Take what’s happening in Southern California: On October 19, 100 container ships were scattered along the shoreline for at least 20 miles as they waited to unload at the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

It was an unprecedented logjam. A single ship carrying 19,100 TEU (20-foot equivalent unit) containers can haul 156 million pairs of shoes or 300 million tablet computers or 900 million cans of baked beans. What the nearly half a million containers worth of goods waiting on those ships represent is difficult to even grasp.

The backup—along with similar gum-ups in 77 percent of major ports all over the world—has piled onto ongoing concerns about holiday season shortages, with everything from semiconductors to semisweet chocolate caught up in the predicament. But these shipping delays won’t just impact whether you’ll get your new Xbox—on a larger level, U.S. officials are worried these shortages will affect consumer spending, and in turn, hinder economic recovery.

Because L.A. and Long Beach account for 40 percent of all seaborne imports to the United States, the situation at those ports caught the attention of President Joe Biden and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who quickly announced that both facilities would begin to operate 24 hours per day to ease the congestion.

While this was a positive step, in the long run, it only irons out one kink in a long link. Ultimately a system-wide solution is needed to fix the entire supply chain—the complex web of suppliers, purchasers, and logistics operations that shuttle products around the world, and keep global and local economies humming healthily along.

Many different causes have led us here. The pandemic changed the lifestyle of many Americans, who switched to a hybrid work schedule and started spending more time at home. That fueled surging demand for items like office chairs, printers, gym equipment, and home appliances as consumer demand shifted from service to goods.

But just as demand skyrocketed, COVID-19 related safety policies made it harder for suppliers to deliver stuff where it needed to go. Logistics experts have reported that extensive quarantine requirements and partial port closures in China, along with lockdowns at factories in Indonesia and Vietnam, significantly hampered the production of goods for the U.S. market. Some have also argued that generous pandemic unemployment benefits in the U.S. created reluctance for many Americans to return to logistics-related work, resulting in severe labor shortages among workers at the ports, truck drivers, warehouse operators, and so on.

Complicating the supply situation is the fact that containers needed to ship stuff aren’t in the places they’re needed. Shortages of containers in China have sharply limited the amount of goods that can be shipped to the U.S. Then, when loaded containers do arrive at the port, there is a shortage of chassis available for truckers to use to haul them away. The Biden administration has requested suggestions from a broad range of stakeholders to solve the country’s container and intermodal chassis shortages and alleviate supply chain chokepoints. But even when the container shortage issue is resolved, this won’t be the end of the problem, because there is a shortage of warehouse space in the U.S. for storing these deliveries. In late October, the vacancy rate in the Los Angeles area was a paltry 1 percent; even before the pandemic, in 2019, the vacancy rate was a tight 1.4 percent.

Broken supply chains may slow economic recovery in Asia, Europe, and the United States. In the U.S. particularly, where many self-interested players are involved and the government has no direct control over most of them, it will be a challenge to get everyone on board to solve the crisis. I suggest two short-term approaches:

First, when supply cannot be increased quickly, it makes sense to curb demand—in this case, to try to entice consumers to shift their spending from goods back to services. To achieve this goal, the Biden administration should push faster and harder with vaccination mandates. Safety is a must to get Americans back traveling, dining out, and returning to movies, shows, concerts, and the gym. Once the vaccinated population reaches a critical threshold, the government can partner with service providers to provide incentives to get Americans out of these houses and back enjoying new and improved services again.

Second, many supply shortage issues are caused by a lack of coordination among participants in the supply chain—and some quick fixes can go a long way. Taking warehouse capacity: California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order on October 21 calling for state agencies to identify land for storing containers now stuck at the ports. This is a good step forward. The government should follow it up by imposing penalties on unclaimed containers, which often sit around because storage and demurrage fees at the yards are too low. As an initial step, the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbor commissions recently approved new fines for containers sitting at the port for more than nine days. The fines will begin at $100 per container, increasing by $100 per day, and provide incentives for retailers to claim containers quickly and get rid of the goods within them via fire sales. This will ensure warehouse vacancy rates increase and make room for new containers to move in and allow normal commerce to resume.

