Warehouse Operations Quotes

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It is unlike the industrial era, when corporations depended on people with a wide range of skills: managers and marketers, engineers and technicians, warehouse workers and salespeople. These jobs were often unionized, at least in the manufacturing and energy sectors, so that upper management was compelled at least to consider diverse views on how the business should operate. In contrast, tech firms are rarely unionized, and none of the largest internet-based firms are.7 Crucially, the tech giants employ relatively few people in proportion to their revenues.
Joel Kotkin (The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class)
The rise of loneliness as a health hazard tracks with the entrenchment of values and practices that supersede any notion of "individual choices." The dynamics include reduced social programs, less available "common" spaces such as public libraries, cuts in services for the vulnerable and the elderly, stress, poverty, and the inexorable monopolization of economic life that shreds local communities. By way of illustration, let's take a familiar scenario: Walmart or some other megastore decides to open one of its facilities in a municipality. Developers are happy, politicians welcome the new investment, and consumers are pleased at finding a wide variety of goods at lower prices. But what are the social impacts? Locally owned and operated small businesses cannot compete with the marketing behemoth and must close. People lose their jobs or must find new work for lower pay. Neighborhoods are stripped of the familiar hardware store, pharmacy, butcher, baker, candlestick maker. People no longer walk to their local establishment, where they meet and greet one another and familiar merchants they have known, but drive, each isolated in their car, to a windowless, aesthetically bereft warehouse, miles away from home. They might not even leave home at all — why bother, when you can order online? No wonder international surveys show a rise in loneliness. The percentage of Americans identifying themselves as lonely has doubled from 20 to 40 percent since the 1980s, the New York Times reported in 2016. Alarmed by the health ravages, Britain has even found it necessary to appoint a minister of loneliness. Describing the systemic founts of loneliness, the U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy wrote: "Our twenty-first-century world demands that we focus on pursuits that seem to be in constant competition for our time, attention, energy, and commitment. Many of these pursuits are themselves competitions. We compete for jobs and status. We compete over possessions, money, and reputations. We strive to stay afloat and to get ahead. Meanwhile, the relationships we prize often get neglected in the chase." It is easy to miss the point that what Dr. Murthy calls "our twenty-first-century world" is no abstract entity, but the concrete manifestation of a particular socioeconomic system, a distinct worldview, and a way of life.
Gabor Maté (The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture)
... People like to know what they are getting ahead of time. Thus, McDonald's, Wal-Mart, F.W. Woolworth: store-brands maintained and visible across the entire country. Wherever you go, you will get something that is, with small regional variations, the same. 'In the field of funeral homes, however, things are, perforce, different. You need to feel that you are getting small-town personal service from someone who has a calling to the profession. You want personal attention to you and your loved one in a time of great loss. You wish to know that your grief is happening on a local level, not a national one. But in all branches of industry - and death is an industry, my young friend, make no mistake about that - one makes one's money from operating in bulk, from buying in quantity, from centralising one's operations. It's not pretty, but it's true. Trouble is, no one wants to know that their loved ones are travelling in a cooler van to some big old converted warehouse where they may have twenty, fifty, or a hundred cadavers to go... 'So when big companies come in they buy the name of the company, they pay the funeral directors to stay on, they create the apparency of diversity. But that is merely the tip of the gravestone. In reality, they are as local as Burger King.
