Christopher Mims > Quotes

“In America and in rich countries the world over, for many workers, the warehouse is the new factory.”
― Christopher Mims, Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door — Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy – A WSJ Columnist's Porchlight Award Finalist Investigation

“At some point in their journey, 90 percent of the world’s goods travel by ship.”
― Christopher Mims, Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door — Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy – A WSJ Columnist's Porchlight Award Finalist Investigation

“Taylorism underwent rapid evolution as people all over the world applied its basic notions of how to increase efficiency through a combination of pushing workers harder and identifying the best way for each to do their job.”
― Christopher Mims, Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door — Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy – A WSJ Columnist's Porchlight Award Finalist Investigation

“In addition, many companies are realizing that in an age of pandemics, robots have a unique advantage—they don’t get sick.”
― Christopher Mims, Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door — Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy – A WSJ Columnist's Porchlight Award Finalist Investigation

“A worker using the Kiva system in its early incarnations would typically triple their output, say from an average of 100 picks an hour to 300, says Mick. But it wasn't as if the Kiva-using companies then reduced all their warehouse employees' hours to a third of what they once were while paying them the same wage. Instead, Staples and Walgreens, both early customers of Kiva, leveraged their workers' increased productivity to increase the output capacity of their warehouses, store and ship a wider range of products, shorten the amount of time required to fulfill an order, and ultimately either lower the cost of their services, increase their profits, or both, as capitalists have done since the dawn of the corporation.”
― Christopher Mims

“(This is one reason shipping container architecture, far from being some kind of Earth-friendly “recycling,” is in many cases an absurd vanity: stripping away all that nasty stuff takes more time, money, and energy than building a comparable structure anew.)”
― Christopher Mims, Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door — Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy – A WSJ Columnist's Porchlight Award Finalist Investigation

“As one economist who worked with actual Uber data discovered, the wage that workers in such fluid, two-sided markets for unskilled labor inevitably garner is whatever the local minimum wage happens to be.”
― Christopher Mims, Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door-Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy

“What Keynes got wrong is what lots of people get wrong about the relationship between new technologies, increased productivity, and jobs. New technologies don't eliminate jobs. As living standards rise, humans find new ways to consume more. Just as important, every time we automate a task, we tend to use more of that product or service, in combination with others, to accomplish some other more complicated or difficult end.”
― Christopher Mims, Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door-Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy

“From 1993 to 2016, the proportion of Vietnamese who lived in poverty dropped from 51 percent to 10 percent.”
― Christopher Mims, Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door — Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy – A WSJ Columnist's Porchlight Award Finalist Investigation

“it costs about two dollars to ship a TV from China to the United States, port to port.”
― Christopher Mims, Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door — Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy – A WSJ Columnist's Porchlight Award Finalist Investigation

“People who are invested in dreams of technology easing our burdens by giving us more power over the world often forget that technology in no way changes the power structures that govern it.”
― Christopher Mims

“One of the ironies of Bezosism is that it’s not the jobs of blue-collar workers that are disappearing, but the jobs of middle managers.”
― Christopher Mims, Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door — Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy – A WSJ Columnist's Porchlight Award Finalist Investigation

“The original idea, favored by Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, was that every company should aim for a certain level of turnover, whatever the consequences. The system was rife with perverse incentives. Peers who sabotaged others’ work could save their own jobs; managers might hire less-capable people on their teams to keep from having to fire existing employees whom they favored. Despite the system’s drawbacks, Welch’s influence was so far-reaching that stack ranking was adopted at many of today’s tech giants, where it wreaked havoc on morale and productivity for decades. Eventually, its negative effects became well known enough to make the practice a liability at companies chasing workers whose specialized talents made them scarce, such as engineers. In the mid-2010s, companies including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon abandoned it.”
― Christopher Mims, Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door — Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy – A WSJ Columnist's Porchlight Award Finalist Investigation

“this water is the reason Vietnam has always been so productive agriculturally. While it sometimes gets in the way, it’s also one reason the country is now booming economically. From 1993 to 2016, the proportion of Vietnamese who lived in poverty dropped from 51 percent to 10 percent”
― Christopher Mims, Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door — Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy – A WSJ Columnist's Porchlight Award Finalist Investigation