Everything You Didn’t Know You Wanted to Know About the Pallet Industry

Taking a cue from a recent Cabinet magazine story, NPR's Planet Money takes you into the weird and wonderful world of pallets. Yes, those big, flat structures that hold products for transport. The story goes like this: For decades, the standard in the pallet industry was stringer pallets, which forklifts could pick up from two of the four sides. But then an Australian company came up with a new version that could be lifted from any side. Great, right? Not so fast. This updated model, made by a company called CHEP, was about twice as expensive to buy. So CHEP did something kind of genius: It rented out the containers and then picked them up once a shipment was delivered. That's why they're painted bright blue, and the company even holds contests for employees who can spot and bring home pallets that were somehow left in the wild.

While this is all well and good for CHEP and companies like Costco that use its pallets, the Cabinet story also reveals a bit of an ugly side to the business. Traditionally, pallets didn't necessarily "belong" to anyone, so people could make money by collecting unused pallets, refurbishing them, and selling them for profit. You can imagine what happened when people started doing this with CHEP's new blue inventions.

Hachette Job Amazon vs. Hachette: The Battle for the Future of Publishing Knowledge@Wharton

Amazon: Gotta love it. Or hate it, depending on where you stand on the ebook-discount fight being waged on your laptop and tablet. Knowledge@Wharton gets a nice little debate going in this explainer about Amazon’s tactics to force publisher Hachette to get with the program. The personae include Wharton management professor Daniel Raff, who points out the dangers of Amazon’s growing control over cultural products, and venture capitalist David Pakman, who takes the kind of position a venture capitalist would, namely that publishers need to wake up to the realities of the digital world. “Digital markets produce much lower profit per item,” Pakman lectures us. Publishers must therefore rebuild their cost structure by doing such things as “moving to a less fancy office and lowering [managers’] salaries.” Photos of David Pakman’s desk and an estimate of his salary were unavailable to the Shortlist at press time. —Andy O’Connell

Maybe Not Does Innovation Always Lead to Gentrification? Pacific Standard

Every struggling city hopes to grow an “innovation district” that will populate its old brick warehouses with teams of brainy entrepreneurs. But when innovation of this kind comes to cities, the price of everything goes up, and the poor and middle class are displaced, often without benefiting economically. “Innovators don’t create affordable housing,” Kyle Chayka writes in Pacific Standard. “They have little incentive to build a more equitable community.” Instead, they merely reproduce their own kind. He argues that cities should take a holistic view of innovation zones, setting them up so as to ensure sustainable, organic growth that’s woven into the pre-existing urban fabric, rather than simply plopping them “onto an empty-looking post-industrial neighborhood.” Educational institutions should be guaranteed space in these zones at low rents. That way, cities can have a shot at energizing not just the latte class but the entire population. —Andy O’Connell

A Chilling Effect GM Recalls: How General Motors Silenced a Whistle-Blower Businessweek

We've been hearing a lot about GM's efforts to encourage employees to speak up these days. But as Businessweek points out, the 325-page Valukas report provides clues about how deep the problems were and what the company’s culture really felt like: "On page 93, a GM inspector named Steven Oakley is quoted telling investigators that he was too afraid to insist on safety concerns with the Cobalt after seeing his predecessor 'pushed out of the job for doing just that.'" That predecessor is third-generation GM employee Courtland Kelley, who was ignored when he regularly pointed out safety problems. Management moved him around the company to the point where, according to a former colleague, "He still has a job — but he doesn't have a career."

Beyond Stereotypes A Portrait of Europe's White Working Class Financial Times

What happens when an entire population is, as the FT's Simon Kuper reports, "hit by deindustrialisation, economic crisis and the crumbling of the welfare state"? And, while we're at it, what happens when it's "typically depicted either as a joke or a threat"? Kuper's deeply reported piece, stemming from a recent report by the Open Society Foundations, examines Manchester's Higher Blackley neighborhood, a place where people want to work but can't find steady jobs, and from which they don't want to move because of their strong community ties. In fact, everyone interviewed by the OSF wanted to work. But among the problems is one that should be instantly recognizable: "Younger mothers, in particular, wanted 'local, flexible work that fitted in with children’s hours.'"

"Still," writes Kuper, in reference to commonly held stereotypes, "blaming poverty on bad behavior is appealing, because it implies that all the government has to do is fix people’s behavior. There’s no need to raise the minimum wage, provide affordable childcare or improve mental-health services."

BONUS BITS A Debate About Robots (and Ebooks for All!)

This is Probably a Good Time to Say That I Don’t Believe Robots Will Eat All the Jobs… (Marc Andreessen)
Dear Marc Andreessen (Alex Payne)
Building Digital Libraries in Ghana with Worldreader (Medium)