Wal-Mart and the United States Postal Service have a lot in common. Essentially, each is a company that specializes in logistics, which is well-defined by the US Army as the “science of planning and carrying out the movement and maintenance of forces.” Wal-Mart, with its home base in land-locked, bumfuck Bentonville Arkansas, realized early the power of the barcode and its organizational potential. Walmart was the first to track products, via its barcode and a networked computer system, from production to sale. In the 1980’s, it was able to leverage its growing market share to force its manufacturers to print barcodes on packaging. As soon as a cashier passed a product under a check-out scanner at a retail outlet, inventories and stocks were updated all the way through the supply chain so that even the factory in China knew how many of its toilet brushes were being sold to diuretic Americans.

Alan Greenspan famously sought statistics describing cardboard box production as a indicator for economic growth. During the online boom at the turn of this century, the three major postal carriers—FedEx, USPS, and UPS—were the lubricant that keep products flowing from Amazon.com’s warehouses to your front door. Greenspan’s boxes were all affixed with barcodes (and eventually more advanced graphic devices, like QR, that could be read at any orientation) to orchestrate the most arguably elaborate supply chain systems ever devised. FedEx’s system was (and still is, I guess) an amazing, carbon-fed machine that counter-intuitively routed all packages through their Memphis, TN facility, regardless of it’s TO: and FROM: addresses.

The supply chains deployed by the USPS and Wal-Mart are similar. Wal-Mart moves product from international shipping containers to store shelves, while the USPS’s orders of magnitude terminate at the mailbox, each is a unique, human-scaled device which operates at a different density. That is to say Wal-Mart’s local scale (shelf) is denser that USPS’s (the city street).

I really want to lump Walmart and USPS together not just because of their massive, majestic logistical prowess, but also because they support our (the American consumer’s) desire to have our products artificially cheap and instantaneous. The segregated zoning of our suburban communities force us to move from couch to car to electric-powered shopping cart to purchase our toilet brushes at Wal-Mart, while the USPS brings the toilet brushes we ordered online right to our door. While Wal-Mart thrives (indeed, it would not exist) without the permissive, sprawl-forming zoning practices that give rise to the SUPERCENTER, at the same time complicate and aggregate the job of delivering the mail. God bless the barcode.