As I commented when this came up yesterday, there are older (and better!) examples of a sharing economy.<p>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.<p>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.
>For the trouble of giving up their baggage allowances, passengers were handed a free round trip plane ticket to Hawaii.<p>Doing that today would likely get people arrested for drug trafficking
I can't believe that to retrieve a container today, you still need to present the original document from the shipper.<p>Surely, a simple database record at the port authorities office should suffice. Or a series of digitally signed transfers.
Worth a watch is the documentary about the "H" in DHL, Larry Hillblom:<p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1212449/" rel="nofollow">https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1212449/</a><p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/business/king-larry-the-bizarre-road-of-a-billionaire-review.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/business/king-larry-the-b...</a><p>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.
This is a fascinating read, thanks for sharing. I remember when I was college hearing about "vacationing couriers" and thought it sounded amazing