A backstory on the DHL shipping company.

We have always had lousy service with DHL -- a package that was supposed to be delivered by 2nd Day Air took two weeks to get here and only then by being driven up here in a DHL employee's personal vehicle. Another instance was for a small parcel that was to be overnighted to the store -- that only took ten days. We were lucky... Well, Chris Byrne at AnarchAngel used to contract for them and has the inside scoop:

Managing to Fail
I was a contractor at DHL for over a year (and excuse me if I'm a bit vague. I have to be careful what I say and how I say it, so as not to violate my confidentiality agreements). During that time, I and my team re-architected their entire security infrastructure; along with much of their data warehousing operations, and the open systems components of their dispatch and tracking systems. We made several hundred million dollars in capital expenditures, and spent well over a hundred thousands man hours (at anywhere from $75 to $150 an hour) in doing so.

At the end of the project, what we had was 4 or 5 times more efficient and effective than what they had before, and would have saved the company hundreds of millions of dollars; and they scrapped it, because it would have cost several hundred jobs in Germany and the EU.

Instead, they took a special inter-EU deal with the Czech Republic, and started over from the beginning; spending several hundred million more dollars to redo the work we had already done (and several billion dollars in total), only with mostly EU workers, in Prague.

DHL took a profitable, growing, fortune 500 business in Airborne Express; and they ran it into the ground from the beginning.

I don't believe I'm violating my confidentiality agreements to tell you that DHL was the worst managed company I have ever seen; and that's really saying something, as I've worked primarily in financial, medical, defense, and government.

The whole rant is staggering. Chris closes with this observation:

The entire ethos of the company was that of a civil service, semi-socialist, state sponsored monopoly. All major decisions were made by German (and other EU) bureaucrats, guided by that ethos. They managed not as businessmen running a business, but as politicians pandering to their constituents.

This is what happens when the state controls private businesses. Every time. The state acts in the interest of the state, not of the business; and that business will fail, in this case taking an Ohio town down with it.

A perfect example of why I hate cultural Marxism and socialism. The core ideas sound noble and empowering on the surface but the implementation makes for an huge, entrenched, top-down nanny state that micromanages all aspects of our life...