LTL as a strategy
I confess I had to look it up.
A truck passed me on the highway and on the side, it said that they did both LTL and FTL shipments.
FTL means "full truckload." For the longest time, a full truckload was the only efficient way to ship goods around. A company would expand operations (not just trucking, but just about everything) so that it could use all of an available resource. No sense having half a shipping clerk or half a secretary or half a truck shipment--the rest was going to go to waste, so might as well use it all.
As Lisa Gansky wrote about in her seminal book the Mesh, the massive shift in data (and knowledge) produced by the net means that FTL isn't nearly the advantage over less than a truckload it used to be. Since it's so cheap and effective to coordinate activity, that extra space isn't wasted, not at all. It's shared.
Since we can share resources, expanding to use all of something (a car, a boat, a vacation home) isn't just inefficient, it's wasteful.
Now that it's cheaper and faster to share, an enormous number of new opportunities exist. Short runs, focused projects, marketing to the weird--mass is dead in more ways than we can count.
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