This all leads back to the ports, where container and container chassis shortages are exacerbated when loaded containers lie for days or even weeks, taking up space that needs to be freed for receiving empty containers. Likewise, without newly emptied containers leaving U.S. ports, container shortages escalate in Asia. Once more containers are claimed and emptied at different yards, port operators, trucking companies and warehouse owners will be able to coordinate operations so that truckers can drop off the empty containers and pick up loaded ones in a single trip. With operations synchronized, more containers will be cleared from the port, making rooms for arriving ships to unload.

These fast and simple solutions could help ensure that merchandise such as toys, shoes, game consoles, and holiday decorations will arrive at stores sooner—and hopefully, before the holiday season. However, even though temporary fixes may tie us over for this holiday season, we need to plan for the future. Any long-term supply chain solution must involve a thorough review of the entire physical and information infrastructure.

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The intermodal shipping container—really, little more than a simple metal box—helped transform the world economy, stimulating international trade on a scale no one could have imagined and opening the way to what we now refer to as globalization.

It all sprang from the mind of a North Carolina truck driver named Malcom McLean—a man who had no experience in the maritime industry but proceeded to turn it upside down.

McLean, born in the tiny cotton center of Maxton in 1913, was a compulsive entrepreneur, a man who was always thinking about business. As a child, he sold eggs from the side of the road. Graduating high school in 1931, in the midst of the Great Depression, he stocked shelves in a grocery store and then managed a gas station. He bought a used truck and opened McLean Trucking in 1934, serving as the sole driver while still selling gasoline. Armed with boundless ambition, he quickly built McLean Trucking into one of the nation’s largest trucking companies. McLean Trucking hauled textiles, cigarettes, and other goods up and down the East Coast. The Interstate Commerce Commission, a powerful federal agency, closely regulated trucking in that era, requiring that rates be based on the cost of providing service. Malcom McLean was known for innovative ideas that lowered his company’s costs, such as crenellating the sides of trailers to reduce wind resistance and improve fuel efficiency, so that regulators would allow his company to reduce rates and take market share from its competitors.

By the early 1950s, U.S. auto sales were booming and highways were becoming heavily congested. The Interstate Highway system was still years in the future. McLean, concerned that traffic jams were delaying his drivers and raising his company’s costs, conceived of waterfront terminals at which trucks would drive up ramps and deposit their trailers aboard ships. He envisioned the vessels moving between North Carolina, New York, and Rhode Island, circumventing the heavy traffic and innumerable stop lights on highways that also served as main streets up and down the East Coast.

Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower, left, leans over for a word with 7-year-old Malcom McLean, Jr., as the lad touches the 1959 American Legion Merchant Marine Achievement Award during its presentation at the White House, July 29, 1959. Young Malcom’s father accepted the award on behalf of the Pan American Steamship Corp., which he headed. In the group at right are, from left: Rep. Frank Boykin (D-Ala.), Mrs. McLean, Malcom McLean, Sr., and Nancy McLean, 13. Photo courtesy of Associated Press.

The industry McLean proposed to enter was more than a little antiquated. A typical oceangoing ship in the 1950s carried around 200,000 separate crates, bags, barrels, and bales. They would arrive at the dock in hundreds of separate shipments. Each item had to be removed from a truck or rail car and moved into a warehouse. When it was time to load the vessel, the individual pieces of cargo were moved out of the warehouse, placed on the dock, and assembled onto pallets that were lifted by a winch into the ship’s hold. There, dockworkers removed each item from the pallet and stowed it.

Unloading at the end of the voyage meant reversing this labor-intensive process. In consequence, moving goods across the ocean often cost 15 or even 20 percent of their value, a price so steep that many goods were not worth trading internationally. Putting truck trailers aboard ships, in theory, would cut out many of those laborious steps—and, in turn, slash costs. But the idea also had an obvious disadvantage: Trailers would take up precious and expensive shipboard space, undercutting potential savings.

McLean pondered the problem and proposed detaching the trailer bodies from their chassis and wheels and putting only the bodies—that is, metal containers—aboard the ships. This would introduce some complications, such as the need for cranes to lift the containers off truck chassis, transfer them to departing ships, and then reverse the operation when a vessel arrived at its destination. On the other hand, containers, unlike truck trailers, could be stacked, allowing each ship to carry far more cargo. Since the vessel was easily the most expensive part of the operation, the more containers that could go aboard each vessel, the less it would cost to carry each one.

