Shipping furniture in a relocation to Germany

Before the pandemic, Flightradar24, the real time flight tracker for airplanes, was popular for tracking flights for leisure and business travelers.

Since the pandemic, global supply chain woes have focused attention on the less popular domain of global container shipping. From June 2020 to July 2021, the cost of sending a shipping container from China to the U.S. west coast increased about 360%. At the same time, shipping times increased substantially. This has led to product shortages, product backlogs, and of course inflation.

Global supply chain issues have been in the news enough that most everyone has some knowledge of global shipping now.

It becomes more interesting when it gets personal.

My furniture was packed by the movers from my home in Toronto Canada on September 20 to be shipped to Germany.

From there, it sat in a warehouse in Toronto for 20 days, before the repacked container left Toronto on October 10.

The reason? There was congestion at the port of Montreal. With the backlog of containers sitting at the port of Montreal, there was not enough space for containers to queue onsite at the port. Outbound containers just sit and wait upstream at their point of origin. Global shipping supply chains reach far inland.

It took three days for the container to reach the port of Montreal on October 13 by rail car. It sat in another queue for 7 days before the ship left the port of Montreal on October 20.

This was a full month since I left Canada, and the furniture was just leaving Canada.

It took 8 days to cross the Atlantic Ocean, arriving at its first port of call in Antwerp Belgium on October 28. Four days after that, it arrived at Bremerhaven Germany on November 1.

It is now November 4. The contents are still awaiting customs clearance. It is not expected to be released and delivered any earlier than November 15.

I’ve been tracking the container ship as it made its way across the Atlantic on Vesselfinder.

The cover image in this post is what global container ship traffic looks like. It’s actually busier than it looks. Zoom in anywhere and the yellow arrows obscure many more ships.

Now here is the interesting part. If I thought that was busy, this is what global tanker traffic looks like. Tanker traffic is even higher. This is an important point when the world’s current energy woes are considered. The visual comparison of global trade in physical goods vs global energy supply is dramatic.

Eleven years ago, a major Silicon Valley luminary coined the phrase that "software is eating the world."

The message here? Software may be eating the world, but the world is still based on physical things that make the meal possible. Without investment in the science and technology of physical things, there will be no world to eat.

This is the springboard to my next post about the future of science and technology careers.