[Desk Column] Hawaii and Dawn Delivery

[Asia Economy Reporter Myung Jin-gyu] A place where the sky is painted bright blue as if with a brush, the white sandy beach, and the emerald-colored waters color the island here and there. At dusk, under the red-tinted sunset, a single phrase from the song "Aloha Oe" flows out. This is a story about Hawaii.

About 10 years ago, I stayed for a week at the Hilton Resort on Waikiki Beach in Hawaii to attend a global conference of an IT company. It was a rare opportunity, but the conference schedule was tight, so I had to stay in the hotel banquet hall for three days straight. The only relief was stepping outside the hotel during breaks to have a quick cigarette with fellow reporters on the business trip. While looking for a smoking area near the conference hall, I ended up using a place behind the hotel where employees also took breaks, and an unfamiliar scene unfolded before my eyes.

Instead of the white employees I often saw in the hotel lobby, there were native Hawaiians I had never seen before. Wearing work clothes and towels around their necks to wipe sweat, they were enjoying a brief rest in small groups under the hotel’s shadows. At that time, I didn’t think much of it. After the schedule ended, I rented a car with fellow reporters for the remaining two days and toured Hawaii, including Pearl Harbor. As a world-class resort, you could meet people of all races everywhere you went, but native Hawaiians were actually hard to find. At the last dinner, the thought suddenly came to me, and I asked the local guide why that was.

The guide said, as if it was nothing special, that most native Hawaiians work in places out of sight. Except for hula dance performance venues, it is common for them to work inside buildings. Hawaii has some of the world’s top international schools, but because the education and living conditions of native Hawaiians are difficult, although they were the original owners of the land, they are treated like foreign laborers.

The guide asked if I had seen many homeless people along the way. There were far too many. People who looked fine were drunk or begging in various parts of Hawaii. Most of them were white people who had taken one-way flights from the U.S. mainland. They were not homeless from the start; most were white people who taught surfing and lived extravagantly but ended up homeless in their later years. There are quite a few places where they could work, such as cleaning or kitchen jobs, but these are considered "jobs for native Hawaiians," so white people rather choose to beg on the streets. It was an uncomfortable truth, but it was a time when I could see the other side of the fact that because someone does the dirty work, others can eat, drink, and enjoy.

Recently, I have become deeply immersed in dawn delivery services. Even if I order tonight, I can receive the goods tomorrow morning, so I use it often. I am amazed by this new innovation in the e-commerce market, which had seen little change for a long time, and I use it diligently. At first, I ordered only things I absolutely needed the next day, but now I order items that are not immediately necessary through dawn delivery as well.

The reason why the thoughts I had in Hawaii more than 10 years ago came back now is because of the news of the death of a delivery worker doing dawn delivery. While we are asleep, someone unseen goes around every house delivering goods. As demand increases, suppliers also increase, competition intensifies, and delivery competition becomes fiercer. Companies call the change in delivery time from day to night an innovation. Ultimately, innovation begins with someone’s labor. It is time for those who call themselves innovators to look back once.