Making money out of being inefficient

As a university student, I had to work one vacation at the local dockyard unloading freighters.  On my first morning, a crane lifted a pallet-load of hundredweight (50 kg) cement bags from a recently-arrived Portuguese freighter, and carefully placed it onto the dock-side in front of myself and a totally uneducated and virtually unemployable colleague.  A fork-lift truck sped up with an empty pallet and placed it next to the full pallet.  Together, my colleague and I transferred the cement bags from the full pallet that had been unloaded from the freighter to the empty pallet that the fork-lift truck had brought.  Once we had transferred the whole pallet-load of cement bags, the fork-lift truck sped across again, picked up the pallet that it had brought and that my colleague and I had now filled, and whizzed it off to the warehouse.

In the meantime, the crane unloaded another pallet full of cement bags in front of us, and the fork-lift truck whizzed back and delivered another empty fork-lift truck pallet next to it.

Being a highly-educated-potential-young-executive-of-the-future, it took me only until the third pallet (!) was delivered by the crane to turn to my colleague and ask, “But why doesn’t the fork-lift truck just take away the full pallet of cement bags that the crane delivers, rather than us having to transfer them from the full one to the empty one so that it can take that one away?”

Without a moment’s hesitation, my semi-illiterate colleague replied, “Because it gives us a job!”

After three back-breaking, ten-hour days of unloading cement bags, I learnt how to make money out of inefficiency.

Of course, this story has no relevance to the financial services industry!