Occupy Oakland damages itself more than ports

[LooseWilly]

97. You fail to acknowledge the "mass" in mass production/sales...

Walmart will stand to make a few thousand dollars less profit per store affected out of a $15 billion dollar a year profit. The port of Oakland alone serves many ships a day, and each ship is liable to be loaded with HUNDREDS, if not THOUSANDS, of shipping containers worth of goods... and then there's Long Beach, Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, San Diego, and Houston...

Do the math.

Have you ever watched a truckload of pallets of retail shit being unloaded at o'dark:30 am? Have you ever stared up at the staggering piles of shipping containers on a single freighter in a port like Oakland? Have you ever noticed how many trucks ply the the interstates (like I5 here in Cali) in the wee hours of the morning, or any other time of day? Have you ever taken a moment to ponder how many containers get shipped by train from major shipping hubs like Stockton CA?

If you've ever seen what one truckload of crap unloaded into a retail store translates to at a cash register... and you then multiply that by all those truck and train loads represented by those containers on a single freighter... then multiply that by all the ports that were shut down... "a few thousand dollars" is possibly representative of one or two of those containers. And that's just the cost of the one day delay for the one or two containers.

The pretense that the magnitude of the stoppage is more significant for the truckers than it is for the retailers is like saying that the pay to the truckers is higher than the profit that the retailers will make selling the cargo— which is laughably ridiculous, because if that were even close to accurate then the retailers would never pay for the shipment of the cargoes in the first place.

Your proportions are inverted. At best.