The obstacles to McLean’s concept were daunting. Suitable containers, cranes, and ships did not exist; McLean hired engineers and naval architects and set them loose to solve the problems. Federal regulations barred trucking companies from owning ships, so in 1955 McLean sold his highly profitable truck line and then purchased a marginally profitable ship line he could use to test out his ideas. The potential demand for container shipping was unknown, but McLean bet everything on the venture he christened Sea-Land Service. Asked later whether he had considered ways to shelter his trucking wealth from the risks of an unproven business, McLean was unequivocal. “You’ve got to be totally committed,” he said.

Many in the shipping industry regarded containerization as a concept with little potential; McLean was, after all, an outsider unfamiliar with the industry’s storied traditions. For his part, McLean thought the U.S. maritime industry was obsessed with its ships rather than its potential customers. He aggressively built his business along the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts, on routes to Puerto Rico, and through the Panama Canal to California. He bought a ship line serving Alaska in early 1964, just before one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded created enormous demand to ship building materials by sea.

In the late 1950s, other ship lines cautiously tried to follow. Their efforts ran headlong into union opposition. Discharging and reloading traditional ships could require armies of workers, and the dockworkers’ unions knew that a shift to container freight would eliminate thousands of jobs on the docks. Only after repeated strikes on both Atlantic and Pacific coasts did port employers and longshore unions reach agreements in the early 1960s about payments to dockworkers displaced by the new technology.

The biggest barrier to the growth of container shipping, though, was diversity. Each company that followed Sea-Land ordered containers that suited its particular business, and each had a different design for the corner fittings by which cranes lifted containers. If a factory packed a shipment into one ship line’s boxes, the goods might have to wait for space on one of that carrier’s vessels and could only be delivered to a port which the line served.

At the behest of the U.S. Navy, which was concerned it might have to supply troops overseas with a fleet of incompatible ships carrying incompatible containers, domestic transportation companies began discussing how to standardize the container in 1958. The International Organization for Standardization soon picked up the cause, seeking to develop international standards.

McLean, treated as an outsider by the leaders of the shipping industry, was not involved in these talks, but after a decade of fruitless bargaining, negotiators turned to him for a solution. He agreed to surrender Sea-Land’s patents so that every container in every country could use the same corner fittings. That, along with agreement on a standard 40-foot length, assured that any container could fit on any ship and be handled by a crane in every port.

A truck parked near a stack of containers at the Port Newark Container Terminal in Newark, N.J., the nation’s second-busiest port, on Oct. 30 2015. Photo by Julio Cortez/Associated Press.

Standardization cleared the way for container shipping to become an international business. In 1967, McLean won a Defense Department contract to use containerships to supply U.S. troops in Vietnam, quickly disproving doubters who had insisted that container shipping across the Pacific would not be viable. The contract covered round-trip costs, and the lack of military cargo coming back from Vietnam to the United States left Sea-Land free to serve other customers. McLean found them in Japan. Starting in 1968, containership service made it possible for Japanese manufacturers like Matsushita and Pioneer to export televisions and stereos in massive quantities, and the burgeoning U.S. trade deficit with Japan soon became a sensitive diplomatic issue.

Tobacco company R.J. Reynolds bought Sea-Land in 1969, but nine years later McLean reentered the shipping industry by acquiring United States Lines, a large but weak competitor. As always, competition was on his mind; he ordered a dozen containerships that were larger and more fuel-efficient than any afloat, expecting they would enable United States Lines to have lower costs per container than other carriers. This time, though, McLean’s intuitive management style worked against him. Oil prices plunged, leaving United States Lines with the wrong ships for the times. In 1986, the company filed for bankruptcy. Its ships were sold off, and thousands of workers lost their jobs.

McLean was not ready to retire. Five years after the failure of U.S. Lines, at the age of 77, he founded yet another shipping company. Yet he remained out of public view, ashamed of his role in a failure that cost thousands of people their jobs. He shunned journalists and avoided public appearances. As a result, his legacy was not fully appreciated.

