The future of logistics is in the neighbourhood | Hacker News Reader

The future of logistics is in the neighbourhood

packsmith.io

22 pointsmnming6 comments

That sounds nice in theory but how do they solve inventory split?

Inventory levels for SKUs across multiple warehouses is notoriously difficult to balance, even more so for smaller (Shopify mom&pop) retailers.

If I split my inventory across multiple packers, the likelihood to get "local-ish" delivery is getting smaller and and smaller.

What I get, however, is a scalable workforce for packaging/shipping. It can result in economies of scale if and only if all the order can be shipped from a single packer.

By the way, if they use anything else than ultra local carriers, the package will anyway be sent away to a sorting center dozens or hundreds of kilometers away from the packet, if even the customer is right next door.

It's a good idea if you want to "uberize"/get a scalable packaging/inventory workforce, but it seems to me to be disguised under a green-ish marketing varnish that quickly fades away once you look at it closely.

This sounds like the inevitable endgame of capital's drive to replace labor inputs.

So where "Main Street" (or the coupla nearest strip malls) used to have a post office and a dozen or more retail shops, now there will be two or three parcel points. Unskilled retail jobs evaporate. There's no shop personnel to ask questions of - you get AI chatbots trained on marketing dreck.

A bright future beckons !

Given 4 stakeholders, which is quite a lot to externalize in the value chain:

1. Sellers

2. Packers

3. Buyers

4. Shippers (i. 1->2 & ii. 2->3)

I'm wondering how they solve:

A. Gamification of shrinkage on the buyer and packer levels.

B. Trust of sellers to give packers product. Really good insurance coverage?

C. If a packer also happens to be local to a buyer, might there be an option to request last-mile, accelerated delivery?

D. Incentivizing buyers to give packers and sellers OOBE feedback.

RE: A - not sure what definition of shrinkage you're using, it depends on whether the Packers take inventory on their own balance sheet or not. This is orthogonal to whether packagers are independent contractors or more "employee"-like freelancers.

Of course an MLM agent need to take inventory on his/her balance sheet, otherwise that wouldn’t be an MLM ;)

For example, a restaurant employee may be asked to compensate for losses due to an unpaid bill (i.e., shrinkage). It may be illegal, but that's what usually happens.

Like the internet, it feels like there need to be open standards for interop to even begin. Internet of packages needs the ability for inventory to find warehousing, packagers, shippers.

I definitely dream of re-de-centralizing, of re-wilding the e-economy. But wow it's going to take so much hard protocol design to make it happen. Amazon ever ratcheting up the fees creates opportunities for various other intermediatiom capture layers like Packsmith here to maybe get ahead but there's an unsatisfied "markets want a free hand" impulse that only the lessons of the internet can help satisfy, and that requires loose coupling & protocols. There's plenty of room for valuable service providers/coordinators there, but the protocols need to be open & free; e-merchamts need to be able to shift & move as they please. That needs protocols.

Percolating those protocols down to local logistics is even harder, is where intermediaries can be useful. But I think the bedrocks that disrupts, it's not enough to innovate internally; the big next shifts have to involve open systems & protocols, to a sizable degree.

how would you even start to reason about that? not even post could be standardized, it only barely works internationally with two extremes: nothing arrive, total abuse of the system.

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