10 Jun
The Cost Of Shipping Has Historically Affected Business
Anyone who has ever invented a product or sought to make a living by selling items either self made or in the retail market understands a basic need to move the product from place to place. Whether the need is a local endeavor, a nationwide event, or a global necessity, there are significant costs involved with getting the product from where it is created to the consumer who will buy it. Shipping has become a major factor in business, and controlling or managing it has become a significant part of every company.
As recently as three decades ago, the cost of moving product from place to place around the country was far less, though never insignificant. Smart businesses have always tried to keep careful tabs on such expenditures to ensure they did not get out of hand. Unfortunately, one of the key ingredients to transportation is oil, and we are dependent in large part on foreign oil. This has left us vulnerable at times to the political whims of other nations, with concomitant negative impact on business.
But it is not just the cost of petroleum that has made it more expensive to move product from place to place. The cost of packaging, much of it made from petroleum has also increased. We can seen the increase in our supermarkets, the cost of paper bags had always been more than for plastic bags, but that is no longer the case.
From the beginning of the nation the notion of delivering packages and mail was an especially important process. The postal service was a mammoth enterprise with a truly nation building impact. Benjamin Franklin became our first postmaster general in 1775, earlier than the signing of the declaration of independence. Unfortunately, mail delivery was not equally available to all Americans.
As things develop, the easiest methods were harnessed first, so people who lived in the cities began receiving official free mail service in 1863. It would be three decades before an organization representing the interests of the farming community could coerce congress into officially launching rural free delivery. But even this new service did not reach all Americans, the west was largely without service.
The notion of rural free delivery was far from universally accepted. The companies that were providing postal service for price felt they were being unfairly persecuted and would lose their business. The shops and stores in towns feared the rural patronage would dwindle and cost them dearly. In the end everyone survived and farm communities had the same access that city folk had.
The fairness of the practice belied the cost of delivering the service. Eventually the idea of prepaying for postal service was made compulsory to deal with the expense of making the deliveries. This cost would be amplified as the effort to extend service to the west all the way to California was attacked in earnest. The pony express was probably one of the nations more notable and romantic efforts in the continued work to assure total international package delivery.
Today we take the ability to transfer packages across the nation and across the globe for granted. We even have the ability to get things delivered throughout the US overnight and anywhere in the world in just a few days. This has allowed the process of doing business to become and remain truly international. But despite all our progress, it is folly to enter into any business with carefully assessing the cost related to shipping.
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