There are about 25 million standardized shipping containers plying the seas on about 6,000 ships in a fragile network designed to stay in sync with port capacity, railroad lines and trucking networks. It’s a system that has lifted millions of people out of poverty and created a generation of discount-minded shoppers. In normal times, it works so well that it has led to the widespread adoption of more efficient just-in-time inventory management. However, the Covid-19 crisis led to unpredictable demand for goods and on-again-off-again lockdowns that idled port terminals. The disruption left handlers of the ubiquitous 40-foot (12.2-meter) boxes struggling to manage traffic, causing shortages of containers where and when they were needed most. By October 2021, ocean cargo rates had spiked ten-fold from a year earlier, sparking worries about the year-end holiday shopping season and disruption stretching into 2022.
The pandemic threw the vital but usually humdrum world of logistics into a tailspin, creating shortages of masks and vaccine vials, semiconductors, plastic polymers and bicycles. The shipping system underpinning globalization — production on one side of the planet, connected to consumers on the other — proved too rigid to absorb the rolling tremors from Covid-19, or to recover quickly from the jolts to consumer demand and the labour force. That triggered supply-chain disruptions, idled factories and unleashed inflationary forces. The chief challenge was moving freight, and it started with a sudden shortage of shipping containers.
1. Why do containers matter so much?
