Hayes Valley, California, ice cream purveyors Smitten are nearly finished work on their shipping container ice cream stand.
She also feeds stray cats wandering among the town's wreckage, which includes a rusted shipping container and several vacant trailers.
Packages eventually file down a chute and into another shipping container, which is weighed to make sure the outbound plane is properly balanced.
ENGADGET: Inside UPS' Worldport: How a shipping titan moves 2,000 packages every 17 seconds
The system fits into a standard shipping container and can be sent by rail or truck to the end customer, where final assembly takes place.
He still pays full property tax on the house, and a city official challenged him for having an unapproved shipping container on the property to store salvaged belongings.
And with advances in big data, he sees that as a possibility - he compares the management of big data combined with machine learning with the shipping container revolution in transportation.
Mine went from shipping container to functional machine in under four minutes, including fitting a loaded battery for eight-plus hours of work, initial registration, and access to an online word processing site.
In this past half-century that shipping container has reduced the costs of trade enormously: so whatever had happened to tariffs we would have expected trade barriers to fall and trade itself to rise.
FORBES: Tariffs and Trade: The Tariff Level Isn't the Most Important Thing
American entrepreneur Malcolm McLean invented the shipping container in 1956, but it took a decade for its stunning effectiveness to be revealed as it went to use supplying the military during the Vietnam War.
Credit Suisse estimates that 35% of China COSCO's revenue and 32% of China Shipping Container Lines' comes from the Asia-Europe route, while earnings from European trade for the country's port operators varies between 7.3% to 34.1%.
Take the 70-employee furniture wholesaler in California that recently got threatened with a suit when a retail customer who purchased one of the company's wine racks claimed that her son found a dead cat in the shipping container and suffered psychological trauma.
In the summer, free movies are projected onto one of the silos on Friday nights and a bar in a converted shipping container serves up Kiwi craft beer from microbreweries including Auckland-based Hallertau and Stoke Beer from the South Island city of Nelson.
The shipping container has done this again over the past 50 years: there is almost no level of legal or tax trade protection that could have stopped foreign goods getting ever cheaper as the costs of hauling things from country to country fell ever lower.
FORBES: Tariffs and Trade: The Tariff Level Isn't the Most Important Thing
Matters are made worse by highly misleading press characterizations of other leaks, to the effect that an IAEA investigation had concluded that traces of weapons- grade uranium discovered by inspectors in Iran actually came from a contaminated shipping container originating in Pakistan, not an Iranian indigenous program.
But the discovery of three corpses among 15 illegals in a stinking Seattle shipping container in January and the shocking news of 58 corpses and just two survivors found in a truck at the English port of Dover three weeks ago have set off alarm bells in destination countries as well as in China.
Result: The cost of shipping a container has gone up, and the time (which was getting shorter) has also gone up.
Fully 46% of the price of shipping a container from Rotterdam to the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, is accounted for by transit through Georgia itself.
ECONOMIST: Trade makes you rich��but reform at home is what causes it
The shipping-container mall, with bank branches, fashion shops and a two-story cafe, has become a vibrant though temporary new city heart amid the rubble and din of heavy machinery demolishing condemned buildings.
The grim outlook for container shipping is not simply a reflection of the recession.
Since container shipping accounts for 52% of the total value of the world's seaborne trade, according to Lloyd's Maritime Intelligence Unit, Forbes used it to rank the world's busiest ports.
"The history of container shipping involves ship lines taking huge gambles, " says Marc Levinson, who points to a trend for some American and European companies to move manufacturing back from Asia.
In the past, says Drewry Shipping Consultants, the container trade has increased by between two-and-a-half and three times the rate of GDP growth.
The container-shipping industry has fared better because it is less fragmented.
"There are millions of shipments around this country whether it be a cargo container or a rig or shipping coming into our ports and the fact of the matter is you cannot open and examine every one of those, " said FBI Director Robert Mueller.
The part of the shipping industry headed for the choppiest waters is the container trade, which had steamed ahead gloriously since the mid-1970s.
In 2007 the International Chamber of Shipping and the World Shipping Council began work on a code of practice for container storage.
The Port of Felixstowe has formally opened the UK's first shipping berths capable of taking the next generation of giant container ships.
This puts the Copenhagen-based shipping company on track to post its first annual ever loss in 2009 after container freight rates and volumes dropped in the global downturn.
Container-leasing firm COSCO Pacific, controlled by one of China's top shipping companies, merits a look, says the European brokerage analyst.
应用推荐