The Business in Chains subtheme is for private sector logistics. Enjoy!
I am but a wee observer to the big, complex world of logistics we inhabit. Sometimes I just want to shine a light on a system to get you to think about the world differently. Today’s examination of the problematics driven by our disposable economy consider the multiple logistical issues for both sides of the retail relationship around enterprise organization and the last phase of the consumer’s life with the product.
The entry point is an overly complicated process to get rid of a suite of Acme Co. phone, internet, and cable hardware and update to a simpler system in a residence. The obstacles began with the removal and installation. The technician who brought the new equipment had no means to take the old with him – “I’m a contractor, I don’t go back to Acme Co.” The next was the path, shrouded in mystery, to finding out how to dispose of the uninstalled materiel. I ended up having to Tweet at the company to effect, with the answer being to return the goods to a store. Except that the guidance was not entirely accurate in two parts. No, it was not just any old store and I had a choice of two, equidistant in opposite directions. Happily, I popped into one of them to ask, and found out that it was the other one. The second problem was that the store would not accept half of the stuff. Apparently, it was not meant to be removed. These were two oversized cheap plastic boxes of wires, had been massive blisters on the wall, and with the service cancelled, the technician had removed them. What was I supposed to do? Recycle them, I am told. I did force the wildly expensive and toxic looking industrial batteries on him despite that not being part of his remit. I couldn’t tell whether he was desperately worried what might come of them, or how much money he thought he could get for them, but his eyes widened when I pulled them out and he quickly agreed to their return.
This byzantine system is driven by two factors. There is in the first instance corporate/brand bait and switch. Acme Co. sells itself as a singular entity offering a suite of goods and services – it is not. This is a common corporate practice. The brand is sold as a unified operation, you are indulged to believe that the relationship is seamless. And then life forces you to interact with different phases or outlets of the operation, and the line becomes, “Acme Co. who? No, that’s just the name on the front of the store, we sell their services and products, but we’re not, you know, Acme Co. for the purposes of anything you might need from them.” This is a vexatious fraud to the consumer. We don’t care that the company has established arcane legal and accounting relationships between nodes of its operation – that is their concern, it makes no sense to the consumers. They are selling on the name, expecting them to honor it is natural, and being rebuffed by a technicality leaves a bad taste.
And this sense animates the overarching theme of this piece, in which for-profit entities impose the burdens of their cost-cutting or savings choices upon the consumer, upon the public sector, upon the environment. The business model that has enabled polluting industrial processes, rapacious extraction, excess and wasteful production, and similar, accounts for a portion of why we are where we are with the climate crisis. And since the rise of the industrial age, none of the marks has ever found a way to effectively counter the externalization of difficulties and costs.
More specifically in this case, the incentives sustain a relatively disposable product chain. The technology of digital communications and home internet service is driven by an ethos of constant evolution and upgrades, the hardware is a cheap plastic warehousing box of wires. Both are intended for replacement within three to five years. The turnover of the hardware is thus built in, it is a relentless conveyor belt from supply chain, to factory, to home, to dump. Plastics manufacture maintained at artificially low prices is part of what makes the model works. Add in further profitability levers, how Acme Co. views lowering the per unit cost of new customers versus capital investment to build durable nodes to deliver residential service, the far less resource intensive development of installed local wi-fi systems has been stymied.
Yet, despite creating models of disposability, the private sector rarely steps up to manage the demise of its own goods. There are few good disposal options beyond direct re-use, as even recycling is costly in all directions. Where recyclable materials are collected, the facts on that sector are not promising, and can be as resource intensive and polluting in process all on its own. The end of the conveyor belt of our excess economy is largely a mess of broken promises and exported garbage. The market further enables these practices. Public goods, such as municipal waste management, are highly utilized and little valued or resourced by their biggest contributors. Private enterprise has identified this as the most profitable (according to the current definitions and measures) business systems. Consumers have few motivations to demand a different system, especially in a material culture where new gear makes most of them happy. And little power to change it if they did, as the atomization at the consumer level makes their mass meaningless.
Systemically, the key issue nodes, resource over-use and free-riding, are eminently fixable by mechanism of regulation and market levers. Politically and culturally, the matter of disposability is a far harder more difficult cultural habit to change. Why bother writing about it? Perhaps a more logistically minded society would begin to think differently about such things.