MENUThis is what happens when globalization breaks down
Hagan Walker contemplated the geography of the planet and felt pangs of agitation. The vastness of the Pacific Ocean seemed to be stretching wider.
His startup company, Glo, makes novelty items — plastic cubes that light up when dropped in water. He started the business six years ago in the compact town of Starkville, Mississippi, while relying on factories 8,000 miles away in China to make his products.
That distance suddenly felt unbridgeable.
It was December 2020, nearly a year into the pandemic, and China’s industrial might was sputtering. The factory making Glo’s next order in the Chinese city of Ningbo warned him that the costs of key materials like plastic were soaring. The shipping industry was straining under an overwhelming flow of goods from Chinese plants to American consumers. Booking a shipping container seemed akin to trying to catch a unicorn.
Calm and reserved, Walker, then 28, was generally comfortable with risk. In 2016, fresh from Mississippi State University with an engineering degree, he turned down a job at Tesla that would have paid him $130,000 a year. Instead, he opted to remain in Starkville, his college town, to start his own business.
Yet he was increasingly worried that his next order would not make it to his warehouse in Mississippi in time for Christmas — still a year away.
“I was scared,” Walker said matter-of-factly. “I was willing to pay pretty much whatever.”
By now, the disruptions to the supply chain are widely known. The still unfolding turmoil has been amplified by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine along with fresh COVID lockdowns imposed in China. Yet the story of how a single container made it from c ..
‘Get This Made in China’
A tinkerer by nature, Walker mastered a power screwdriver when he was 3, shocking his parents by using it to remove the deadbolt from the front door of his family home.
He fashioned his first light-up cubes by inserting basic electronics into a rubber toothbrush cover. He sold his wares to local bars that stuck the cubes into cocktail glasses. When the light went out, the bartender could tell with a glance that the customer was ready for a r ..
Glo had hired a company called Platform 88 to make its first order of Sesame Street characters. Before the pandemic, roughly 300 people had worked at Platform 88’s plant in Ningbo, according to its operations manager, Calvin Zheng. By March 2021 — as the factory prepared to bring Elmo and Julia to life — fewer than 200 workers were on hand.
On top of the labor shortage, the Chinese government was limiting the supply of plastic by prioritizing its use for vital goods like medical devices ..
A Floating Traffic Jam
Glo’s container — logged in the shipping manifest as MSMU8771295 — was loaded atop the Maersk Emden, one of more than 300 such vessels owned and operated by A.P. Moller-Maersk, a Danish shipping conglomerate.
By itself, Maersk moves about 17% of all shipping containers worldwide. It is in an alliance with the largest carrier, Mediterranean Shipping, one of three consortia that collectively move 80% of all containers.
The Maersk Emden was 1,200 feet long and 158 feet wide, or more than five times the size of the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal.
On Sept. 12, the Emden glided out of the Shenzhen port, carrying some 12,000 containers. It stopped at Nansha, near the Chinese city of Guangzhou. It docked at Yantian, east of Shenzhen. It stopped at the port of Ningbo, by then reopened.
On Sept. 27, it embarked across the unfathomable expanse of the Pacific.
No one could have been surprised by the madness that greeted it on the other side as it arrived off the Port of Long Beach nearly two weeks later, on Oct. 9.
The two ports at Los Angeles and Long Beach handle two-fifths of all imports reaching the United States from Asia via container vessels. That flow would increase by more than 17% over the second half of 2021 compared with the previous year. The surge proved overwhelming.
More than 50 ships were stuck out in the ocean, waiting for a dock to open in the mother of all traffic jams.
For the first six days, the Emden did not even have a place to anchor. It ran a slow, looping course in the waters off the port, before anchoring in formation with nine other vessels, roughly 3 miles off the coast, according to data compiled by AIS Maritime Intelligence, a unit of MarineTraffic. There, it sat for another 10 days, having become a floating warehouse.
