Invisible Hands at Work

The National Geographic Channel is doing a series on the Ports of Los Angeles / Long Beach.

I plan on watching the series when it makes it's way to Netflix (I don't have cable), but I have been following it periodically on their website. I though I would share this little bit with y'all.

Half Way Around The World In A Sneaker

Molly Mayock
-Series Producer

The top products arriving at the Port of Los Angeles are:

(1) furniture;

(2) apparel;

(3) vehicle and vehicle parts;

(4) toys and sporting goods;

(5) electronic products.

The majority of these products are manufactured at factories in China. That’s why we decided to go to the Nike factory in Gaobu and follow a sneaker coming off the assembly line on its journey to the store shelf in the United States.

Going to China was the trip of a lifetime. We flew into Hong Kong, traveled on a train to the bustling city of Guangzhou in mainland China and then motored a few hours to the factory in a rural area. (I was pleasantly surprised when every area I visited carried the National Geographic Channel!)

After being loaded into a cargo container, the sneaker was trucked to the Port of Hong Kong, which is one of the busiest ports in the world. It’s a vibrant, wild place full of colorful characters. We met a 50-ish woman who’d been working on the same water taxi at the port since she was 12. She drove our camera crew right along side a massive cargo ship as it was being loaded with sneakers from the Nike factory.

Watching a sneaker being made was utterly fascinating—at least 200 hands are involved in making each pair. Most of the workers were teenage girls wearing fashionable western-styled clothing (probably made in China). The factory itself was bigger, brighter and more modern than I had imagined it would be. Except for the bathroom facilities–which consisted of a hole in the floor.

I was hesitant until I remembered an appropriate slogan: Just Do It.

Those sneakers will see more miles inside of that box than outside of it.

I am fascinated by the whole supply chain, the army of people making and distributing products whose work largely goes unnoticed. Such elaborate systems are virtually unknown in history; for the majority of the existence of the human race, goods were largely consumed where they were produced.

One of the basic tenants of economics is that trade makes everyone better off - since trade is voluntary, people would not engage in trade that makes them worse off. At this point in time, trade is at the highest level it has ever been, production is at its highest level, consumption is at its highest level, so this should, theoretically speaking, be the best time in the history of the world.

On a side note, there is a very good chance that those sneakers which are made in China, will be stored in one of "my" warehouses in the Inland Empire. The rent and vacancy numbers than I chart and track were probably used in deciding where to locate the warehouse and how much Nike should pay for it. Indirectly, I am a very small part of this colossal shoe assembly line; a river of shoes that started as a collection of streams, created from snow from places unseen.