Arriving today : from factory to front door--why everything has changed about how and what we buy / Christopher Mims.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The gathering storm -- The box -- Ships and other cyborgs -- Coming to America -- Parallel parking 1,200 feet of ship -- Longshoremen against the machine -- The largest robots on earth -- The little-known, rarely understood organizing principle of modern work -- How a management philosophy became our way of life -- Rime of the long-haul trucker -- 100 percent of everything -- How "Hitler's highway" became America's circulatory system -- The future of trucking -- What actually happens inside Amazon's warehouses -- The unbearable complexity of robotic warehousing -- Bezosism -- From Japan with love: origins of the Amazon way -- How warehouse work injures -- Amazon's employee-lite endgame -- The middle mile -- The future of delivery -- The last mile.

A Wall Street Journal reporter travels the globe to tell the story behind the misleadingly simple phrase online shoppers increasingly take for granted: "arriving today." From factory laborers in Vietnam to longshoremen at the port of LA to truckers crawling our interstate highways to robots lurking in Amazon's "dark warehouses," here is an eye-opening investigation of the way online commerce is reshaping the globe, rewriting the rules of business, and redefining consumer expectations.