're doing an amazing job with their supply chain management.

This actively changes how I will do my shopping; either somewhere online for in-store physical pickup, or Amazon.

#) I've given him meaningful stuff throughout the year, and hate that I have to come up with something for this fixed date as is the tradition

There is a complex but ridiculously well-thought out pipeline for getting your order to your door, by the estimated delivery date.

If a few AusPost drivers call in sick, your package is one day late. If your Prime last-mine Flex driver doesn't show, the app texts other Flex workers with ever-escalating payments for the 'block' until someone accepts (as much as ~A$60-80/hour gross if it gets that high).

> What? Surely, everyone is thinking of this?

Exactly my thought. Amazon hardly has a monopoly on good ideas. They may have a culture that rewards impulsive strategies, though.

Thinking maybe. Execution is hard, the extra truck overhead may make it a non-starter for many

Amazon's scale makes some things workable for them that would not work economically at smaller scales.

They do also seem to be willing to or have a culture of taking bets like this that I suspect a lot of the other companies of their size don't - it sounds like they started working on this back in 2015, and I imagine it's been a pretty big investment so far. I'm not an Amazon fan, but not a lot of other companies out there seem to be willing to take bets like that.

Not really, lots of companies are sharing space on charter vessels at the moment, and trunking networks are pretty well developed.

Lots of retailers are doing exactly what this article describes, it’s not just Amazon. In fact, I know a company that only ships c5 containers a day that is renting space on a charter vessel, so you don’t need Amazon-scale to do this.

I agree, everyone was thinking this. Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, and other giganta-corps can afford to charter their own ships and such. Your local mom and pop are screwed. Also worth noting, there were reports of the backlog of the ships on the US West Coast was getting smaller. Those ships are now just stuck off the shore of Mexico, Japan, and Taiwan.

https://www-freightwaves-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.frei...

First, this an article from CNBC, so I don't think the actual strategy is as simple as this (its coming from an external freight analyst).

Second, my understanding is that Amazon is essentially going to eat into its already thin profits to pull this off. So this is essentially a branding move - aka "we could deliver your christmas presents this year, trust us, others cant, why would you ever trust them?"

> What? Surely, everyone is thinking of this?

But are they doing this?

Coos Bay, Oregon (US west coast) is a deep water port with nothing really shipping in and out of it. It used to be busy when timber was being harvested madly and shipped out, but not anymore. The port is literally begging for shipping action.

The one negative? No major rail or road system in and out for delivery to the I-5 corridor.

There is really not sufficient infrastructure in Coos Bay to support the offloading of much cargo, let alone getting it distributed from there.

> What? Surely, everyone is thinking of this?

Amazon probably has enough trade to commission an entire ship unlike most companies who are using containers, and why they can divert to other ports which is whats being reported here. TLDR they have the size to be flexible in logistics.

Sometimes you need to get someone with enough general knowledge to act as a troubleshooter though, like this chap. https://youtu.be/OBu5ewmEP2E?t=27

Stagnation occurs everywhere, people get comfortable which is why some on here big up those with Military experience because the military will get you out of your comfort zone.

Unions often but not always drive stagnation, rarely do they come up with innovation because some of the bigger unions work across a variety of different companies or organisations and just work on pay and conditions which is sometimes harmful to a business during its life.

Unions can have their place against bad bosses, but a union which could work well is one that is operating in just a business or organisation and isn't solely focussed on pay and conditions, they should drive innovation and efficiency or work with innovation & efficiency because there are times management and boards can stagnate and then businesses organisation can decline.

Covid has certainly exposed the lack of stock holding in the Just In Time (JIT) system of doing business.

Dell is another business to look at when he was starting up in the early years, he used his contracts to shift stock holding onto the suppliers to keep "inventory" at the right levels for accountancy purposes so suppliers had trucks loaded with goods waiting in goods in to unload. He also recycled returns which he got into court trouble with, ie flogging components from returns in new pc's.

Quite often you will find businesses bending rules somewhere though and it could be anywhere, contracts and accountancy practices can be common but not the only way to get the books looking good.

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