The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Second Edition with a new chapter by the author

by Marc Levinson

There can be no doubt, however, that containerization eliminated one of the key reasons for operating a factory in New York City: ease of shipment. A New York City location had long offered transport-cost advantages for factories serving foreign or distant domestic markets, as local plants could get their goods loaded on ships with much less handling than could factories inland. The container turned the economics of location on its head. Now, a company could replace its crowded multistory plant in Brooklyn or Manhattan with a modern, single-story factory in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, could enjoy lower taxes and electricity costs at its new home, and could send a container of goods to Port Elizabeth for a fraction of the cost of a plant in Manhattan or Brooklyn. This is exactly what occurred: while industry fled the city, 83 percent of the manufacturing jobs that left New York between 1961 and 1976 ended up no farther away than Pennsylvania, upstate New York, or Connecticut.