By the time of his death in 2001, the industry McLean had founded with a single vessel carrying 58 containers had reshaped the global economy. The local industries that had been the norm in 1956 were long gone; thousands of ships were moving millions of containers around the world each day; the equivalent of nearly 10 million truck-size containers arrived at U.S. ports in 2016. Long-time port cities such as New York and San Francisco had been reborn after years of struggle to replace the jobs and industries lost to the rise of container shipping. Consumers had unprecedented choice among a nearly endless array of products from all parts of the world, but the manufacturing workers who produced those goods strained to cope with more intense global competition. McLean’s innovation, intended just to make his trucking company a bit more efficient, ended up changing the world in ways that no one had imagined.

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In 1937, when I was seven, we lived in a white, wood frame house on East 61st Street. It had a front lawn and a big backyard with an alley behind it. Main Street was a few feet west, with a print shop I visited because the owner gave away writing tablets and the Princess Theater where we spent weekend afternoons. To the east was a little street named Wall Street with a corner grocery store. Toward the end of the month when mother ran short of cash, the grocer was happy to put any needed purchases “on the bill” until payday. The farthest south we ever ventured was 64th Street where our school, St. Columbkille’s, stood.

But in those days, you didn’t need to take the streetcar to meet the world; so many memorable people and things arrived at your door. With few exceptions, like going to the neighborhood grocery store, we didn’t have to leave home to purchase goods; vendors came to us. Amazon may be onto something, but it isn’t something new.

I recall the greengrocer who visited in a horse-drawn cart selling fruit and vegetables. The driver would raise the side panels of his vehicle to display his selection, still in their packing boxes. In those pre-spraying days, anyone eating an apricot was best advised to split it open and not bite into it. Tiny worms often inhabited the area around the pit.

The Fuller Brush man was a regular visitor at most houses. He came laden with the latest thing in brushes to make our lives easier—brushes for the floor, for the kitchen, and bathrooms. Since I was the oldest child in our family, it was my job to prepare bottles of milk for my infant brothers and sisters. I was happy to discover that the Fuller Brush man sold bottle brushes to assist me in washing the bottles. The Fuller Brush man became part of American popular culture and achieved the ultimate—a movie that starred a top comic of his day, Red Skelton, as the Fuller Brush Man.

In an era when not every home had a refrigerator, the iceman delivered. In our neighborhood it was the Kirker Ice Company whose plant was at 5930 South Main St. Once a week, a household that needed ice would place a card with a large ‘K’ printed on it in the window—a signal to the ice man that he should stop and deliver. The iceman would grab a block of ice with heavy-duty tongs, fling it onto his shoulder where it rested on a pad of heavy leather, and lug it to the kitchen icebox where he deposited it in its compartment. The system worked fine except that the melting water often overflowed the pan we placed on the floor under the box, creating a sloppy mess.

The Helms man often announced his arrival with three toots of his whistle. The bread he sold didn’t interest the children who gathered around his distinctive yellow van. What attracted us were the sweets: doughnuts, turnovers, pies, eclairs, and more. He stored them in oversized drawers and removed a requested item by taking a piece of tissue paper and lifting the item as if it were a precious object. Even kids who weren’t buying gathered around to enjoy the show and inhale the accompanying fragrance.

Farmer Brothers sold coffee and tea door-to-door. Occasionally Farmers ran promotions that featured dishware at reasonable prices; it was decorated with delicate paintings of autumn leaves. I hadn’t seen any of them for many years until I recently spotted a bowl at a Pasadena flea market. The sight instantly took me back decades. Of course, I bought it. Marcel Proust evoked memories of his childhood with the taste of chamomile tea and madeleines. My bowl serves that purpose for me.

Milk was delivered to homes in the early mornings by men wearing white uniforms and lifting glass quart bottles in a metal carrier that fitted six bottles. Jessup, Knudsen, and Adohr were the important dairies then. During World War II, a song named “Milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet” became very popular. It was sung by a worker in a defense plant whose sleep the milkman disturbed.

Milkman, keep those bottles quiet,
Can’t use that jive on my milk diet.
Been jumping on the swing shift all right,
Turning out my quota all night.

Been knocking out a fast tank all day,
Boy, you blast my wig with those clinks,
And I got to catch my 40 winks.

