DHL pioneered the sharing economy (2016)

https://www.flexport.com/blog/dhl-bills-of-lading/

by bpierre • 2 years ago

109 43 2 years ago

malfist• 2 years ago

This is a fascinating read, thanks for sharing. I remember when I was college hearing about "vacationing couriers" and thought it sounded amazing

cbull• 2 years ago

I used to work for a small business called The Air Courier Association. They didn't do any of the actual travel arraignments, they were a membership "club" that gave you all the information on the actual shipping companies and how you can get the cheap/free airfare in return for giving up your baggage allowance on your flights. This was at the end of the 1990s...

tomjen3• 2 years ago

I can't believe that to retrieve a container today, you still need to present the original document from the shipper.

Surely, a simple database record at the port authorities office should suffice. Or a series of digitally signed transfers.

jerkstate• 2 years ago

You don’t anymore. There is something called Telex release that allows the carrier to release the cargo with an electronic copy of the bill of lading.

thedogeye• 2 years ago

In actuality a telex release is just an email that opts you out of the secure release process so once a container has been 'telex' released anyone with the BL number can go pick it up at the port.

razakel2• 2 years ago

It's not a technical problem, it's a political one. You'd have to get every country in the world to agree on a central source of truth.

Physical documents mean the port operators can point the finger at someone else in case of criminality.

potato3732842• 2 years ago

Ironically I think international is almost easier because when the DEA finds the CIA's coke in your container you can just kinda shrug and say "well that container got tamper seals applied when they loaded it in Mongolia and we can prove it" and they just kinda stop chasing there because it's not tractable to dig further until they've established a pattern or something.

When everything is under one regulatory umbrella and it's actually tractable to pin it on someone then it turns into a giant bickering fest until someone takes it (this goes for all sorts of exceptions like damaged goods or whatever, not just crime).

That said, there are tons of places in the economy where make-work is done and BS jobs exist to divide responsibility because the current regulatory situation (private more so than public, i.e. insurers, lenders, etc) all but demands it because if you make things hyper efficient with low labor your concentrate responsibility into few parties and are more likely to get left holding the bag when there's a mishap.

whs• 2 years ago

For the trouble of giving up their baggage allowances, passengers were handed a free round trip plane ticket to Hawaii.

Doing that today would likely get people arrested for drug trafficking

chirau2• 2 years ago

What do you mean? As long as people inspect what they are transporting or only take things delivered to them directly from merchants, I don't see how this would be a problem.

In fact, there is a whole class of travellers in some parts of the world now called runners who do this

echoangle2• 2 years ago

How would you inspect it? I don’t think you have a good chance of finding hidden drugs, but the airport might. So there’s a risk that you missed it but their dog will find it, and you’ll be on the hook.

diebeforei485• 2 years ago

Why? They were only transporting documents (papers for bill of lading) not actual items.

nmridul• 2 years ago

> Four men were indicted on Wednesday for trafficking drug-laced squares of paper disguised as postal stamps to the US and South Africa using an express air service.

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2013/11/22/2...

conradev• 2 years ago

As long as the arbitrage exists (acquisition cost for passengers is less than shipping), someone is going try to exploit it

https://www.vice.com/en/article/now-you-can-pay-people-to-fe...

siva7• 2 years ago

Wow, this must be the dumbest idea i've seen for a long time. Good luck explaining to airport security that you just used some app to be an air courier for someone you don't know while they get their hands dirty on the white powder from your courier package.

bombcar• 2 years ago

The hardest part I've found is figuring out what "low cost" items in one area are "high value" in another and worth schlepping over.

Here's one - Milwaukee Packout is majority red in the USA but mostly black (people call it "Blackout") elsewhere in the world. If you have luggage allowance, buy some and bring it back to the USA and it'll sell decently.

infecto• 2 years ago

Not really. It happens a lot more than you might realize. This is a pretty big business in certain SEA communities and I cannot recall any issues with drugs.

eesmith2• 2 years ago

As I commented when this came up yesterday, there are older (and better!) examples of a sharing economy.

The Negro Motorist Green Book was a guidebook published 1936–1966 for African-Americans to have safe road trips during the Jim Crow era. Some of the information was voluntarily collected by U.S postal workers who gathered the information while on their routes.

I say 'better' because paid couriers existed long before DHL. What DHL did (according to this account) was find a way to replace them with cheaper workers and not have to share the profits but instead use those profits to defend legal challenges against their business model.

hackernewds• 2 years ago

Pioneering means also running it sustainably I'd say.

pessimizer2• 2 years ago

It lasted for 30 years, and ended when legal segregation ended. I suppose they could have lobbied to maintain Jim Crow, if they had been run by MBAs.

eesmith2• 2 years ago

It was not sustainable. DHL switched to a different business model.

dang• 2 years ago

DHL Pioneered the Sharing Economy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41867650 - Oct 2024 (5 comments)

How DHL Pioneered the Sharing Economy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11096769 - Feb 2016 (3 comments)

_zagj• 2 years ago

Worth a watch is the documentary about the "H" in DHL, Larry Hillblom:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1212449/

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/business/king-larry-the-b...

He leveraged his FU money to become a South-Pacific sex tourist so prolific and shameless that, besides his death giving rise to a massive, multi-national paternity dispute, probably was instrumental in getting Congress to criminalize the sexual exploitation of minors by Americans traveling abroad.

andrewstuart• 2 years ago

He also pioneered Ruby on Rails and Basecamp.

beAbU• 2 years ago

That's DHH

raxcc• 2 years ago

Wow, I read the entire thing only to realize it’s an advertisement

Aloha• 2 years ago

I figured from the URL - but its a really well written ad!

It taught me something, and at the end, it presents a problem that I may or may not need solved.

lm28469• 2 years ago

I love how they made the term "sharing economy" a thing when in reality 99% of these things are about _renting_ something from a megacorp

DHL pioneered the sharing economy (2016)

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