Life with two kids: International Demon-Hunter Shipping

[andrewducker]

A week and a half ago I ordered a couple of K-Pop Demon Hunters hoodies for the kids from Amazon. I didn't realise quite how much of a trip they'd be making:

8th - Taken from warehouse in Shenzhen (China) and handed to massive chinese shipment company SF Express.
8th - Driven an hour up the road to Dongguan shipment centre.
11th - Transported (presumably by road) 1,100 km to Ezhou (SF Express hub airport, also China))
12th - Flown to Liège Airport (Belgium), stopping over in Almaty International Airport (Kazakhstan)
14th - Flew in to Heathrow
14th - Then arrived in Stansted for customs
15th - Then handed to Hermes in London
16th - Who got it to me in Edinburgh the next day

Total cost, including shipping: £24 (£12 per top).

I am both impressed and somewhat aghast.

Comments

[calimac]

That's a greater distance than my tracked packages usually go, but the route is a lot more straightforward than some of them.

But yes, the amount of effort (not to mention the carbon footprint) involved is kind of amazing.

[andrewducker]

I'm hoping that the carbon footprint for the two sweaters is still pretty tiny. But in general I'd rather that things travelled by ship than plane! Tricky to do when nobody anticipated the demand.

[bens_dad]

I once read in the New Scientist that, amazingly, there are times when a fast ship uses more fuel per tonne of cargo than a plane !
This is not the typical case, and IIRC is only going to happen when a under-loaded ship travels at maximum speed.

Take off and landing use a lot of fuel, but at cruising speed and altitude a plane is fairly fuel efficient - the high speed balances the high rate of fuel burn.

I see a lot of current concern that cleaner shipping fuels are replacing the old dirty fuels that ... reduced global warming by reflecting the heat back into space.

[darkoshi]

Did the shipment tracking give that much detail? I don't usually get any location details until an item is in the U.S.

[andrewducker]

Here you go

https://www.sf-international.com/us/en/dynamic_function/waybill/#search/bill-number/SF6045898993089

[darkoshi]

Neat!

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I was quite impressed!

[anef]

Everything comes from China now (sigh!)