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In the center of the pileup off Long Beach lay the Maersk Emden, a Danish-flagged container ship that stretched 1,200 feet long and 158 feet wide, making it more than five times the size of New York's Grand Central Station. Freshly arrived from the Chinese port of Ningbo, it was carrying roughly twelve thousand containers.

That haul included 474 containers for LG, the South Korean home appliance brand, and 74 boxes full of Nike products. Mattel and Hasbro, two giant toy companies, were collectively waiting for 160 boxes aboard the Emden. And just as the weather was turning cold in North America, 48 containers shipped by Burlington Coat Factory were stranded atop the ship.

Hagan Walker had only one box on board the Maersk Emden, a forty-foot container logged in the shipping manifest as MSMU8771295. But it held the most important order in the brief history of his start-up.

Walker's company, Glo, was based in a small town in Mississippi. It made plastic novelty cubes that lit up when plunked in water. He had recently secured a breakthrough deal—a contract to make bath toys for Sesame Street, including a figurine version of the iconic Elmo. He had planned to debut them during the pivotal holiday season, now only two months away.

Like millions of companies, Walker's operation depended on two key elements: factories in China to make its products, and gigantic container ships to carry them to American shores. For decades, this had proven a cheap and reliable way to do business, the means by which major brands and niche players alike had kept the world's largest economy stocked with everything from oven cleaner to aircraft parts.

But that equation was unraveling.

Walker's year had been dominated by logistical torment. Chinese factories were short of workers and raw materials, yielding alarming delays. The shipping industry was deluged. Trying to book cargo space on a container had become next to impossible. The cost of transporting goods across the Pacific had multiplied tenfold.

In the middle of it all, on March 23, 2021, like a farce engineered by the heavens, a behemoth container ship had gotten lodged inside the Suez Canal in Egypt. Traffic through the canal came to a stop, halting a huge volume of goods moving from Asia to Europe. For months afterward, factories around the globe waited for shipments of parts and raw materials, impeding their production and threatening the livelihoods of their workers.

Walker had managed to navigate this shifting assortment of threats. Yet now, in the fall of 2021, he found himself confronting the most frustrating ordeal yet—the mother of all traffic jams off the coast of Southern California. As the calendar continued its relentless march toward the holiday season,

Walker's Elmo dolls were floating out on the water, castaways during what I had come to call the Great Supply Chain Disruption.

For society as a whole, the stakes were considerably greater than whether a collection of light-up Sesame Street toys made it to their final destinations in time for Christmas. Still, Walker's container was an ideal object to follow—as we will do in the course of this book—because its passage traced the voyage of countless other loads of cargo traversing the Pacific and the American continent. Its odyssey, at once commonplace and astounding, afforded an ideal vantage point on the breadth of the troubles assailing the global supply chain. The journey of that single box revealed how and why trillions of dollars' worth of goods, some critical to saving lives, effectively went missing in the midst of a public health catastrophe.

By the time the Maersk Emden joined the floating queue off Long Beach bearing Walker's shipment, people from Europe to Africa to North and South America had endured a terrifying scarcity of personal protective gear like face masks and medical gowns. This had forced frontline medical workers to attend to patients stricken with COVID-19 absent adequate protection.

Society had experienced the disappearance of toilet paper from store shelves around the globe amid panicked hoarding. Women's sanitary products had become difficult to find, along with medicines like antibiotics and even aspirin. Meat display cases at supermarkets sat empty. For a time, Grape Nuts, the popular breakfast cereal, all but vanished, along with tapioca beads used to make boba tea.