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> at worst, you need to pay for a round trip to bring back the empty container That assumes the container is ready for you to bring back. It sounds like a big
by thayne 6y ago
> at worst, you need to pay for a round trip to bring back the empty container
That assumes the container is ready for you to bring back. It sounds like a big part of the problem is that North America is a bottleneck where it is taking containers in, but they aren't available to be sent back, empty or not.
- angry_octet 6y agoThere was a huge backlog at the Port of Los Angeles in 2020 due to COVID labour constraints, ships were waiting weeks to dock and containers were piling up at the railhead. Now they have workforce constraints and a trade imbalance. Perhaps the freight industry has long term contract rates which assume bidirectional flow, and they can't operate economically without essentially doubling rates, so they constrain capacity. https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/los-angeles-addresses-backlog-and-diverts-ships-as-volumes-rise https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/los-angeles-addre...
- URSpider94 6y agoThat's what I took away. It seems like there were a lot of containers on ships that came into US and European ports in Q2 last year, when the economy was shutting down, and those containers haven't been turned around as empties yet.