I'm amazed at the large number of containers these ships can carry. We love our cheap stuff from China.
The use of containers has totally changed the face of international shipping. The old days of
cargo nets bringing up pallets or piles of boxes which were then moved by stevedores or other
longshoremen were inefficient to say the least. A common expression in the New Jersey of my
youth was "it fell off of a truck" which was also a common line in the Sopranos. The reality is that
with so many individual boxes/pieces, some percentage would generally "leak" away and lots got
sold on the streets. The advent of much more secure cargo containers which could also be loaded
and unloaded much faster and easier was nothing short of revolutionary. This has nothing to
do with any one low cost nation and everything to do with decreasing cost of transport by putting
more and more on each delivery platform (ship). As for "cheap stuff", when I was working for a
train manufacturer, in New York state, we imported the train chassis and several other key components
from overseas and in almost all cases, they came in standard cargo containers. They were far from
cheap parts but the container was the ideal way to move them.