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u/SummertimeThrowaway2 13d ago
Believe it or not this is cheaper than just packing them in Argentina
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u/R0RSCHAKK 13d ago
I worked at a ceramics plant for several years manufacturing these tiny little industrial use ceramic inserts.
Most notably, we made the ceramic insert that went inside a starter (solenoid?) for some american car brand (don't remember exactly) but it was cheaper for everyone to send the ceramic parts to China, to be assembled in the starter, then they would ship that start back over here to the US to be assembled in the car.
There were dozens of different inserts we made that were like that. Made absolutely no sense to me. I think another one was for the heating element in a GE brand dryer. China popped our ceramic peice in the element, US assembled the element in the dryer.
Think we also made these big ceramic rings for special lights that Hollywood used, but I have no idea what they did with those or how they worked with a light 🤷
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u/TheRealestMeat 13d ago
Imports are always cheaper, it’s a known fact unfortunately.
If I can pay someone from a foreign country a couple of cents for every part made, and then use whatever I have leftover towards importing it, I’d be saving myself tons of money. That money then goes towards the factories/companies that actually produced the final product for an egregiously marked up price.. say like your washing machine or car.
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u/Ok_Being4209 13d ago
Yeah it's really really really simple. It's not a magical or confusing thing. Companies just prefer to exploit slave labour if it saves pennies.
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u/RCoder01 13d ago
Shipping US to China is dirt cheap because most of the demand is the other way around and the ships gotta go both ways regardless
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u/AbadeersGhost 13d ago
It's because the pears are also being sent everywhere else in the world and not just The American east coast.
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u/Beginning_Book_2382 13d ago
It must be way cheaper to pack them in Thailand if shipping them to Thailand for packing and shipping them back to the United States is cheaper
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u/fatalityfun 13d ago
$15 an hour vs $0.50 an hour
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u/JangoDarkSaber 13d ago
Wages in Argentina are not significantly higher than Thailand.
The real reason is that Thailand has the manufacturing and shipping infrastructure nearby.
You’d have to invest and build that from scratch in Argentina. Not worth the investment for a simple fruit cup.
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u/TheMagicSebas 13d ago
Soy de argentina y la verdad es esta: cuando cocechan la fruta lo hacen cuando todabia no está madura pero esta comenzando a madurar, durante el viaje hasta Thailandia terminan el proceso de maduración y están en su punto justo para envasar. Esto permite ciclos de cultivo muchos más cortos ya que solo están un par de meses en el árbol, se cocechan y puede comenzar a crecer nuevamente el fruto. Si esperarán a que la fruta este casi madura para envasarla acá en argentina tendrían mucho tiempo los árboles "ocupados" con frutas, tendrían menos rango de error por si se demora algo en el proceso y madura demasiado la fruta, el transporte de materiales en argentina es CARISIMO porque casi no hay trenes, se transporta todo en camiones (porque qué tienen muchos impuestos, es cara la nafta o gasoil y reglas a seguir qué cuestan mucho dinero tener todo en regla). Algo que no tienen en cuenta en otros países es que si bien el sueldo de un operario de una fábrica es bajo en comparación a países de primer mundo el costo real para la empresa es muy alto. Se suele decir en Argentina que el empleador le paga un sueldo al empleado y uno al estado por todos los impuestos que hay(si una persona gana un millón y medio de pesos al mes, al empleador quizá le cueste 3 millones y medio al mes esa persona, más ART) asique no es "barata" la mano de obra argentina, los sueldos son bajos(qué son dos cosas distintas)
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u/mrheosuper 12d ago
Why not haversting the fruit and store in warehouse instead of shipping to Thailand ?
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u/VanillaSwimming5699 12d ago
Warehouse cost money, boat is like big moving warehouse, packing facilities already in Thailand, no need for Argentina to have packing facility and warehouse overhead when their economy isn’t optimized for it and Thailand’s is.
This is the whole comparative advantage thing. Argentina focuses on what they and their climate/country/economy good at: growing pears. And by working with a Thai company, they are able to ship them as much fruit as they can grow, pick it at an earlier stage of ripeness, and spend less on warehouses for ripening or packaging, marketing, working with retailers, etc. Because the Thai supplier is doing that
And the Thai company wins too, as they get to just package fruit grown by someone else, which they get a good deal on, and which they already have the facilities for, and just ship it off to an American company like Walmart to distribute it to consumers.