Neil Gaiman (American Gods)
You may not recognize the name Steven Schussler, CEO of Schussler Creative Inc., but you are probably familiar with his very popular theme restaurant Rainforest Café. Steve is one of the scrappiest people I know, with countless scrappy stories. He is open and honest about his wins and losses. This story about how he launched Rainforest Café is one of my favorites: Steve first envisioned a tropical-themed family restaurant back in the 1980s, but unfortunately, he couldn’t persuade anyone else to buy into the idea at the time. Not willing to give up easily, he decided to get scrappy and be “all in.” To sell his vision, he transformed his own split-level suburban home into a living, mist-enshrouded rain forest to convince potential investors that the concept was viable. Yes, you read that correctly—he converted his own house into a jungle dwelling complete with rock outcroppings, waterfalls, rivers, and layers of fog and mist that rose from the ground. The jungle included a life-size replica of an elephant near the front door, forty tropical birds in cages, and a live baby baboon named Charlie. Steve shared the following details: Every room, every closet, every hallway of my house was set up as a three-dimensional vignette: an attempt to present my idea of what a rain forest restaurant would look like in actual operation. . . . [I]t took me three years and almost $400,000 to get the house developed to the point where I felt comfortable showing it to potential investors. . . . [S]everal of my neighbors weren’t exactly thrilled to be living near a jungle habitat. . . . On one occasion, Steve received a visit from the Drug Enforcement Administration. They wanted to search the premises for drugs, presuming he may have had an illegal drug lab in his home because of his huge residential electric bill. I imagine they were astonished when they discovered the tropical rain forest filled with jungle creatures. Steve’s plan was beautiful, creative, fun, and scrappy, but the results weren’t coming as quickly as he would have liked. It took all of his resources, and he was running out of time and money to make something happen. (It’s important to note that your scrappy efforts may not generate results immediately.) I asked Steve if he ever thought about quitting, how tight was the money really, and if there was a time factor, and he said, “Yes to all three! Of course I thought about quitting. I was running out of money and time.” Ultimately, Steve’s plan succeeded. After many visits and more than two years later, gaming executive and venture capitalist Lyle Berman bought into the concept and raised the funds necessary to get the Rainforest Café up and running. The Rainforest Café chain became one of the most successful themed restaurants ever created, and continues that way under Landry’s Restaurants and Tilman Fertitta’s leadership. Today, Steve creates restaurant concepts in fantastic warehouses far from his residential neighborhood!
Terri L. Sjodin (Scrappy: A Little Book About Choosing to Play Big)
A major portion of the cost of defense against foreign aggression in a laissez-faire society would be borne originally by business and industry, as owners of industrial plants obviously have a much greater investment to defend than do owners of little houses in suburbia. If there were any real threat of aggression by a foreign power, businessmen would all be strongly motivated to buy insurance against that aggression, for the same reason that they buy fire insurance, even though they could save money in the short run by not doing so. An interesting result of this fact is that the cost of defense would ultimately tend to be spread among the whole population, since defense costs, along with overhead and other such costs, would have to be included in the prices paid for goods by consumers. So, the concern that “free riders” might get along without paying for their own defense by parasitically depending on the defenses paid for by their neighbors is groundless. It is based on a misconception of how the free-market system would operate. The role of business and industry as major consumers of foreign-aggression insurance would operate to unify the free area in the face of any aggression. An auto plant in Michigan, for example, might well have a vital source of raw materials in Montana, a parts plant in Ontario, a branch plant in California, warehouses in Texas, and outlets all over North America. Every one of these facilities is important to some degree to the management of that Michigan factory, so it will want to have them defended, each to the extent of its importance. Add to this the concern of the owners and managers of these facilities for their own businesses and for all the other businesses on which they, in turn, depend, and a vast, multiple network of interlocking defense systems emerges. The involvement of the insurance companies, with their diversified financial holdings and their far-flung markets would immeasurably strengthen this defensive network. Such a multiple network of interlocking defense systems is a far cry from the common but erroneous picture of small cities, businesses, and individuals, unprotected by a government, falling one by one before an advancing enemy horde.
Morris Tannehill (Market for Liberty)
Within thirty minutes, the refrigerator was plugged in and humming, the stove was operational and some rough cabinetry had been bolted to the warehouse wall. Because the new kitchen location was adjacent to a bathroom, Trey was going to make a hole in the wall and reconfigure the plumbing.
Conrad Brasso (Hunting the Midnight Shark)
• Lodging REITs (e.g., Hospitality Properties Trust [HPT]), which hold properties such as hotels, resorts, and travel centers. • Self-storage REITs (e.g., Public Storage [PSA]), which specialize in both owning self-storage facilities and renting storage spaces to customers. • Office REITs (e.g., Boston Properties [BXP]), which own, operate, and lease space in office buildings. • Industrial REITs (e.g., PS Business Parks [PSB]), which own and manage properties such as warehouses and distribution centers. • Data center REITs (e.g., Equinix [EQIX]), which own data centers, properties that store and operate data servers and other computer networking equipment. • Timberland REITs (e.g., Rayonier [RYN]), which hold forests and other types of real estate dedicated to harvesting timber. • Specialty REITs, which narrow in on very specific properties such as casinos, cell phone towers, or educational facilities.
