This was a pretty big eye-opener for me. I knew that international supply chains were big and complex, but I always thought for some reason that if you tried for a few months, you could probably guess where every little piece of metal in your car came from. Apparently I was wrong.
When I think about it, it seems like the whole process is so inefficient. Everyone has to skim a little value off the top when they pass some commodities through their hands, so that adds up to a huge amount of added price for the end product. I imagine that in a simpler supply chain everything would be cheaper on the whole.
Then again, many socialist countries experimented with planned supply chains and it didn't go so well. Maybe markets work.