His big insight was that the customer doesn't care how you're shipping the goods. The customer wants to get it from here to there cheap and on time. The customer doesn't care if it goes by air or land or sea.

I think this has been a big deal for Houston. It really helped make the port there a major league port.

By far the biggest expense in this process was shifting the cargo from land transport to ship at the port of departure and moving it back to truck or train at the other end of the ocean voyage.

A lot of the policy discussion seems to assume that once this bill is passed, some of the undocumented aliens will simply leave the country and others will stop coming.

Before the container, transporting goods was expensive. So expensive that it did not pay to ship many things halfway across the country, much less halfway across the world.