Any one vessel stuck in the water indicated that a massive quantity of goods was not getting where it was supposed to be. The Maersk Emden alone was carrying 474 containers for LG, the South Korean home appliance giant, according to customs data tabulated by ImportGenius, which tracks global shipping. Nike had 74 containers on board. Mattel, the toy company, had 96. Just as the weather was turning cold in North America, 48 containers shipped by Burlington Coat Factory were stuck on the vessel.
Taken as a whole, the products bobbing on the Pacific — carried to the United States not just from China but from South Korea, Mexico, Australia, the South Pacific and the Middle East — could collectively fill an empire of warehouses and shopping malls.
One ship held enough animal feed to sustain 20,000 cows for a week. Five ships collectively carried 13 million pounds of Fiji brand bottled water. Others bore enough Heineken beer to slake the thirst of every adult in San Francisco for a year. A key element for making synthetic fabrics and plastic bottles was stuck in the queue along with solar panels, chain-link fencing, fabric for carpets for Tesla cars and Cornhole game equipment.
Walker had his sights on a single container stuck in this monumental pileup, one steel box held there by forces entirely beyond his control.
The Last Leg Home
On Oct. 25, after 10 days of purgatory at anchor, a giant crane plucked Glo’s container off the Emden and deposited it on the dock.
Four days later, a so-called drayage driver — the operator of a truck that loads and unloads at ports — picked up the container and hauled it to his company’s yard in Los Angeles. There it sat for two days, until another driver ferried the container to a warehouse in Costa Mesa, some 40 miles down the freeway.
Two days after that, on Nov. 3, Walker received an alarming email from Freightos: The previous delivery date of Oct. 30 — now past — had been updated to Dec. 10.
“I said to myself, ‘We’re going to miss Black Friday and Christmas,’ ” Walker recalled.
He emailed Seabay, the freight company in China, to try to move the box faster. It directed him to its counterpart tasked with managing the final leg of the journey, Israel Cargo Logistics. Its U.S. operations were housed in a low-slung office complex in the Rosedale section of Queens, on a street dotted by a used-car dealer, a diner and a bodega.
Inside the complex, many of the suites were vacant. The offices of Israel Cargo Logistics were on the ground floor, down a long hallway off another long hallway lined with stained carpets. There, Michael Horan, the ocean manager, sat in a cubicle in an oddly silent room, the walls white and devoid of decoration.
He read a plaintive cry for help from Mississippi.
“Hi Michael, I know you’re probably hearing this from every client,” Walker had written. “This container has ALL of our packaging for ALL Christmas products that we intended to sell this year, so we’re in a tough position.”
“Please let me know if there’s anything we can do to expedite the process,” he continued. “And I truly mean we. I appreciate your help.”
Walker figured that Horan was besieged by angry shippers issuing rude threats, and he bet on the power of polite discourse. He allowed himself to imagine that a truck might be secured to haul his container perhaps as far as Memphis, Tennessee, or Dallas. Then, he would scramble to line up transport for the rest of the journey.
He was astonished by the email he received only 21 minutes later.
“Hi Hagan,” Horan replied. “I have a truck picking up tomorrow from Los Angeles and will deliver to you on Tuesday 11/9.” This, for an extra cost of $1,100.
“Yes!” Mr. Walker wrote back immediately. “Let’s do it!”
Just before 8 a.m. on Nov. 9, Walker arrived at his warehouse, a failed furniture showroom on the outskirts of Starkville. The tractor-trailer was already there, backed up to the loading dock. The driver was resting inside the cab after his four-day, 1,900-mile drive.
As the driver lifted his rear gate, Walker peered in excitedly. There sat 1,595 brown cartons atop 24 pallets.
Walker and three employees wielded electric pallet jacks to move the goods into the warehouse. An hour later, a Glo truck began collecting some of the cargo to take it to the old movie theater downtown, where employees began preparing shipments for customers across the United States and around the world — in Belgium, Dubai, Singapore.
Watching this process unfold, Walker felt an overwhelming sense of relief.
But before the day was done, anxiety had returned. Given what he had endured, he was already looking ahead to the 2022 Christmas season, readying ever larger orders as a hedge against new troubles emerging somewhere on the pathway between China and Mississippi.