During the summer, the neighborhood would be visited at least once by a photographer who arrived leading a pony that was laden with a large format camera and tripod. There was no need for him to broadcast his presence. Children caught sight of him and ran home to announce his arrival. Doting mothers who wanted photographs of their offspring came out of their houses to hail him. The photographer came prepared for his photo sessions with a pair of sheepskin cowboy chaps, a belt and holster with a six-shooter, a large bandana, and a cowboy hat. My mother was a customer and the family photo album contains photos of both my brother Raul and me posing warily on ponies, doing our utmost to smile. From that day to this, I have not gotten on another horse, of whatever size.

Insurance salesmen generally knocked on our door in the late evening when the entire family would be there to decide on whether to purchase a policy. Mother was a firm believer in insurance and it took no persuasive speech by the Prudential man to convince her to buy a policy. The salesman would come by monthly to collect the premiums, using his thick account book to record the payment and issue a receipt. When the insured, my father, died, payments on his policy were in arrears but mother contacted the agent anyway. He assured her that if she made up the late payments, the company would pay off as they had contracted. She did and they did. Prudential paid her $500, a not inconsiderable sum at the time.

These days when nearly everyone carries a personal telephone, it is difficult to imagine a time when most houses were not equipped with telephone jacks and didn’t have phones. I didn’t use a phone until I was 10 years old.

Bradford’s Bread Truck, Irvine Ranch, circa 1920.

For the many Americans in our situation—that is, phoneless—Western Union offered a scene that Ingmar Bergman might have thought up. A uniformed Western Union employee would knock on the door, usually at night. He carried a telegram that had a black border around the envelope that contained it. That border gave us immediate notice that someone close to the family had died. I witnessed that scene several times as a child and can testify that the interim between seeing the black border and learning the name of the deceased seemed a very long time.

Other itinerant salesmen included the knife and scissors sharpener who wheeled his little cart with its grinding wheel down our street periodically. A music man came by the house one evening to try his luck at selling music instruments. He demonstrated a steel guitar that I liked a lot. I asked my parents whether we could buy the guitar and if I could take the lessons that came with it. One parent agreed; the other didn’t. I still can’t play the guitar.

In the summer, the ice cream man drove his truck down the street playing a tune on his loudspeaker. Chocolate-covered Good Humor bars and Eskimo Pies were beyond our budget. What helped cool us off in hot weather were big slices of cold watermelon and frosty pitchers of lemonade that mother prepared for us.

A woman wearing a flowing, flowery skirt knocked on our door one day. She advertised herself as a fortune teller. Mother consulted her and I can only hope that she got some good news for her money. Vacuum cleaner salesmen dropped by to make their pitches. Mother liked the machine the Electrolux man demonstrated. She bought it. It was expensive but mother appreciated quality and never bought any vacuum cleaner that wasn’t an Electrolux.

Now that I think about it, both my brother, Raul, and I were members of the selling class. On Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings, we’d pick up our quota of newspapers and roam the streets around our neighborhood, then around 62nd and San Pedro Streets, pulling our wagon and hawking our newspapers. To announce our presence, we developed a sing-song, “Exxxxxaminer, Times, Paperrrr!” We were thrilled when we got home with our pockets bulging with coins. It was a fun way to augment the family income.

Our family doctor was E.C. Deming, whose office was located at 6806 South Broadway. Dr. Deming made house calls for which he charged $2. In 1939 mother called him to our house to check the condition of a 9-year-old boy who was experiencing pain in the groin area. Father was less than enthusiastic about my going to the hospital, but when Deming mentioned the possible consequences of a ruptured appendix, I was allowed to go. The operation, at Children’s Hospital, was successful.

Many people, overwhelmingly men, worked as itinerant salesmen in the 1930s; I’m reminded that in 1937 the U.S. unemployment rate reached 17 percent. Those men took jobs that may not have been their first choice—they did so because there were no other employment options.

These vendors were eventually replaced as consumers took to driving their cars to malls, often on crowded streets and freeways, packing multi-storied, fortress-like parking structures to full capacity.

How long will it be before shopping malls and their parking lots join the list of things that aren’t here anymore, and that people of a certain age look back upon with nostalgia?

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