Even after winter storms left East Coast harbors thick with ice, some of the country's top chefs and trendy restaurants were offering sushi-grade tuna supposedly pulled in fresh off the coast of New York.
On the Model 3 body line on a Tuesday afternoon in early June, everything is still. Tesla Inc. is just coming off a week of downtime during which workers added a new production line, improved ventilation after a fire in the paint shop, and overhauled machines across the factory. But even after the changes, there are kinks to work out.
Home Depot Inc. plans to spend $1.2bn over the next five years to speed up delivery of goods to homes and job sites as the rise of online shopping resets consumer expectations.
It’s lazy to think that a manufacturing process is better just because it’s automated. While the effort going on right now at the Tesla factory in Fremont is anything but lazy, it brings into the spotlight one of the core problems with the simplistic “automation for automation’s sake” strategy: processes that aren’t stable to begin with cannot be made stable with robots.
A watchdog group is calling on Amazon.com Inc. to improve conditions for factory workers in China who make Echo speakers and Kindle e-readers, renewing criticisms that CEO Jeff Bezos became the world’s wealthiest man on the backs of low-paid laborers.
Behind the daily skirmishes over tariffs, the U.S. and China are gearing up for a longer-term battle between two very different systems of innovation. To win, America may need to start using some of its rival’s weapons.