“It’s the whole cycle all over again,” he said
His startup company, Glo, makes novelty items — plastic cubes that light up when dropped in water. He started the business six years ago in the compact town of Starkville, Mississippi, while relying on factories 8,000 miles away in China to make his products.
That distance suddenly felt unbridgeable.
It was December 2020, nearly a year into the pandemic, and China’s industrial might was sputtering. The factory making Glo’s next order in the Chinese city of Ningbo warned him that the costs of key materials like plastic were soaring. The shipping industry was straining under an overwhelming flow of goods from Chinese plants to American consumers. Booking a shipping container seemed akin to trying to catch a unicorn.
Calm and reserved, Walker, then 28, was generally comfortable with risk. In 2016, fresh from Mississippi State University with an engineering degree, he turned down a job at Tesla that would have paid him $130,000 a year. Instead, he opted to remain in Starkville, his college town, to start his own business.
Yet he was increasingly worried that his next order would not make it to his warehouse in Mississippi in time for Christmas — still a year away.
“I was scared,” Walker said matter-of-factly. “I was willing to pay pretty much whatever.”
By now, the disruptions to the supply chain are widely known. The still unfolding turmoil has been amplified by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine along with fresh COVID lockdowns imposed in China. Yet the story of how a single container made it from c ..
‘Get This Made in China’
A tinkerer by nature, Walker mastered a power screwdriver when he was 3, shocking his parents by using it to remove the deadbolt from the front door of his family home.
He fashioned his first light-up cubes by inserting basic electronics into a rubber toothbrush cover. He sold his wares to local bars that stuck the cubes into cocktail glasses. When the light went out, the bartender could tell with a glance that the customer was ready for a r ..
Glo had hired a company called Platform 88 to make its first order of Sesame Street characters. Before the pandemic, roughly 300 people had worked at Platform 88’s plant in Ningbo, according to its operations manager, Calvin Zheng. By March 2021 — as the factory prepared to bring Elmo and Julia to life — fewer than 200 workers were on hand.
On top of the labor shortage, the Chinese government was limiting the supply of plastic by prioritizing its use for vital goods like medical devices ..
A Floating Traffic Jam
Glo’s container — logged in the shipping manifest as MSMU8771295 — was loaded atop the Maersk Emden, one of more than 300 such vessels owned and operated by A.P. Moller-Maersk, a Danish shipping conglomerate.
By itself, Maersk moves about 17% of all shipping containers worldwide. It is in an alliance with the largest carrier, Mediterranean Shipping, one of three consortia that collectively move 80% of all containers.
The Maersk Emden was 1,200 feet long and 158 feet wide, or more than five times the size of the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal.
On Sept. 12, the Emden glided out of the Shenzhen port, carrying some 12,000 containers. It stopped at Nansha, near the Chinese city of Guangzhou. It docked at Yantian, east of Shenzhen. It stopped at the port of Ningbo, by then reopened.
On Sept. 27, it embarked across the unfathomable expanse of the Pacific.
No one could have been surprised by the madness that greeted it on the other side as it arrived off the Port of Long Beach nearly two weeks later, on Oct. 9.
The two ports at Los Angeles and Long Beach handle two-fifths of all imports reaching the United States from Asia via container vessels. That flow would increase by more than 17% over the second half of 2021 compared with the previous year. The surge proved overwhelming.
More than 50 ships were stuck out in the ocean, waiting for a dock to open in the mother of all traffic jams.
For the first six days, the Emden did not even have a place to anchor. It ran a slow, looping course in the waters off the port, before anchoring in formation with nine other vessels, roughly 3 miles off the coast, according to data compiled by AIS Maritime Intelligence, a unit of MarineTraffic. There, it sat for another 10 days, having become a floating warehouse.
Any one vessel stuck in the water indicated that a massive quantity of goods was not getting where it was supposed to be. The Maersk Emden alone was carrying 474 containers for LG, the South Korean home appliance giant, according to customs data tabulated by ImportGenius, which tracks global shipping. Nike had 74 containers on board. Mattel, the toy company, had 96. Just as the weather was turning cold in North America, 48 containers shipped by Burlington Coat Factory were stuck on the vessel.
