Where have all the boxes gone?
Posted on | July 28, 2010 | No Comments
I know it is summer time, and all the best stories have gone to the seaside, but why is there this fixation about containers? People are hunting them like Snarks, allegedly complaining that their goods are stacking up in warehouses, because there are no boxes into which they can be stuffed.
There are various approaches one might take to this curious tale. Firstly one can dismiss it as nonsense on stilts, and a mischief making tale put about by the proprietors of container factories, which have been somewhat under-used of late.
Or one can dismiss it as lamentable excuses by the container lines, which (probably due to cost-cutting) have hopelessly failed to keep track of the hardware emblazoned with their brand names on the sides. It is just possible that millions of containers have been damaged beyond repair by daft shippers using them (because they were so cheap) to ship unsuitable cargoes, like scrap metal, teak logs or time-expired cheese that will respectively bruise or taint their fragile corrugations and wooden decks.
It could, of course, be that there is any number of containers available for shipment, except that they are all 10,000 miles away from where they are needed. This is probably the truth, as their “repatriation” will not have been regarded as terribly important by containership owners while they were racking their brains about whether to opt for “hot” or “cold” layup, and whether it was better to enrage the Scots or Singaporeans by parking unused ships in lochs, or the TSS in the Singapore Straits.
Maybe the containers have found other uses. In recent months I have seen them employed for kindergartens in London Docklands, with holes in the shape of animals cut in the sides, and as art installations. Close to where I live the police discovered a whole fleet of them buried deeply in a field, affording a nurturing microclimate to several thousand cannabis plants.
I bet that many thousands are usefully housing the world’s poor. It just needs a bit of determination to track them down. In the 1980s one of the secondary carriers in Oceania, discovered that their boxes were landed at little ports and vanished into the dense jungle. Their solution was to hunt them with helicopters, using metal detectors.
But the present crisis (if there really is one) does not say a great deal for the gigantic brains of those operating the container liners. They have either got too few, or too many ships, by miles. Nothing in the liner trades is ever done by halves. Now they say, you cannot get the boxes…..
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