Inside the Journey of a Shipping Container (And Why the Supply Chain Is So Backed Up)

[Narrator] In late October,

over a hundred containerships floated in the waters outside

of LA waiting to unload at the dock.

The global pandemic triggered sky high consumer spending on

manufactured goods as opposed to vacations or other

services.

So this bottleneck will persist according to supply chain

analyst, like Lora Cecere.

We're gonna be facing shortages on the retail shelf,

electric tools, home goods, computers, and monitors,

or special clothing.

Those goods are on their ships in the middle of the ocean.

We'll have shortages with all days and then we'll have a

coolant of inventory because we will have unloaded those

containers too late.

[Narrator] Let's follow a single container.

How about that one over there?

Yeah.

On its epic journey along the supply chain to find out where

exactly things are breaking down.

Since its invention in 1956,

the modern container was a game changer

for the shipping industry.

You can't talk about supply chain without talking about

containers.

[Narrator] According to some estimates,

95% of manufactured goods

now move across the world on shipping containers.

A container allows the shipper to transport a box

from a rail car or a trucker onto a ship

and then to take the box off the ship onto a rail car

or a truck and move it without opening the container

and without disturbing the goods,

which helps us eliminate theft and damage.

[Narrator] Welcome to the port of Shanghai, China,

the busiest port in the world where our container.

No, no, no, the one on the right, yes.

That's the one, good old C1832777251

is one of over 30 million, 20 foot containers

moved through this port annually.

Our container is loaded onto a truck and travels to a

manufacturing center in Wenzhou China to be loaded up by a

forklift with 3,500 pairs of shoes.

Part of a big order for Walmart in the United States.

The containers are loaded at a manufacturing site,

and then they're sealed,

which basically says that it has been prepared for shipping.

[Narrator] With its passage to

Long beach California booked,

our container is sent back to the port of Shanghai,

where it is moved to the dock and onto its designated ship.

There's our container being moved onto the ship

by a robot crane.

We're very sophisticated,

we're the most sophisticated in Europe,

more sophisticated in Asia than in North America.

The North American shipping industry has been resistant to

move to PI automation of the cranes.

[Narrator] Our container is now ready to cross

the Pacific ocean.

The next phase of its long journey to a Walmart in Chicago.

A large retailer might have a purchase order

that will cover multiple containers.

I've seen a single purchase order for Walmart cover 50

different containers.

[Narrator] Our container will spend 20 to 30 days at sea,

stacked alongside 15,000 other shipping containers.

To carry a supersize load,

you need a supersize ship.

To cut costs, shipping vessels have become a lot bigger

over the past few years,

and that means they take a lot more time to unload.

Many smaller ports can handle these big boys.

Putting pressure on large ports like LA

that are already struggling to handle the spike

in demand caused by pandemic consumer

spending patterns, which are centered on imported goods.

When you have this much volume,

you have a black hole on the supply chain and you don't know

necessarily what's on each container.

And the issue is that containers don't have authoritative

identifiers.

So while, you go to the grocery store

and you'll buy a pack of gum and scan it,

it has a unique identifier.

A container will have a number,

but you've got to see the number

and it's hard to see the number on the ship.

Also, the numbers may not be intact.

[Narrator] After a month at sea, our shipping container

comes within view of the port of Long Beach.

Together with LA,

these sister ports handle 40% of America's inbound

sea freight and traffic is way up because consumers

still rattled by the pandemic,

keep spending their money on manufactured goods.

The satellite image for the ports in Southern California

show upwards of 100 container ships at sea.

Most of them are waiting 10, 15, 20 days.

And they're just sitting out, waiting their queue,

waiting to be called.

If the ocean container carrying ships are not given a spot

on the dock, they just sit and wait.

And one of the issues

is sometimes they can experience weather.

And when weather happens,

some of the containers fall off the ships

and they fall into the ocean.

One to five percent of containers

will actually fall into the ocean.

The containers that fall off the ships

will basically bob in the ocean.

Sometimes, you know,

the goods will get wet and sometimes they won't.

[Narrator] More than 3000 containers

went overboard in 2021.

But our containers survived the two week wait

and it's shipped finally, pulls up to the dock.

Then the longshoreman using cranes start to unload the

containers one at a time.

Our container goes on to a chassis,

that's being old by a trucker with a cab to be moved to an

inland hub, a process which is known as drayage.

The drayage piece of the supply chain is long.

It can be a day, a day and a half, two days.

[Narrator] So why does it take that long

to move our container essentially a half mile?

The United States ports are some of the most inefficient

ports in the world.

If we wanna look at port efficiency,

we should go to Europe and look at the work that Maersk is

doing and Rotterdam or the port of Antwerp.

Those ports have been invested in and they're streamlined

and much higher visibility,

less variability than what we have in the United States.

[Narrator] Ports in America aren't centrally managed

or maintained by governments the way highways are,

they're often owned by a mishmash of

private terminal operators.

[Lora] There is no centralized control tower

or signal to be able to synchronize all of these pieces,

to be able to align for the supply chain.

[Narrator] Lack of centralized coordination

at the port is really obvious when it comes to trucking,

there are over 100,000 chassies in Long beach and LA alone.

[Lora] Many of those chassies are not functional

and they're not enough.

And the lack of really good facilities for the truckers to

get to the chassies and get to the docks,

we don't have good synchronization of the truck drivers

to the docks.

[Narrator] The drayage trucker carrying our container

has a very small cab designed for quick turns

in the tight spaces at ports.

To get to a distribution center,

we will need a bigger truck to pick up our container from

the inland yard and take the long haul across the country.

[Lora] If we are transporting goods

from Long beach to Walmart,

it'll be five to seven days on the road

for the truck driver.

[Narrator] When the container

gets to a distribution center,

receivers look at the number of the container,

match it to the paperwork they have.

It will then be unloaded, put onto belts and sorted.

[Lora] The turn-around in a Walmart distribution center,

if those goods are needed at retail is 10 to 24 hours.

It's quick.

Sometimes the supply chain doesn't work very well.

Either, the Walmart distribution center

might be full or the demand

at the store changes significantly.

So the container could be moved directly to the store from

either the distribution center to basically wait for

unloading when the store is ready for it.

You may see containers on chassies or containers

on parking lots waiting to be unloaded at the store itself.

[Narrator] But in the case of our container,

it is then moved by rail empty to an inland yard by train,

stacked onto a chassis at the port,

and hopefully placed onto a ship back to Asia soon.

But that could take weeks or months.

But because of the pressures on the ports,

many of those empty containers are sitting on chassies in

those inland rail yards and that's twofold of an issue.

One because it's tying up chassies and the second is we need

to get those empty containers back to Asia,

to complete the routes.

Many truckers are having trouble returning empties.

So you see a lot of truck drivers

are just dropping empty containers and chassies,

which is becoming a nuisance

for a lot of the areas around the port.

[Narrator] So how do we fix this mess

and keep the containers moving?

[Lora] We need to think about how do we resolve

the chassis issue.

We need to invest how we move goods, chassis free.

We basically unload through the cranes onto something like

Hyperloop to be able to move those containers inland in

these areas in California, where land is so premium,

and it's just not available near the port because it's

landlocked into the inland hubs so that the drivers don't

have to deal with the Southern California traffic problems.

So investigating how we could move containers without

chassies should be a high priority and investment there.

[Narrator] So after a three month journey

across the globe,

our box comes back home to China

to begin the supply chain cycle again.