Over eighty percent of everything the world trades by volume
arrives the way this one steel box is arriving now.
In twenty twenty-five the world's container ports handled more
than one billion of them for the first time ever.
Everything that follows depends on a spreader finding four corner castings,
guided from a cab high above the deck.
From the moment it leaves the hatch the box is tracked by number,
not by sight, at every step.
The yard is not storage but a sorting problem,
every box stacked where the next move will cost least.
A box that is buried under three others will
cost three unproductive moves before it ever reaches the gate.
At the gate cameras read the markings,
the chassis and the seal, and the paperwork either matches or stops.
Beyond that line the terminal's control
ends and the box becomes somebody else's cost,
measured in hours of waiting.
Inside the freight station the doors finally open,
the cargo is checked and relabelled, and the box is sealed again.
None of these steps is difficult on its own,
and every one of them is happening again behind you, continuously.
What a terminal really sells is not space or
steel but the hour it gives back to everyone downstream.
So the whole eighty percent arrives exactly like this,
one box, one journey, repeated until the shelves are full.