Imagine doing this when you were in college, assuming you were an undergrad in the ’60s:
I’m tracking an Apple.com shipment in near realtime from the factory in Suzhou, China, to my house near Savannah, Georgia.
I think this is even more amazing than the first video Skype call I made, from Bergen, Norway, to my wife in Atlanta.
A couple of other thoughts:
- It only takes a little over 4 days to make the trip, factory to end user. Talk about just-in-time.
- Even though it was delivered to FEDEX Suzhou after the cutoff, FEDEX sent it out to Shanghai anyway (thanks, FEDEX!)
Slightly East of New 
long ago and far away, my brother use to be apple regional marketing rep (largest geographic region in CONUS, when he would come into town and have business dinners … I could tag along and sometimes argue with the MAC developers about the design of the MAC … before MAC was even announced).
At the time, Apple was being run on IBM S/38 (precursor to AS/400) and he figured out how to dial-in remotely and track manufacturing and delivery schedules.
Much later … both Apple and AS/400 move to POWER/PC platforms
“…assuming you were an undergrad in the ’60s:”, and the marvelous thing arriving was something you wanted but not needed.
Well, true. But the tracking ability itself is pretty marvelous.
I agree.
It always amazes me when I look on the computer and it reads that the UPS person is in the process of delivering to the address, and then walk out to the front porch and discover that, indeed, the person has delivered to my front door.
It seems to me that the “cheap trick” http://www.tempobook.com/glossary/#cheap-trick to a consumer economy is that the advantage goes to the consumer that wants something, but doesn’t really need that something because they have all they need, and the disadvantage goes to the needy, who needs resources to survive.
And then the rest of the narrative is about an economy that is built on changing need to want. The economy becomes about making that “something” consumers want into a “thing” that is needed, i.e. the entropy in the society is made available as need changes to want.
So I suppose, sooner or later a consumer economy isn’t about wanting more and more, because that just builds entropy, but the cheap trick of those who want more taking advantage of the market for low prices, becomes more about reducing entropy through design and planning.
Designing destructs, and as the entropy of the system becomes available through the destruction of what is need (water, food, and environment), planning constructs that which is wanted, everyone connected to the system through resources that supplies all that is wanted.