Michele Cagan (Real Estate Investing 101: From Finding Properties and Securing Mortgage Terms to REITs and Flipping Houses, an Essential Primer on How to Make Money with Real Estate (Adams 101 Series))
Companies don't want anyone telling them how to deal with their workers  -- they never have; they never will. Stores don't want anyone telling them how to design their entrances; how many steps they can have (or can't have); how heavy their doors can be. Yet they accept their city's building and fire codes, dictating to them how many people they can have in their restaurants, based on square footage, so that the place will not be a fire hazard. They accept that the city can inspect their electrical wiring to ensure that it "meets code" before they open for business. Yet they chafe if an individual wants an accommodation. Because, it seems, it is seen as "special for the handicapped," most of whom likely don't deserve it. Accommodation is fought doubly hard when it is seen to be a way of letting "the disabled" have a part of what we believe is for "normal" people. Although no access code, anywhere, requires them, automatic doors remain the one thing, besides flat or ramped entrances, that one hears about most from people with mobility problems: they need automatic doors as well as flat entrances. Yet no code, anywhere, includes them; mandating them would be "going too far"; giving the disabled more than they have a right to. A ramp is OK. An automatic door? That isn't reasonable. At least that's what the building lobby says. Few disability rights groups, anywhere, have tried to push for that accommodation. Some wheelchair activists are now pressing for "basic, minimal access" in all new single-family housing, so, they say, they can visit friends and attend gatherings in others' homes. This means at least one flat entrance and a bathroom they can get into. De-medicalization No large grocery or hotel firm, no home-and-garden discount supply center would consider designing an entrance that did not include automatic doors. They are standard in hotels and discount warehouses. Not, of course, for the people who literally can not open doors by themselves  -- for such people are "the disabled": them, not us. Firms that operate hotels, groceries and building supply stores fight regulations that require they accommodate "the disabled." Automatic doors that go in uncomplainingly are meant for us, the fit, the nondisabled, to ensure that we will continue to shop at the grocery or building supply center; to make it easy for us to get our grocery carts out, our lumber dollies to our truck loaded with Sheetrock for the weekend project. So the bellhops can get the luggage in and out of the hotel easily. When it is for "them," it is resisted; when it is for "us," however, it is seen as a design improvement. Same item; different purpose
Mary Johnson (Make Them Go Away: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve & The Case Against Disability Rights)
In 2002, a joint federal, state, and local investigation was launched called Operation Ice Palace, which targeted The Castle, a head shop housed in a cavernous corrugated metal warehouse shaped like a medieval fort complete with a moat and a drawbridge.
Frank Owen (No Speed Limit: Meth Across America)
Odoo Microsoft Office 365 Integration Odoo is an Enterprise Resource Planning(ERP) system which includes CRM, Inventory, Warehouse etc. Microsoft is well known software company who develeops computer Operating System and other related services. One of its best product is Microsoft Office365. Odoo integration with Microsoft Office365 makes it easy to sync the data in Apps i.e Contacts, Outlook, Calendar, OneDrive, Tasks both ways.
woadsoft
An incline/decline conveyor is just one of many types of conveyor systems that allow moving goods faster, safely and steadily while changing the vertical level. It is known that the standard speed for most unit-handling conveyors is 60 feet per minute (ft/min). This is equal to the average speed of a warehouse worker carrying a 50-pound box. However, the speed of workers is significantly reduced when moving cargo vertically. This is typical of many mezzanine order picking and assembly operations. No one worker can maintain a smooth working rhythm with no loss of efficiency during the shift, moving goods up and down from a lower level to a higher level and vice versa.
Katie Conway
The automatic vertical warehouses use mechanical structures moving between 2 rows of racks to carry out the load AS/RS (storage/retrieval) operations. The stored containers are trays whose features and dimensions are determined by specific characteristics of the products. the entire structure is absolutely enclosed by walls and thus isolated from company surrounding atmosphere
Yes Machinery
Concurrent with the decline of manufacturing, the latter half of the twentieth century oversaw another shift. While earlier office technologies had supplemented workers and increased demand for them, the development of the microprocessor and computing technologies began to replace semiskilled service workers in many areas – for example, telephone operators and secretaries.20 The roboticisation of services is now gathering steam, with over 150,000 professional service robots sold in the past fifteen years.21 Under particular threat have been ‘routine’ jobs – jobs that can be codified into a series of steps. These are tasks that computers are perfectly suited to accomplish once a programmer has created the appropriate software, leading to a drastic reduction in the numbers of routine manual and cognitive jobs over the past four decades.22 The result has been a polarisation of the labour market, since many middle-wage, mid-skilled jobs are routine, and therefore subject to automation.23 Across both North America and Western Europe, the labour market is now characterised by a predominance of workers in low-skilled, low-wage manual and service jobs (for example, fast-food, retail, transport, hospitality and warehouse workers), along with a smaller number of workers in high-skilled, high-wage, non-routine cognitive jobs.24
Nick Srnicek (Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work)
there are four separate and distinct components to consider in the DW/BI environment: operational source systems, ETL system, data presentation area, and business intelligence applications.
