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.
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.
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.
>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
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.
Wow, I read the entire thing only to realize it’s an advertisement
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.
This is a fascinating read, thanks for sharing. I remember when I was college hearing about "vacationing couriers" and thought it sounded amazing
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
Related:
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)
He also pioneered Ruby on Rails and Basecamp.