We’re kind of at a point where the cost of making stuff isn’t very important. It is far outweighed by the cost of moving stuff - not only financially, but environmentally and temporally.

There probably isn’t a lot more refinement to be done in most manufacturing processes, other than very niche things like microchip fabrication. Production machinery can pump out T-shirts or drinking glasses or automobiles faster than people will buy them, so the factories run for shorter periods of time. The only profit margins to be had in manufacturing come from bulk production runs, which is why you can’t order 10 injection molded parts or 50 custom silicon packages - you have to buy like 5000 units just to pay the cost of spinning up the production line.

But logistics… we’re basically killing the planet to solve logistics problems. A massive amount of greenhouse gas production is due to transportation. We need better ways to move things around.