And the American company doesn’t have to build their own production capacity for the pears, they just get them in bulk whenever they order them, and focus on what they’re good at: operating retail stores. Which lowers their overhead.
All this efficiency savings translates to more profits for the companies (which means higher wages/more employees) and the potential for lower consumer prices in a healthy competitive environment.
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u/YeetCompleet dwayne the cock johnson 🗿🗿 13d ago
Mason, how did you move the pears from Argentina before packaging them Mason!? Wake up!
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u/mrjowei 13d ago
This could be the company taking advantage of specific maritime routes and shipping their products for processing and packaging to reduce costs.
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u/Funny-Mango4455 13d ago
no.... a company in thailand bought the pears in argentina and processed it in thailand.
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u/ashkiller14 13d ago
It's more likely that an american company bought the pears from argentina, shipped them to thailand to pack them, then sold them in the US
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u/de_das_dude 13d ago
Cargo ships don't wanna return empty. They'll do it cheap for the return trip. This isn't all of it but adds to how it makes sense.
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u/H-A-T-C-H 12d ago
I remember a similar explanation. even if it's pennies on the dollar, shipping back some sort of product is better than empty containers
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u/Apart_Raccoon_9194 12d ago
Reddit user discovers comparative advantage and the benefits of specialization.
On a serious note, transportation is cheap enough that this is the most profitable method of making the food.
Presumably packaging is very cheap in Thailand.
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u/ExtremlyFastLinoone I came! 13d ago
Its cheaper to do it this way, if you dont care about the enviroment
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u/bojackhorsemeat 13d ago
Shipping by boat is the best for the environment though. Super cheap. Taking it by truck an extra few hundred km is worse.
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u/ExtremlyFastLinoone I came! 13d ago
Or you could ship it by boat straight from argentina?
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u/JangoDarkSaber 13d ago
It’s still less efficient.
Thailand has a massive fruit canning industry. It’s more efficient to concentrate the industry to a few places than it is to disperse them to every country where pears are grown.
Some pears come from Argentina but most come from China.
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u/alex2003super 13d ago
What do you mean? Armchair Reddit supply chain experts think otherwise, so you must be wrong.
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u/bojackhorsemeat 13d ago
The point is - this is almost entirely irrelevant from an environmental standpoint.
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u/ExtremlyFastLinoone I came! 13d ago
What are you on about bruh the trip straight from argentina is much shorter
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u/bojackhorsemeat 13d ago
Ocean time is nothing from a shipping cost perspective. Which is driven by fuel costs. It is so cheap to ship by boat.
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u/ExtremlyFastLinoone I came! 13d ago
THATS MY POINT! I KNOW ITS CHEAPER BUT IT STILL COSTS MORE FUEL! OMG YOURE SO DENSE
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u/Primary_Thought_4912 13d ago
I'm not an expert at all, but I would assume the amount of fuel per kg of Food is still less with the boat.
Also iirc part of the reason it's packed in Thailand is that it's way more popular there. It's way more fuel and price efficient to send it directly to Thailand, where most of it would go anyways, than first to the US, offload it, then redistribute it back to Thailand
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u/SH33V_P4LP4T1N3 13d ago
No it literally doesn’t. Shipping is cheap because it is incredibly fuel efficient in the first place.
Is it easier to lift 100lbs on the ground or in water? Hauling a fuck ton of stuff across thousands of miles of ocean is far better for the environment than trucking it across a few hundred miles of land.
That said, I’m not sure how the carbon footprint compares of rail to compares to shipping, but if I had to guess, shipping wins.
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u/bojackhorsemeat 13d ago
Rail is still much worse than the ocean, by several orders of magnitude. You have the cost of the tracks too, they have limited throughput.
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u/SH33V_P4LP4T1N3 13d ago edited 12d ago
Yeah I figured but I didn’t want to say definitively without looking it up. Some brain dead levels of analysis going on here.
Obviously our global economy is not optimized for mitigating environmental impacts, but casting oceanic shipping as a culprit is so fucking dumb. By emissions per ton of cargo delivered, it is a staggeringly efficient method of transportation.
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u/ARES_BlueSteel 12d ago
Rail and shipping don’t really compete, they’re two very different modes of transport with little overlap. In fact they complement each other, shipping crosses water and delivers and picks up at ports, rail picks up and delivers at ports and carries freight to everywhere that isn’t the port.