Ralph Kimball (The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Definitive Guide to Dimensional Modeling)
Business Processes Business processes are the operational activities performed by your organization, such as taking an order, processing an insurance claim, registering students for a class, or snapshotting every account each month. Business process events generate or capture performance metrics that translate into facts in a fact table. Most fact tables focus on the results of a single business process. Choosing the process is important because it defines a specific design target and allows the grain, dimensions, and facts to be declared. Each business process corresponds to a row in the enterprise data warehouse bus matrix.
Ralph Kimball (The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Definitive Guide to Dimensional Modeling)
This asset is almost always used for two purposes: operational record keeping and analytical decision making. Simply speaking, the operational systems are where you put the data in, and the DW/BI system
Ralph Kimball (The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Definitive Guide to Dimensional Modeling)
Cultures in scaling startups can fracture in two ways. First, “old guard versus new guard” conflicts may arise if early team members resent the growing power of specialists or some new employees’ lack of initiative and commitment. Recent hires, in turn, may be jealous of early employees who’ve amassed enormous stock option gains (“That engineer in the next cubicle does the same thing I do, and she just made $5 million”). Second, as specialists are added to the staff and their units expand, functions can develop their own subcultures. Employees may feel a stronger sense of attachment to their functional unit—say, marketing or warehouse operations—than to the venture overall.
Tom Eisenmann (Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success)
A data warehouse is an organized store of data from all over the organization, specially designed to help make management decisions. Data can be extracted from operational database to answer a particular set of queries. This data, combined with other data, can be rolled up to a consistent granularity and uploaded to a separate data store called the data warehouse. Therefore, the data warehouse is a simpler version of the operational data base, with the purpose of addressing reporting and decision-making needs only.
Anil Maheshwari (Data Analytics Made Accessible)
They measured, surveyed, and allocated whatever land had not been distributed. They built roads, bridges, fences, livestock pounds, and public landings. They exported barrel staves and imported “salt and Barbados goods on reasonable terms.” They authorized the building of a warehouse whose owner would “supply the town of Lyme with salt and certain woods upon reasonable terms,” and they prohibited the cutting of timber on common land and the “transport of the same out of the town” because “all sorts of timber grow scarce among us.” They also managed the operation of the gristmill to keep it “in repair continually for to grind the town’s corn all winter and summer,” and they decided the length of the school year, authorizing two dame schools “for teaching young children and maids to read and whatever else they may be capable of learning, either knitting or sewing.” In 1685 they decided to erect “a pair of stocks & scaffold to answer the laws within a month at the meeting house.
Carolyn Wakeman (Forgotten Voices: The Hidden History of a New England Meetinghouse (The Driftless Series))
So in other words… Those children had seen a warehouse full of skeletal corpses in the Republic operation… They had to climb up a cliff along a road formed from their allies’ remains. These poor child soldiers have been faced with one gruesome sight after another, and so the adults have sought to ease their troubled minds by sending them on vacation… Why must the chief of staff and the other officers spend their cigarette break pretending to be a bunch of evil masterminds plotting something terrible…? Such was the aide’s exasperated, silent soliloquy.
Asato Asato (86—EIGHTY-SIX, Vol. 7: Mist)
Unlike traditional retailers, Amazon boasted what was called a negative operating cycle. Customers paid with their credit cards when their books shipped but Amazon settled its accounts with the book distributors only every few months. With every sale, Amazon put more cash in the bank, giving it a steady stream of capital to fund its operations and expansion.14 The company could also lay claim to a uniquely high return on invested capital. Unlike brick-and-mortar retailers, whose inventories were spread out across hundreds or thousands of stores around the country, Amazon had one website and, at that time, a single warehouse and inventory. Amazon’s ratio of fixed costs to revenue was considerably more favorable than that of its offline competitors. In other words, Bezos and Covey argued, a dollar that was plugged into Amazon’s infrastructure could lead to exponentially greater returns than a dollar that went into the infrastructure of any other retailer in the world.
Brad Stone (The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon)
You have to remember,” Peterson adds, “that one of the ways that Gary Kurtz talked to me about Empire was, ‘From the model point of view, it’ll actually be easier than the first show because we already have all the models; they’ve been packaged, sent up north, and are sitting in a warehouse. So in some ways, it’ll be just operating those models again.’ Well, it didn’t work out that way at all!
