Waiting for Our Ship to Come In

It is an excit­ing time for Modernist Cuisine! Three ships left China last week car­ry­ing a total of almost 2,000 copies and headed for var­i­ous ports. Each week, more boats will leave with more copies. By March 21, the last part of the first print­ing will have left China. So we are lit­er­ally wait­ing for our ships to come in.

A nat­ural ques­tion to ask is: when do those copies reach actual cus­tomers? The answer is com­pli­cated. It takes a ridicu­lous amount of time (from where I stand, any­way) to ship the books from their port of entry in the U.S. or Europe to the dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ters that com­pa­nies like Ingram and Amazon use to ship prod­ucts to end cus­tomers and book­stores. Part of the prob­lem is that those dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ters have been located to min­i­mize ship­ping time from the cen­ter to the cus­tomer. That sounds great, except that in this case we want to min­i­mize the time from China to the customer.

If a book is in stock, then opti­miz­ing the time from the dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ter to the cus­tomer makes per­fect sense. If a book­store orders from Ingram, or a cus­tomer orders from Amazon, then they want their books quickly. Usually, the books are sit­ting in a ware­house, typ­i­cally one sit­u­ated in an area with good con­nec­tions for UPS and FedEx, but also cheap real estate, so the cost of hold­ing the books at the ware­house is not too high. Major cities have lots of cus­tomers, but hardly any­body places a dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ter in a major city; land is just too expen­sive. Fortunately, UPS, FedEx, and other ship­ping com­pa­nies do a fan­tas­tic job of ship­ping within the U.S., so this sys­tem works.

Unfortunately for us, how­ever, the dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ters are typ­i­cally located far from the coastal ports where boats from China dock. Shipping a load of 1,000 books from, say, Seattle to Indiana is a very slow process—the books go by train and then truck, on a jour­ney that takes as many as 10 days to com­plete. That is much longer than the two or three days that UPS or FedEx typ­i­cally require to ship books to customers.

So, why not use UPS and FedEx to ship to the dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ter? Well, it’s just too expen­sive. In fact, ship­ping this way would cost more than twice as much because com­pa­nies like Ingram and Amazon have deals with UPS and FedEx that are vastly cheaper than a small com­pany like ours can get. That is under­stand­able, given the tremen­dous vol­ume of goods that these giants move. In addi­tion, the dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ters have com­pli­cated logis­tics sys­tems that make it easy for them to ship things. We don’t have any­thing like that at The Cooking Lab, espe­cially in the port cities that we have been using.

Another solu­tion is to send the books to closer ports—to New York, for exam­ple, rather than to Seattle or Los Angeles. Water is very slip­pery stuff, so it does not take much energy to move across the ocean. As a result, most of the cost of ship­ping by boat is in load­ing and off-loading. A few years ago, I com­pared the price of ship­ping a con­tainer from China to Seattle to the price of ship­ping the same con­tainer from Vancouver, B.C. to Seattle. At that time, the cost was $2,500 from China and $2,000 from Vancouver—even though Vancouver is only 150 miles away from Seattle.

The draw­back to the many-ports approach is that boats are slow. Typically, they travel at a mere 23 knots (nau­ti­cal miles per hour). That is the “made good” speed aver­aged over the trip, and it cor­re­sponds to 26 miles per hour (42 km/hour). The dis­tances are vast. China to Seattle is 5,761 nau­ti­cal miles, which takes 10 days and 10 hours at 23 knots. China to New York, on the other hand, is 11,061 nau­ti­cal miles, or almost exactly twice as far. This voy­age takes 20 days at 23 knots. Of course, the 23 knot fig­ure is an aver­age. Part of our first ship­ment did in fact go to New York, and it took a full 30 days, whereas our Seattle and Los Angeles ship­ments have been more like 11 days, in line with the esti­mate above.

In addi­tion, there are always sna­fus. We had a sit­u­a­tion where 150 copies of the book got mis­placed at a dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ter for sev­eral weeks while we and the par­ties involved tried to find them. Those copies have now shipped, but they got delayed in the sys­tem for about three weeks. Yes, that is frus­trat­ing, but that sort of Catch-22 sit­u­a­tion does hap­pen in the real world.

So, the bot­tom line is that we are hop­ing that roughly 2,000 copies will ship to cus­tomers by late March, although that may slip into April. All of the rest of the copies should ship dur­ing April, but please note that I am say­ing should, not guar­an­tee­ing that they actu­ally will.

There has been a lot of chat­ter online about Amazon chang­ing ship­ping dates in their emails to cus­tomers. With all due respect to my friends there, I would not take the exact dates very seri­ously because nei­ther they, nor we, know all of the variables.

Finally, I need to say again that the cur­rent ship­ping sit­u­a­tion is due to unfore­seen issues with pro­duc­tion of the book. The orig­i­nal plan was that the first ship­ment would also be the last ship­ment, and we’d get 6,000 copies all at once. It didn’t work out that way, so we decided instead to ship as many books as we could, as soon as we could. I’m sorry that we’ve left peo­ple wait­ing for their copies, but in our defense, this is the first 2,400 page cook­book we’ve ever writ­ten. Come to think of it, it is the first cook­book of this scope that the printer has ever done, or for that mat­ter, any­body has ever done. Some teething prob­lems are inevitable when you push the edge of the envelope.

The pro­duc­tion issues have all been resolved, but unfor­tu­nately there have been some delays. The good news is that every­body who orders, up through today, should get their books in April, or worst case sce­nario, in early May.

That brings up another issue. We are set to final­ize the sec­ond print­ing, but that will not yield books until June. Very soon, peo­ple who order the book are going to wind up get­ting the sec­ond print­ing, not the first, which means that their copies will not arrive until June. It is entirely pos­si­ble that we will expe­ri­ence some delays until enough of the sec­ond print­ing arrives to soak up the back orders that will arrive between the point that the first print­ing is sold out (any day now) and when the sec­ond print­ing arrives. Anyone order­ing the book in the sec­ond half of March will prob­a­bly have to wait until June to get the book. So I would not be sur­prised if Modernist Cuisine is on back order sta­tus until some point in July.

We hope to improve on this sit­u­a­tion, so please don’t panic, but our phi­los­o­phy of being trans­par­ent and open about ship­ping issues means that I do have to point out that they are a possibility.