>For the trouble of giving up their baggage allowances, passengers were handed a free round trip plane ticket to Hawaii.

Doing that today would likely get people arrested for drug trafficking

As long as the arbitrage exists (acquisition cost for passengers is less than shipping), someone is going try to exploit it

https://www.vice.com/en/article/now-you-can-pay-people-to-fe...

Wow, this must be the dumbest idea i've seen for a long time. Good luck explaining to airport security that you just used some app to be an air courier for someone you don't know while they get their hands dirty on the white powder from your courier package.

You can easily acquire personal experience and knowledge here, instead of aggressively assuming.

What do you mean? As long as people inspect what they are transporting or only take things delivered to them directly from merchants, I don't see how this would be a problem.

In fact, there is a whole class of travellers in some parts of the world now called runners who do this

How would you inspect it? I don’t think you have a good chance of finding hidden drugs, but the airport might. So there’s a risk that you missed it but their dog will find it, and you’ll be on the hook.

Why? They were only transporting documents (papers for bill of lading) not actual items.

>> Four men were indicted on Wednesday for trafficking drug-laced squares of paper disguised as postal stamps to the US and South Africa using an express air service.

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2013/11/22/2...

Related:

DHL Pioneered the Sharing Economy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41867650 - Oct 2024 (5 comments)

How DHL Pioneered the Sharing Economy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11096769 - Feb 2016 (3 comments)

As I commented when this came up yesterday, there are older (and better!) examples of a sharing economy.

The Negro Motorist Green Book was a guidebook published 1936–1966 for African-Americans to have safe road trips during the Jim Crow era. Some of the information was voluntarily collected by U.S postal workers who gathered the information while on their routes.

I say 'better' because paid couriers existed long before DHL. What DHL did (according to this account) was find a way to replace them with cheaper workers and not have to share the profits but instead use those profits to defend legal challenges against their business model.

Pioneering means also running it sustainably I'd say.

Worth a watch is the documentary about the "H" in DHL, Larry Hillblom:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1212449/

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/business/king-larry-the-b...

He leveraged his FU money to become a South-Pacific sex tourist so prolific and shameless that, besides his death giving rise to a massive, multi-national paternity dispute, probably was instrumental in getting Congress to criminalize the sexual exploitation of minors by Americans traveling abroad.

I can't believe that to retrieve a container today, you still need to present the original document from the shipper.

Surely, a simple database record at the port authorities office should suffice. Or a series of digitally signed transfers.

You don’t anymore. There is something called Telex release that allows the carrier to release the cargo with an electronic copy of the bill of lading.

It's not a technical problem, it's a political one. You'd have to get every country in the world to agree on a central source of truth.

Physical documents mean the port operators can point the finger at someone else in case of criminality.

This is a fascinating read, thanks for sharing. I remember when I was college hearing about "vacationing couriers" and thought it sounded amazing