Introduction

Before I knew anything about logistics, I thought it was just about getting goods from A to B. But since I started working on En Punto and living in Argentina, getting to know the world of logistics and how Argentina's logistics industry works, it became increasingly clear that logistics is more about trust than anything else.

At its core, logistics is a chain of commitments. Someone commits to pick up a load, someone commits to deliver it, someone commits to pay and everyone commits to do so within a certain time window. Those commitments are made under uncertainty: traffic, weather, cash flow, breakdowns, human behaviour. When logistics breaks down, it is usually because those commitments stop being credible.

This article is an attempt to understand how trust behaves across the logistics system as a whole, why it breaks in predictable places and what that implies for anyone trying to build logistics infrastructure, especially in low‑trust markets like Argentina.

Logistics Is a Layered System

One mistake I made when thinking about logistics is treating it as a single, uniform activity (goods from A to B). In reality, logistics is layered. There is long‑haul or line‑haul transport, often handled by professional operators with significant capital investment. There is regional and intercity transport, where margins tighten and variability increases. And then there is last-mile, where time pressure is highest, margins are thinnest and the distance between commitment and execution is shortest.

Each layer has different economics, different actors and different trust dynamics. Importantly, trust tends to degrade as you move closer to the customer. The last mile is not “worse” because the people are worse, it is harder because the system absorbs less uncertainty there.

Understanding logistics as a layered system matters, because many of the behaviours people complain about are not evenly distributed. They are concentrated where risk, volatility and informality collide.

Argentina as a High‑Variance Environment

Even as my first real experience of logistics, Argentina has shown to be a particularly useful place to observe these dynamics – not because it is unique, but because it is explicit.

Economic volatility is normal. Informality is common. Contract enforcement is slow and expensive. Payment delays of 30–90 days are not unusual for small logistics operators and inflation makes those delays materially costly. Cash flow matters enormously, especially for independent drivers and small fleets.

These conditions exist everywhere to some degree, but in higher‑trust countries they are often absorbed by institutions: courts, insurers, banks and platforms. In Argentina, those buffers are weaker or more expensive, so the underlying trust mechanics are exposed.

People adapt accordingly. This is not a cultural argument. It is a systems argument.

How Actors Adapt Under Uncertainty

When trust is expensive, people hedge. Shippers hedge by delaying payment, renegotiating terms, or spreading work across multiple providers. Transporters hedge by prioritizing jobs that pay faster, staying flexible on commitments, or exiting the system entirely when risk outweighs reward.

For example, a small transporter may accept a delivery expecting payment within two weeks. When that payment stretches to sixty days, the transporter absorbs the cost of fuel, maintenance and downtime immediately. The next time a similar job appears, that transporter may decline it, or accept it only if terms are informal and flexible. From the outside, this can look unreliable. From inside the system, it is defensive behaviour.

In low‑trust environments, long‑term signalling often gives way to short‑term survival. Reputation still matters, but only within a narrow context and time window.

Last Mile as a Stress Test

Last-mile logistics deserves special attention, not because it defines the entire system, but because it functions as a stress test. Last-mile concentrates volatility. Jobs are short, margins are thin, time windows are tight and substitution is easy. Entry and exit barriers are low, which means participation is fluid. In Argentina, this often looks “gig‑like,” even without formal gig platforms. Much of these dealings are orchestrated through WhatsApp, which in my opinion, makes things worse.

Drivers jump on and off work. Commitments are situational. Availability fluctuates. None of this is surprising when the cost of a missed payment or a wasted hour can be significant relative to earnings.

I want to be clear: professional, highly reliable operators absolutely exist elsewhere in the system. But the last mile reveals what happens when trust is not supported structurally.

The Other Side of the Transaction: Payment

Trust discussions in logistics often focus on delivery reliability. Much less attention is paid to payment reliability, but like I have mentioned before, is just as important. In many logistics markets, late payment is common. For large shippers, it is an inconvenience. For small transporters, it can be existential. Fuel, maintenance and labour costs are immediate. Payment is often not.

When payment is uncertain, behaviour changes. Transporters prioritize speed of payment over nominal price. They discount promises. They become cautious about repeat commitments.

Delivery unreliability and payment unreliability reinforce each other. One is not the cause of the other; they are part of the same loop.

Coordination by WhatsApp and the Cost of Informality

In Argentina, a large proportion of logistics coordination still happens outside formal systems, most commonly via WhatsApp (although the same could be said for business in general). Load details, pickup times, delivery changes, proofs of delivery and even payment confirmations are routinely exchanged in private message threads.

