Transloading

We are the proud owner of a fine furniture-making establishment named Fine Furniture & Stuff, or FFS for short. FFS is located in North Carolina, but we ship our products to all 50 states. Normally, this means we just load the items onto a truck and off they go, but we feel like we’d run into complications if we tried to truck an armoire all the way to Hawaii. That’s why, once the aforementioned armoire is trucked to the west coast, it’s transferred to a ship for the rest of its journey to Hawaii.

Using more than one method of transportation to get goods from their source to their final destination is called “transloading,” and for a lot of businesses, it’s highly necessary. There are two main reasons for this, and the first has to do with physics: we can’t truck something across an ocean, and we can’t boat something across dry land. So if our armoire is headed someplace that requires traversing both, we’re gonna need to do some transloading.

The second reason has to do with economics: sometimes it’s cheaper to transload than it is to not transload. For example, let’s say FFS decides to branch out into the wide and wonderful world of throw pillow manufacturing. If we receive a customer order from, say, Germany, we might do the math and decide that the most cost-efficient way to deliver those pillows is by trucking them to an airport and throwing them on a cargo plane. Then, once the pillows land in Berlin, they’ll be trucked to the customer’s house…or haus, as it were. Transloading FTW.