What a shared box costs, and who chose what is in it

The cheapest option, and the sentence nobody said

Lesson 2 ended with a clean answer. The 200 cartons left over from the amendment go into a consolidation for USD 1,469.60. That is against USD 1,960 for a twenty-foot container and USD 2,940 for a fourth forty-foot. It is the cheapest line on the table by USD 490.40.

Then somebody printed the loading plan and read what was actually in those 200 cartons.

The 2,400 sweaters are the whole of the second door count Brantmere added on 4 August, at the highest FOB on the order. The 1,000 snowsuits are the promotion units with a date attached. The least controlled shipment on the purchase order is carrying its two most urgent items. Nobody decided that.

It fell out of the loading plan. The plan filled the two full containers with the tallest cartons. It filled the third with the short ones until the height ran out. What did not fit was whatever was left when the height ran out. The residue of an order is chosen by geometry unless somebody chooses it on purpose.

What a consolidation actually costs

Before deciding whether that matters, price the thing properly. And a consolidation's price is not mostly in dollars.

A full container is stuffed at your factory, sealed by you, and opened by your consignee. A consolidated carton is different. It is delivered loose to a container freight station at origin. Somebody else stuffs it next to other people's cargo. It is discharged into a container freight station at destination, unloaded, sorted, and released. It is handled several more times, and it waits in two more queues.

Thornbeck keeps its own arrival record on this lane. Over the last twelve months, 40 consolidations and 96 full containers:

The median difference is three days. At the ninetieth percentile the difference is eight days. That is the number that decides whether a promotion happens. A consolidation is not much slower on average. It is a lot slower in the tail, and the tail is what a deadline meets.

The risk you cannot see, priced from somebody's record

There is a second cost. It is the one that belongs to this track rather than to a freight course.

A container is one arrival for the ship and many consignments for the customs authority. Each shipper in that box has its own house bill of lading, its own description of goods, its own declared value and its own consignee. Each one is risk-assessed separately. When any one of those consignments is selected for examination, the container is not opened selectively. It goes to an examination facility whole, and everything in it waits.

You cannot assess that risk. You cannot see the other cargo. You do not know who packed it or what it is declared as, and you will never be told. What you can do is ask your forwarder for their own history. Thornbeck's, on the same 40 consolidations: six were held because another shipper's consignment in the same container was selected, and the median hold was five days.

Six of forty is 15.00%. It is Thornbeck's number on Thornbeck's boxes, not an industry figure. That is exactly why it is usable. It describes the consolidator you are actually about to use.

The decision, done twice

PO BM-4412 carries a late-delivery clause: 10% of the invoice value of any style that misses the agreed date at the Mississauga distribution centre. Thornbeck's own read is that roughly 40% of a five-day hold at this point in the calendar would break that date.

The saving is smaller than the risk it takes on. On these cartons, consolidation is the wrong answer by USD 32.80. That margin is so thin that the real conclusion is not "take the twenty-foot". It is this: you are deciding a USD 87,200 exposure to save USD 490.40, and you should not be in this position at all.

Restow first, then choose

You are in this position because the loading plan chose the residue. So change the loading plan.

The third container has 2,690 mm of height, and the naive plan used 2,400 of it, in eight tiers of 300 mm cartons. Load it instead as one tier of snowsuit cartons at 400 mm, three tiers of sweaters at 300 mm and four tiers of trousers at 300 mm. That is 2,500 mm, still 800 cartons, and now 60.00 cubic metres rather than 57.60.

Every sweater is now inside a sealed container. Every promotion snowsuit is inside a sealed container. What is left over is 200 cartons of WT-2075, the continuity work trouser: 4,000 pieces, USD 59,200, no launch date, no promotion. The distribution centre will take that style whenever it arrives.

Same number of cartons, same lane, same week. The volume falls 14.29%. The value at risk falls 32.11%. And the answer flips: consolidation now saves USD 663.20 against an expected cost of USD 355.20. It is the right choice by a comfortable margin, instead of the wrong one by a thin margin.

Nothing about the freight market changed. Somebody decided which cartons would be the ones outside the containers.

The document half, and where it goes next

A consolidation also changes your paperwork. You get a house bill of lading from the consolidator, not the carrier's own document, and the two are not interchangeable. For what that difference does to a claim, course 12.4 owns it. For what a bank will and will not accept, course 13 owns it. Clearance at the far end, including what an examination actually involves, is course 12.3. This lesson stops at the operational decision: whether your cargo shares a box, and which of your cargo does.

Act as a freight pricing analyst working for the shipper. You have no interest in selling any particular mode. I want one shipment priced under every mode it could travel by, starting from carton dimensions. Shipment facts: origin [PLACE], port or airport of departure [NAME], destination [PLACE], consignee's delivery point [PLACE]. For EACH style: code, pieces on the order, pieces a carton, carton EXTERNAL length, width and height in millimetres, carton gross weight in kilogrammes, and FOB a piece. Quoted charges I have: full container [AMOUNT] a box, with the equipment type and what is inside that figure; consolidation [AMOUNT] a weight-or-measurement unit plus [AMOUNT] of fixed charges; air [AMOUNT] a chargeable kilogramme, with the weight breaks if you have them, plus [AMOUNT] of per-shipment charges; and the volumetric divisor on the air quotation. Do the following. First, for each style give cubic metres a carton, gross kilogrammes a cubic metre, volumetric weight a carton and chargeable weight a carton. Then say plainly whether that style is charged on space or on weight by air. Give the weight at which it would cross the line, and how far it is from it. Second, build a stow: cartons across, cartons along, tiers up, for each equipment type. Tell me the container count and exactly which cartons are left over. Third, price the leftover cartons four ways: inside a full box for comparison, a part-filled box of the same size, the next size down, and consolidated. Give me a table of dollars a cubic metre, not just totals. Fourth, derive the crossover volume between consolidation and each container size from my own quoted charges. Check each crossover against that container's real capacity for MY cartons, and tell me if a rung is unreachable. Fifth, tell me the rate at which each answer flips. Sixth, list every assumption you had to make. Do not give me a range where a number is possible. Do not quote market rates. Use only the figures I gave you.

What to take away

1. A consolidation's real price is in days and in cargo you do not control, not in the rate.
2. Ask your forwarder for their own record on the lane: median and ninetieth-percentile days from discharge, and how often a shared box was held for somebody else's consignment.
3. One container is many consignments to a customs authority. Any one of them can stop all of them.
4. The residue of a mixed order is chosen by the loading plan unless you choose it. Name the styles that must travel sealed.
5. Compare the saving against the exposure it takes on. A USD 490 saving on an USD 87,200 shipment is not a saving. It is a bet.