Many nonfreight costs undoubtedly fell with the growth of container shipping. Packing full containers at the factory eliminated the need for custom-made wooden crates to protect merchandise from theft or damage. The container itself served as a mobile warehouse, so the traditional costs of storage in transit warehouses fell away. Cargo theft

The container has enabled logistics centers such as these to prosper by adding value to global supply chains, capturing jobs that were once performed elsewhere, or not at all.

United States Lines would achieve what it took to succeed in container shipping: scale. Scale was the holy grail of the maritime industry by the late 1970s. Bigger ships lowered the cost of carrying each container. Bigger ports with bigger cranes lowered the cost of handling each ship. Bigger containers—the 20-foot box, shippers’ favorite in the

Four years later, it got out of the shipping business altogether and spun off Sea-Land as an independent company. As R. J. Reynolds’s new management explained to investment analysts, “investors who might be interested in owning RJR stock were not the type who ordinarily would be interested in a capital-intensive, cyclical transportation company.”35

In 1933, it joined other railroads to form the International Container Bureau, an organization dedicated to making international container freight practical in Europe.

And if land-transport costs, labor concerns, and crime were not enough to deter businesses from shipping through New York, there were the port’s decrepit facilities.

This meant that the benefits from switching to container shipping were greatest on shorter routes, for which the savings in cargo handling and port time came to a very large proportion of the total cost of a voyage.

Richardson’s secret weapon was a simple form with the pompous title “Total Transportation Cost Analysis.” The form provided a side-by-side comparison of the costs of shipping a product by truck, rail, and containership, including not just transportation rates, but also local pickup and delivery, warehousing, and insurance costs. Salesman were

These new ports, by and large, were privately managed, and in some cases privately financed. Their creation was a deliberate response to the economics of container shipping, in which keeping the ship moving is what matters most. Only the biggest ports are worth a time-consuming stop: in 2014, 46 percent of world container shipments moved through