J.W. Rinzler (The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition))
And around this hub, its center enclosed by the rounded rectangle of the elevated Loop tracks, clustered the dozens of individual neighborhoods that together formed this huge and diverse metropolis. Here was Little Poland, Little Italy, the Black Belt, and Greektown, the silk-stocking districts and the New World shtetls, each one of which—whether made up of crumbling tenements, luxurious mansions, or neat little worker cottages—stood in many ways apart from the others, a self-contained enclave with its own ethos and mores. From this height, one could also see the engines that kept this collection of urban villages in operation—the interlocking feedlots and slaughterhouses of the stockyards district to the southwest, the enormous steel mills to the far south, the reaper works, the railcar factories, the gasworks, the warehouses and merchandise marts of the retailing trade, and the endless railyards full of trains that connected the city to the rest of the world. To call this conglomeration by a single name—Chicago—seemed wildly inappropriate. It was less like a city than a world unto itself, bringing together the artifacts and energies of a vast multitude.
Gary Krist (City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago)
While the cocaine was unloaded into a warehouse, Cox and I were taken by car to a nearby gray stone hotel. The driver led us upstairs, and knocked on the Penthouse door. "Yeah," a voice answered. "I got a Tinker-belle and a Peter Pan here to see you, Sir," the driver called. "Send 'em in." Cox and I walked into the suite where then Governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton was shuffling through a briefcase. Clinton and Johnston were cohorts in illegal covert operations that emanated from Tinker Air Force Base.
Cathy O'Brien (TRANCE Formation of America: True life story of a mind control slave)
Today the cloud is the central metaphor of the internet: a global system of great power and energy that nevertheless retains the aura of something noumenal and numnious, something almost impossible to grasp. We connect to the cloud; we work in it; we store and retrieve stuff from it; we think through it. We pay for it and only notice it when it breaks. It is something we experience all the time without really understanding what it is or how it works. It is something we are training ourselves to rely upon with only the haziest of notions about what is being entrusted, and what it is being entrusted to. Downtime aside, the first criticism of this cloud is that it is a very bad metaphor. The cloud is not weightless; it is not amorphous, or even invisible, if you know where to look for it. The cloud is not some magical faraway place, made of water vapor and radio waves, where everything just works. It is a physical infrastructure consisting of phone lines, fibre optics, satellites, cables on the ocean floor, and vast warehouses filled with computers, which consume huge amounts of water and energy and reside within national and legal jurisdictions. The cloud is a new kind of industry, and a hungry one. The cloud doesn't just have a shadow; it has a footprint. Absorbed into the cloud are many of the previously weighty edifices of the civic sphere: the places where we shop, bank, socialize, borrow books, and vote. Thus obscured, they are rendered less visible and less amenable to critique, investigation, preservation and regulation. Another criticism is that this lack of understanding is deliberate. There are good reasons, from national security to corporate secrecy to many kinds of malfeasance, for obscuring what's inside the cloud. What evaporates is agency and ownership: most of your emails, photos, status updates, business documents, library and voting data, health records, credit ratings, likes, memories, experiences, personal preferences, and unspoken desires are in the cloud, on somebody else's infrastructure. There's a reason Google and Facebook like to build data centers in Ireland (low taxes) and Scandinavia (cheap energy and cooling). There's a reason global, supposedly post-colonial empires hold onto bits of disputed territory like Diego Garcia and Cyprus, and it's because the cloud touches down in these places, and their ambiguous status can be exploited. The cloud shapes itself to geographies of power and influence, and it serves to reinforce them. The cloud is a power relationship, and most people are not on top of it. These are valid criticisms, and one way of interrogating the cloud is to look where is shadow falls: to investigate the sites of data centers and undersea cables and see what they tell us about the real disposition of power at work today. We can seed the cloud, condense it, and force it to give up some of its stories. As it fades away, certain secrets may be revealed. By understanding the way the figure of the cloud is used to obscure the real operation of technology, we can start to understand the many ways in which technology itself hides its own agency - through opaque machines and inscrutable code, as well as physical distance and legal constructs. And in turn, we may learn something about the operation of power itself, which was doing this sort of thing long before it had clouds and black boxes in which to hide itself.
