
The Everything Town in the Middle of Nowhere - thomasjudge
https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/14/20961523/amazon-walmart-target-package-delivery-sales-tax-montana-roundup
======
authoritarian
I've had one instance with amazon where they clearly drop shipped the product
and didn't even take it out of the box. I purchased a single hang-on-back
aquarium filter which came in an absolutely massive amazon box, containing
another hugely oversized walmart box, containing an unlabeled/unbranded box
which was still too large, and then finally the aquarium filter in it's own
box and packaging. It almost seemed like it had been shipped from some
supplier, to walmart, to amazon, and they just kept sticking the package in a
larger box. The amount of waste for a single small filter was absurd

~~~
rob74
The alternative would be to throw away the two extra packages, which would
reduce the waste a bit, but would still be absurd if you think about it...

~~~
dec0dedab0de
No, the alternative would be to put a new shipping label on the original
package.

~~~
5555624
Which they do. I received an office/break room trashcan, from Amazon, in its
Walmart box.

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vsskanth
This looks like a retail goods analogy for SWIFT type system for connecting
different retail marketplaces to one another.

I always thought the economics of drop shipping would never work but looks
like it is profitable even with a processing middleman.

I am curious to know what kind of inefficiency is being exploited here,
because this seems to be from one online retailer to another (unlike ebay). I
have a couple of guesses but I would like to know if there are others:

* information gap on the customer side (doesn't want to cross shop)

* product won't ship to target market through competitors website

* competitor's website wont accept user's preferred mode of payment

* wants a competitor's house-brand product on amazon

* some kind of customs loophole

~~~
authoritarian
Back when I originally started using Amazon it got me in the habit of not
checking prices elsewhere because Amazon was usually the cheapest, and that
was also before I started having to pay my states sales tax. Nowadays, I find
the prices are generally not very good, not to mention all the other issues
Amazon has, so I do compare prices with other sites before making any
purchases. However, I imagine a lot of customers never broke their habit of
just purchasing without checking elsewhere which has likely contributed to
this.

~~~
jjeaff
I find that many other sites, surprisingly, don't have anything close to the
variety available for many specialty items.

I recently needed some 2 part epoxy glue in larger containers. Amazon has
dozens of different brands and quantities, mostly at competitive prices.

I checked walmart.com and only found a few options from 3rd party sellers that
was way overpriced. I even tried a few specialty sites. But no one else was
even close. Kind of a sad state of affairs.

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pjc50
> The end result is a bizarre, looping supply chain. Some hair conditioner
> might get sent from a Walmart warehouse in Grantsville, Utah, to Roundup,
> then from Roundup to an Amazon fulfillment center in Joliet, Illinois.
> Finally, Amazon sends it out to a customer.

> Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe another seller buys the item and sends it to
> another prep center. The preppers are constantly getting packages from
> Amazon, which they unbox and repackage and send back to Amazon.

Ah, the efficiency of capitalism.

More seriously, this is a weirdly _organic_ process. Just as anything edible
will be infested with life within a short time, a huge algal bloom of
businesses develops to feed off this arbitrage. It shouldn't make sense to do
all this, but the endless search for ever-tinier market inefficiencies to live
off somehow calls it in to being.

I'm reminded of [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scheme-Full-Employment-
reissued/dp/...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scheme-Full-Employment-
reissued/dp/1408813742) , a novel in which vans endlessly circulate among a
series of depots carrying parts for other vans, until someone discovers that
the whole thing has no underlying purpose and the scheme collapses.

~~~
ThrowMeAwayOkay
"Ah, the efficiency of capitalism."

Also...the _Emergent Systems_ that rise up to gain from these efficiencies of
capitalism. The companies created to help others get those efficiencies...more
efficiently...

~~~
kanaba
Emergences: A Talk by Danny Hillis
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20879366](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20879366)

------
pmjordan
Entirely tangential to the main thrust of the article, but this threw me:

 _a noose dangling from “the hanging tree,” which a plaque explains was used
to execute three cattle rustlers and two unlucky bystanders, cattle rustling
being “considered one of the lowest forms of crime.”_

Wait, WHAT? Can anyone with more knowledge about the Old West explain what
crime these bystanders would have been committing? Am I interpreting this
correctly that these "bystanders" had nothing to do with or to gain from the
theft of the cattle but were thought to be in the vicinity and didn't prevent
it?

~~~
steveklabnik
The implicit assumption you’re making here is that there was a court, trial,
or even evidence. “Frontier justice” doesn’t always care about those things.
Sometimes the “crime” is that you were in the wrong place at the wrong time,
maybe with the “wrong“ skin color...