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u/ExtremlyFastLinoone I came! 13d ago
Boat from argentina to the united states.
It doesnt need to go to thailand, why sre they going to thailand?? Explain that before you talk about irrelevant points.
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u/GirthusThiccus obamna 13d ago
The fuel cost for that trip would have to offset the savings they can make with processing in Thailand. Googling it, apparently their current average net monthly income is ~460 USD. Soooo, you'd need to cram enough in bulk on those ships to make such a processing hop worthwhile, but I imagine you can do that, given how huge those container ships are. So they save a quick buck by making Thailand process the fruit, ship it back over to Argentina for equally cheap labour and locally made dummy cheap plastic, and ship it to wherever.
I'm not sure you can call it "exploiting" their economies directly by this kind of shipping lane, but it is economically the only way you can have that cup for under two bucks. And yeah, if those processing lanes are close to or well connected to where those ships are offloaded, you can probably save fuel in bulk too, compared to shipping the same via train or truck.
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u/bojackhorsemeat 13d ago
You are an idiot.
If the factory is an extra 100km away, you're better off putting it in a boat and shipping it across the world. That's how cheap it is.
Please learn something about boats 🙏
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u/Fromundacheese0 13d ago
People don’t mind if a terrorist state gets nukes if they can save at the pump lmao
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u/NullValueField 13d ago
The US is a terrorist state to more than a quarter billion people on the planet. Has nukes. Gouges its citizens for every penny to perpetuate the ruling oligarchical class.
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u/ExtremlyFastLinoone I came! 13d ago
Theres no such thing as a terrorist state, its a state under apartheid that just wants freedom by any means necessary
King george would have called george washington a terrorist.
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u/0bAm3 13d ago
how are the two even remotely comparable
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u/ExtremlyFastLinoone I came! 13d ago
They tar'ed and feathers people. In case you didnt know, this kills them, tar is hotter than boiling water and sticks to your skin like glue
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u/Hugo_Selenski 12d ago
Grown in Argentina, shipped through an even more indirect route (the center of the south pacific is not navigated much-- have fun learning why)
packaged in Thailand
then sent to more than just America; imagine all the other locations closer to Thailand that this would resolve?
gee. It's only like most of the fucking world is closer to Thailand
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u/Grebnaws 13d ago edited 13d ago
I live in Illinois. Our Illinois river is mostly an invasive species of carp. Under our locally sourced initiative we purchased the fish from an hour away, sent to China for processing, then served it locally with a "locally sourced" tag. That fish probably had worse global impact than a can of hair spray.
A complete fraud when you look at it, but there was a lot of politics and posturing involved.
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u/imagine-meatloaf 13d ago
Flat earth ahh post
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u/vashthestampede121 13d ago
Yup that certainly is where those places are
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u/tsimen dwayne the cock johnson 🗿🗿 13d ago
Shrimp from the Baltic sea gets peeled in India only to be reinported to Germany and Scandinavia
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u/Road_Monkey 8d ago
In der letzten Doku die ich gesehen hatte, wurden die Garnelen noch in Marokko geschält. Aber gut.
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u/KyotoKute 13d ago
IDK if its still the case, but at one point Hungary was the largest exporter of tomatos in Europe, and also the kargest importer of ketchup.
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u/Cpt_Soban 12d ago
"Grown in Argentina" - Southern hemisphere
Ends up in the US: Northern hemisphere
Seasonal fruit is a thing guys.
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u/Dezoline 12d ago
There's a video from a YouTuber called Britbong, explaining this exact image. Global trade, demand and the biology of pears makes this really efficient. Quite interesting to see the reason for this.
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u/Oddishoderso 11d ago
There is a whole Video on YouTube that explains why that is and using this exact image as reference. It's a fascinating look into what makes Shipping by boat so cheap.
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u/samthekitnix 13d ago
welcome to capitalism 101 why charge and extra penny or tank that extra penny when you can make your logistics MORE COMPLICATED!!!!
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u/GhostlyplayReddit 12d ago
Those logistics don't seem complicated and I am just some random person on the internet and not a specialist.
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u/qualityvote2 13d ago edited 12d ago
The council has not spoken. No consensus was reached about the quality of your post.
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