This form of coordination is rational. WhatsApp is ubiquitous, fast and flexible. It works across company boundaries and requires no onboarding. In a fragmented market with many small operators, it often becomes the default operating system. However, this informality sits alongside a partial and uneven adoption of internal control systems. Many PYMEs (Pequeña y Mediana Empresas) that operate their own fleets or regularly subcontract transport maintain internal driver ratings or scorecards. These are usually simple, operational tools: punctuality, incident frequency, client complaints, or route compliance. They are rarely exposed externally and almost never shared across companies.

The result is a fragmented trust landscape. Within a single company, a driver may be well understood and reliably evaluated. Outside that boundary, the same driver effectively starts from zero. Trust does not transfer.

WhatsApp-based coordination amplifies this fragmentation and introduces structural costs that directly affect trust.

First, it fragments the system’s memory. Commitments are scattered across message threads, voice notes and images, making it difficult to reconstruct what was agreed, when it was agreed and by whom. When disputes arise, evidence is informal and asymmetric. Second, it weakens attribution. Delays, changes and failures are often negotiated ad hoc, without clear ownership. What looks like unreliability is frequently the result of coordination drift rather than bad intent.

Third, it prevents trust from compounding, Even when transactions go well, that success is not captured in a way the system can reuse.

Finally, WhatsApp collapses execution and exception handling into the same channel. Normal operations and failures are indistinguishable, which makes it hard to separate noise from signal.

None of this is a moral failure. It is the predictable outcome of operating without shared infrastructure. But it explains why informal coordination, while efficient in the moment, often reinforces low trust over time.

Toward an Ideal Platform: Calculating Trust from Behaviour, Not Opinion

Most logistics platforms that operate at scale have converged on a quiet but important idea: trust is not something participants declare about each other — it is something the system infers from observed behaviour.

In consumer marketplaces, trust often takes the form of explicit judgment: a buyer says a seller was bad, a rider gives a driver three stars. In logistics, this approach breaks down quickly. Shippers and carriers operate under asymmetric power, thin margins and frequent external constraints. Allowing one party to directly declare trust about another turns reputation into a weapon rather than a signal.

Modern freight platforms therefore calculate trust indirectly, using verifiable events rather than sentiment. Uber Freight, Convoy and Transfix differ in presentation, but converge at the calculation layer. Trust is derived from whether commitments were met, not whether someone felt satisfied.

At a minimum, these systems observe:

• Punctuality: Was pickup and delivery completed within the agreed time window?

• Execution reliability: Were loads accepted and completed without late cancellations or fall-offs?

• Compliance and visibility: Was tracking enabled and documentation submitted correctly?

• Consistency over time: How does recent performance compare to historical behaviour?

Crucially, human complaints and disputes are handled outside the trust calculation. A shipper raising an issue may trigger an investigation or exception workflow, but it does not directly alter a carrier’s trust score. This separation prevents retaliatory feedback and limits the influence of power imbalances.

For a platform operating in a low-trust environment, this distinction is essential. Trust should be:

• Event-based, not opinion-based

• Contextual, not absolute

• Recoverable, rather than permanently damaging

• Symmetric, applied to both shippers and carriers

In practical terms, this also means extending trust calculation beyond carriers alone. Chronic late payment by shippers, frequent scope changes, or unreliable communication should be captured as behavioural signals in exactly the same way as missed pickups. Trust is not who you are, it is how you behave under agreed constraints.

The role of the platform, then, is not to arbitrate character, but to maintain a shared, auditable memory of what actually happened. In markets where informal coordination and low institutional trust are the norm, this may be the only way to allow scale without forcing participants to hedge against each other by default.

Design Principles for Low‑Trust Logistics Systems

If there is one lesson that emerges from all of this, it is that trust in logistics is a system property, not a personality trait. Effective logistics platforms tend to share certain characteristics. Trust is bidirectional. Payment behaviour matters as much as delivery behaviour. Performance is contextual, not absolute. Reliability is rewarded over time and failure is not permanently punitive. Most importantly, the platform absorbs uncertainty instead of pushing it onto the weakest participants. It reduces the cost of being reliable.

Closing Thoughts

Logistics does not fail because people cannot be trusted. It fails because systems struggle to hold uncertainty. When trust is expensive, rational actors hedge. When platforms externalize risk, volatility increases. When systems take responsibility for trust, behaviour changes. Understanding this is not just useful for Argentina. It is essential for anyone trying to build logistics infrastructure, in a world that is, in many places, becoming more volatile.