James Bridle (New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future)
To initiate its EIR program, USCIS would also turn to an agitator. Brad Feld, an early-stage investor and prolific blogger, had become exasperated when officers of two promising startups under his watch were forced to return to their home countries because they couldn’t secure visas. He shared their story on a blog, attracting the attention of other entrepreneurs, including Ries, who couldn’t understand why there was no visa category for an entrepreneur with American investors and employees. In lieu of that category, many entrepreneurs were at the mercy of visa examiners who didn’t understand how they operated. At the point of visa application, many startups had not hired many employees or generated much revenue. This confused traditional visa examiners, who would then ask odd and irrelevant questions, often before a denial. To give just one example, it’s been years since AOL required a compact disc to use its service. And yet, visa examiners were demanding proof of a warehouse, where software startups would store their CD inventory for shipping to customers. As Feld’s idea of a “startup visa” became intertwined with, and paralyzed by, the broader debate on comprehensive immigration reform, the USCIS, with White House support, sought to accomplish something administratively within the existing law. It instituted an EIR program, to organize and educate a specialty unit of immigration officers to handle entrepreneur and startup nonimmigrant visa cases.22 The project also called for educating entrepreneurs about the available options, one of which they may have overlooked. For instance, the O-1 visa, which was reserved “for those with extraordinary ability,” had proven a successful channel for actors, athletes, musicians, directors, scientists, artists, businessmen, engineers, and others who could provide ample evidence of their unique and impressive abilities, attributes, awards, and accolades. It had even created some controversy, when visa evaluators took the term “model” to an extreme, awarding a visa to one of Hugh Hefner’s ex-girlfriends, a Playboy centerfold from Canada named Shera Berchard.23 If she was confident enough to assert and explain her “extraordinary ability,” why weren’t entrepreneurs?
Aneesh Chopra (Innovative State: How New Technologies Can Transform Government)
As it turns out, these decentralized networks don’t form and grow all by themselves. It usually takes an organization acting as the primary node in that network to grow and coordinate all of that activity on a large scale. These platform businesses don’t operate the way traditional organizations did. Rather than investing in internal resources—such as employees, factories, or warehouses—platforms create value by coordinating these large external networks of consumers and producers.
Alex Moazed (Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy)
Despite the prodigies of industrial improvisation the South accomplished during the war, most of its industries were eventually destroyed by the war along with much of the rest of its economy. The bonds and paper money issued by the Confederate and state governments became worthless, wiping out the region’s liquid capital. Its agriculture—the very heart and soul of the Southern economy—had been devastated as much of the enslaved workforce abandoned the fields as soon as they could. The cotton crop, unable to be exported because of the Northern blockade (although much was clandestinely smuggled out to keep New England mills operating) rotted in warehouses. With the end of the war and slavery, a new system of agriculture had to be developed in the South. The former slaves now controlled the use of their labor, but had not land, equipment, or expertise in dealing with a free economy. The former slaveowners for the most part kept their ownership of the capital assets needed to produce crops, such as the land and cotton gins, but often lacked the cash to pay farmhands’ wages. Numerous arrangements were tried, but soon a system of sharecropping, in which laborers were paid with a share of the crop, arose in the Deep South (it was largely unknown elsewhere in the country) and it would dominate southern agriculture until after World War II. But it never excluded other types of arrangements, nor was sharecropping limited to black workers. Many poor white families were also sharecroppers, and about 25 percent of black farming families owned the land they worked by 1880, a remarkable accomplishment only fifteen years after the end of slavery. But the South retained the essential attributes of what today is called a Third World country: ownership of the means of production by a small, privileged elite; desperate poverty and grinding toil for most of the population; and an economy based on agriculture and extractive industries rather than manufacturing and services.
John Steele Gordon (An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power)
Emmalina and I found Matthew chatting to the bookseller, whose stall was situated outside the Tavern at the end of Three Cranes Lane, where he had a good view of the watermen dropping off and picking up their fares but was out of the main bustle of the street. In characteristically ironic style, the tavern sign showed three waterfowl cranes with plump bodies and long beaks, rather than representing the three mechanical cranes that stood on the dock for loading wine barrels, after whom the wharf was named. Today, only one of the cranes was in operation, lifting barrels from a barge and swinging them high across to the vintry warehouse. A glance at one of the barrels, as it rose over our heads, showed that the wine was imported claret from a certain T. Lurton of Bordeaux.
Jonathan Digby (A Murderous Affair)
In all Woodell spent a few days with Bork, smoothing his feathers, going over the operation. He discovered that Bork was stressed, too. Though the retail store was thriving, the back room, which had basically become our national warehouse, was in shambles. Boxes everywhere, invoices and papers stacked to the ceiling. Bork couldn’t keep pace.
Phil Knight (Shoe Dog)