A pharmaceutical company would have paid approximately $2,400 to ship a truckload of medicines from the U.S. Midwest to an interior city in Europe in 1960 (see table 1). This might have included payments to a dozen different vendors: a local trucker in Chicago, the railroad that carried the truck trailer on a flatcar to New York or Baltimore, a local trucker in the port city, a port warehouse, a steamship company, a warehouse and a trucking company in Europe, an insurer, a European customs service, and the freight forwarder who put all the pieces of this complicated journey together. Half the
...more
