A visit to the ports

Where does all that stuff we buy come from?

Ever since I started writing about Amazon at The Atlantic, I’ve been fascinated by all the crap Americans buy, and what happens to it when they’re done with it. I remember interviewing a guy who bought things from Amazon in his sleep and being both amused and horrified—mostly because this is something I worried I would soon start doing. 

I’ve tried to buy less stuff since then, or buy used goods, or get them free (thanks Buy Nothing on Facebook!) but the Internet has made it cheaper to buy new stuff than to shop around for old stuff. And some stuff I need, more or less—the baby tears so many pages out of books that I recently had to buy three rolls of Scotch tape or give up on the books, and you can only hover on Craigslist or Buy Nothing for so long, waiting for someone to sell their used baby clothes, before you have to buy your own or risk the daycare telling you that none of his clothes fit.

That’s why the supply chain problems of the past year have been so interesting to me—we were already buying so much crap before the pandemic, you’d think the supply chain would be a well-oiled machine by now. But as I found out following Jani the giraffe from China to my doorstep, the supply chain is a hot mess right now. When President Biden announced that the Port of LA would operate 24/7 in mid-October, I figured it would be a good time to look more closely into exactly why the supply chain was having such protracted problems.

I called up the Port of LA to try and arrange a tour, only to be told that hundreds of journalists were asking the same thing, and that “even 60 Minutes” (!) couldn’t get into the marine terminals where cargo ships dock and unload. (Marine terminals are privately owned, sometimes by the same companies that own the cargo ships.) So I started calling around to see who else could show me around. I ended up with two very different willing participants: Gina Martinez, a woman who lives in Wilmington, a L.A. neighborhood bordering the ports, and Matt Schrap, who heads the Harbor Trucking Association, which represents truck companies that do “drayage”—essentially moving containers from the port docks inland. 

That’s how I ended up last week driving my rental car around a very industrial neighborhood in L.A. while Martinez and two other women who were members of the Wilmington Neighborhood Council gave me contradictory driving directions, talking over one another, and clucking at all the trucks driving by. Their neighborhood has, over the past decade or so, become a dumping ground for the shipping containers that haul goods to and from the U.S. We went to yards that were empty lots and are now piled with shipping containers six or seven high, and drove past a street where a shipping container fell on a parked car, crushing it.

(A photo I shot out the window while being told to turn left, right, and straight)

As a consumer, I felt like there was a little bit of NIMBY-ism going on—what’s so bad about having a container in your backyard if it means I can get my stuff?—but the more we drove around (and around and around), the more I realized how annoying it would be to have loud and polluting trucks rolling down your streets and dumping containers everywhere. If you try to pull out of your driveway and a container is blocking you, a tow truck is not going to be able to help you out. Containers can weigh more than 8,000 pounds.

Schrap, of the Harbor Trucking Association, showed me lots and lots of empty containers too. This gets a little into the weeds, but here goes. Drayage truckers say that they have to get an appointment to go to the port and pick up a container, and that they have to have a certain company’s container to drop off at the ports when they do (because the marine terminals are all owned by different companies.) Because there are so many empty containers, trucking companies are running out of chassis, the wheels and base used to haul a container, because they’re all being used for storage. We visited a trucking company where lots are full of empty containers sitting on chassis, and I sat next to a dispatcher as he tried over and over again to get an appointment at the marine terminals.

All those media reports that say there’s a shortage of truck drivers are not right, by the way. At the ports, truck drivers are sitting around waiting to get called into work, but there isn’t enough work for them because there are so many containers sitting around. There were 81,000 containers sitting at the Port of LA alone last week, so many that the port had to cut longshoremen shifts because they couldn’t keep unloading the boats because they ran out of room.

Read my story here: How American Shoppers Broke the Supply Chain

As I discovered, this all goes back to Amazon, as so many things do at the end of the day. I kept wondering: ok, we have a lot of containers right now, but are we really buying more crap than we did before the pandemic, when we bought a lot of stuff? The answer is yes. I made a nifty chart to show our trade deficit for goods, which reached an all-time high in September.

We’re buying a lot of stuff because the pandemic made us stay home and improve our homes. But more important, we’re importing a lot of stuff because Amazon and Walmart know we’re going to buy it soon, and we’re going to want it delivered the next day.

You probably already know this if you read a lot about Amazon, but one of the reasons Amazon is so successful is that Jeff Bezos built hundreds of warehouses all around the country, with the idea that sellers would send products to each of them. Then, when you or I order more Scotch tape, Amazon can send it from the warehouse near me, and get it to me quickly. That’s why Amazon is so much better at getting stuff to you than most other clothing companies, which probably only have a handful of warehouses that send out stuff bought online. 

Over the last year, as people ordered more and more stuff, Amazon sellers bought more stuff to stock their warehouses around the country. And Walmart moved towards a model similar to Amazon’s, where third-party sellers could reach customers quickly, which meant more stuff to be ordered from warehouses. Lots of the stuff coming into the ports is stuff that you and I ordered—but lots of it is also stuff we’re going to order, and that, according to some economists, is why the supply chain is so screwed at the moment. “Americans have become singularly impatient consumers, unlike their peers in much of the rest of the world,”  Jock O’Connell, international trade advisor at Beacon Economics, told me.

There’s more in the story too, including why exports have gone down, how truckers waiting in line get dinner, and what this all means for pollution in the neighborhoods where I drove with Gina Martinez.

If you want to read more from me on the supply chain and consumption, here are some links:

Why Is Everything More Expensive Right Now? Let This Stuffed Giraffe Explain

‘We Are All Accumulating Mountains of Things’

I Delivered Packages for Amazon and It Was a Nightmare

Is This the End of Recycling?

I’m on (Some) TVs!

I’ll be on Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien this weekend to talk about my experience buying from women-owned businesses. Here’s a list of where it airs and when. 

I’ll leave you with my favorite photo from my day trip to LA. I told Andrew that I would have had no choice but to change my name if his last name had been Fire Extinguisher.