Daddy, where does stuff come from?

                The Secret Life of Everything: Where Your Stuff Comes From by Brandon Keim is an article detailing the difficulty of tracking down the sources of production and delivery of common household items. It covers the author’s compilation on others research regarding delivery, supply lines and product complexity.

                In its discussion of final destinations for products Brandon notes how much easier it is to find where something is delivered compared to where it came from. Sensibly this is because stores already communicate what they have in order to sell it, although whether the difficulties the author encountered in finding where it came from are because the businesses are striving to hide all sources or just the result of whoever he asked being unsure where their products come from. For all his detail on the process of delivery in regards to mathematically maximizing the efficiency of their box placement for when it’s unloaded the author doesn’t express whether the delivery services where separate from companies or more compliant in sharing where the stuff they moved came from.

                The supply lines aspect focused on the complexity and control of delivery of car parts. To illustrate the difficulty of tracking every part of a product to its source he cites how Pietra Rivoli spent years of research to make their book, The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy. Of greater interest however is his information regarding a coffee company whose president was able to link him to the source of the beans from which their coffee was made, without knowing where products they bought from other sources like cups came from. To me this paints the picture of multiple companies who can account for their own products while having little clue regarding how the products they buy from others are made.

                While not a focus of the article, the difficulty of tracing the production of a computer was noted by the author as so difficult that “Even focusing on one part, a single display or chip, would be a daunting.” (Brandon.) I find this particularly interesting given computer manufacturing taking place almost entirely after vastly improved information storage and communication.

                Ultimately I found the article to be a well-structured summary of its author’s venture into the world of modern supply lines and an eye opener to the amount of information that is and isn’t out there. The greatest concern I found was regarding the difficulty in finding the source of any error in a product when finding the sources behind a t-shirt take years without trying to research individual sources for problems.