Taken as a whole, the products bobbing on the Pacific — carried to the United States not just from China but from South Korea, Mexico, Australia, the South Pacific and the Middle East — could collectively fill an empire of warehouses and shopping malls.
One ship held enough animal feed to sustain 20,000 cows for a week. Five ships collectively carried 13 million pounds of Fiji brand bottled water. Others bore enough Heineken beer to slake the thirst of every adult in San Francisco for a year. A key element for making synthetic fabrics and plastic bottles was stuck in the queue along with solar panels, chain-link fencing, fabric for carpets for Tesla cars and Cornhole game equipment.
Walker had his sights on a single container stuck in this monumental pileup, one steel box held there by forces entirely beyond his control.
The Last Leg Home
On Oct. 25, after 10 days of purgatory at anchor, a giant crane plucked Glo’s container off the Emden and deposited it on the dock.
Four days later, a so-called drayage driver — the operator of a truck that loads and unloads at ports — picked up the container and hauled it to his company’s yard in Los Angeles. There it sat for two days, until another driver ferried the container to a warehouse in Costa Mesa, some 40 miles down the freeway.
Two days after that, on Nov. 3, Walker received an alarming email from Freightos: The previous delivery date of Oct. 30 — now past — had been updated to Dec. 10.
“I said to myself, ‘We’re going to miss Black Friday and Christmas,’ ” Walker recalled.
He emailed Seabay, the freight company in China, to try to move the box faster. It directed him to its counterpart tasked with managing the final leg of the journey, Israel Cargo Logistics. Its U.S. operations were housed in a low-slung office complex in the Rosedale section of Queens, on a street dotted by a used-car dealer, a diner and a bodega.
Inside the complex, many of the suites were vacant. The offices of Israel Cargo Logistics were on the ground floor, down a long hallway off another long hallway lined with stained carpets. There, Michael Horan, the ocean manager, sat in a cubicle in an oddly silent room, the walls white and devoid of decoration.
He read a plaintive cry for help from Mississippi.
“Hi Michael, I know you’re probably hearing this from every client,” Walker had written. “This container has ALL of our packaging for ALL Christmas products that we intended to sell this year, so we’re in a tough position.”
“Please let me know if there’s anything we can do to expedite the process,” he continued. “And I truly mean we. I appreciate your help.”
Walker figured that Horan was besieged by angry shippers issuing rude threats, and he bet on the power of polite discourse. He allowed himself to imagine that a truck might be secured to haul his container perhaps as far as Memphis, Tennessee, or Dallas. Then, he would scramble to line up transport for the rest of the journey.
He was astonished by the email he received only 21 minutes later.
“Hi Hagan,” Horan replied. “I have a truck picking up tomorrow from Los Angeles and will deliver to you on Tuesday 11/9.” This, for an extra cost of $1,100.
“Yes!” Mr. Walker wrote back immediately. “Let’s do it!”
Just before 8 a.m. on Nov. 9, Walker arrived at his warehouse, a failed furniture showroom on the outskirts of Starkville. The tractor-trailer was already there, backed up to the loading dock. The driver was resting inside the cab after his four-day, 1,900-mile drive.
As the driver lifted his rear gate, Walker peered in excitedly. There sat 1,595 brown cartons atop 24 pallets.
Walker and three employees wielded electric pallet jacks to move the goods into the warehouse. An hour later, a Glo truck began collecting some of the cargo to take it to the old movie theater downtown, where employees began preparing shipments for customers across the United States and around the world — in Belgium, Dubai, Singapore.
Watching this process unfold, Walker felt an overwhelming sense of relief.
But before the day was done, anxiety had returned. Given what he had endured, he was already looking ahead to the 2022 Christmas season, readying ever larger orders as a hedge against new troubles emerging somewhere on the pathway between China and Mississippi.
“It’s the whole cycle all over again,” he said
