Look at the volume leaving the house after 2020. That is the part a sales dashboard cannot make you feel.
We relayed inventory into New Jersey and back during COVID. We were scared of bringing the virus home, especially with vulnerable family members in the house. The fear was not abstract. The prospect of somebody being hospitalized alone was enough to reorganize how we touched freight, people, vehicles, and packages.
Some of our improvised “disinfection” behavior was ridiculous and, in retrospect, unsafe. I am preserving that as history, not as a procedure anyone should reproduce. The important part is the motive: we treated contamination risk like an operational problem and kept redesigning the process around protecting the people at home.
And the volume was larger than I first remembered. The holiday period I originally described as roughly a thousand units was closer to 3,800 units. That changes the physical meaning of every box photo.
Each carton represented a customer promise. By the time the last truck was empty, the house, the vehicles, the garage, and the family schedule had all temporarily become parts of the fulfillment network.