This part of history contains a _lot_ of ugliness. It’s also part of the
present. Extrajudicial killings are still very much a thing in the world.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montana_Vigilantes](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montana_Vigilantes)
contains some leads for this specific history, I’d guess.

~~~
pmjordan
Thanks for the link. I guess I was aware of the general lawlessness of that
part of the world at the time, but the part about " _cattle rustling being
“considered one of the lowest forms of crime.”_ " seemed like a reference to
some specific, well-known rule with which I was not familiar.

~~~
steveklabnik
Ah.

So, I am not _super_ educated on this history, but I am the product of at
least three generations of beef cattle farming. My understanding is that this
phrase is true, and I think it makes some intuitive sense: if your community
is based around herding cattle, stealing cattle is literally stealing the your
livelihood. Furthermore, there's an "outsider" aspect to this kind of crime;
it's not like there's farm A, and farm B, and farmer B steals some of A's
cattle and now they have more. It's someone sneaking in from out of town,
stealing your stuff, and leaving. In general, people are more likely to be
lenient to their neighbors than to strangers.

I _believe_ , if memory serves, there's a sort of racial/settler component to
this as well. It ties into the whole "cowboys and indians" thing. Goes along
with the whole "insider" vs "outsider" dichotomy.

~~~
pmjordan
That makes sense, so I suppose the explanation might be that these bystanders
were also outsiders, but, as turned out, presumably too late, they merely were
in the wrong place at the wrong time as you say and guilty by proximity.

My initial reading was that they were known to be bystanders at the time of
execution, which seemed a bit extreme even in that context. But you're right,
it's equally possible to read their being bystanders as posthumous
exoneration, which is much more likely.

(FWIW, I've been to Montana, and as a middle-class European, it certainly felt
by far the most foreign of the 15 or so states I've visited in the US.)

~~~
ewhanley
FWIW, I grew up in Roundup (and am shocked to see it on HN). I remember the
hanging tree being put up downtown sometime in late 80s or early 90s to (I
suppose) add some Wild West decor. It’s entirely possible the whole hanging
cattle rustlers and bystanders tale is apocryphal or loosely based on actual
events. That’s not to say such things didn’t happen in the days of open range
cattle ranching.

------
JackFr
Whenever I read 'drop ship', I think of the noun from "Starship Troopers".

~~~
kevinlou
It is disappointing, isn't it? That such a cool term has been co-opted to mean
"forwarding some stuff to another person."

~~~
yellowapple
Unless that stuff being forwarded is a Morita rifle, of course.

------
ForHackernews
This is some genuine late-capitalist dystopian activity: Ordering cheap
plastic garbage, having it packed and shipped to low-tax jurisdictions, only
to unpack it, cover up the barcodes and re-pack it to ship it again.

It's like if somebody read about drop-shipping and thought "How can we do
something like this, but make it even more pointless and wasteful?"

~~~
TulliusCicero
"Moderately wasteful middlemen exist" is pretty mild as far as dystopian
activity goes.

You can probably find equal or greater waste in the bureaucracies of any
economic system you care to name.

~~~
madengr
This is how the government buys computers. The order goes to a Small
Disadvantaged Business, who takes a 10% cut, with the computers being drop
shipped from the manufacturer.

~~~
ryandrake
This is how a lot of government contracting works, too. The prime contractor
is always some [I'll gently call it] Incentivized-Demographic-Owned company
whose only job is to subcontract all their contracts out to a bigger company
who actually does the work. The "IDO" company (often one person) does nothing
but takes a small cut and passes the rest of the profits to the company doing
the work.

~~~
Spooky23
They do more than that -- the prime contractors are as ridiculous as the
government is. It's a sweet deal until it isn't... a black-swan event, usually
a fuckup one of the parties means that the reseller is stuck with a
bankruptcy-level bag of poo.

As vassals of the big company, they act as a buffer for whatever the goals of
the big company are.

When the big co needs to make it's quarterly goals, they'll "ship" a bunch of
software to the vassal company (which is at best a piece of paper) to hit
their nut. With physical equipment, the same thing happens. Most notoriously,
car dealers get stuck with accepting cars they don't want in order to get cars
they need. A Ford dealer won't get an extra allocation of $75k F-150 trucks
unless they take a load of Ford Focuses. If you get a great deal on a specific
printer or something from a reseller, this is why.

On the other side of the transaction, the government sucks in terms of on-time
payment. Wall St. doesn't like receivables from the customer, so the bigco
will shaft the female-nativeamerican-disabled-veteran owned reseller with a
Net-30 payment schedule, and they need to finance that receivable for the
Net-180 paying government entity.

The other issue is terms and conditions. The government will demand most-
favored nation status for price and impose onerous terms. The subcontractor
company accepts that risk, deals with whatever wacky terms need to be dealt
with, and enters the contract -- so big company doesn't get sued for fraud
when the US Department of Agriculture gets a more expensive price than the
Wyoming Department of Health for a product, or when the pallet used to ship a
server includes wood sourced from Brazilian hardwood.

