…would appear to be the A14, which runs from the intersection of the M1 and M6 through the lower East Midlands, past Cambridge, Newmarket, Bury St.Edmunds and Ipswich to its end point at Felixstowe Docks.
I came back from Suffolk along the A11 on Monday, which combines with the A14 for a few miles near Newmarket and I was amazed at the number of lorries carrying shipping containers going the opposite way — one about every fifteen seconds.
This traffic says a huge amount about the British economy as all these (presumably mostly empty) containers were heading back to the container port at Felixstowe, which handles 35% of the UK’s container traffic. Nowadays, almost all consumer goods seem to be imported, mainly from China — and essentially the A14 is a conduit for all these goods to be shipped into the country from the far east. (A fascinating fact quoted by Wikipedia and also very apposite to the state of the country today is that much of the land that’s occupied by Felixstowe Docks belongs to Trinity College, Cambridge — so we have another instance of the old money of the elite profiting from the removal of livelihood of those further down in the social pecking order.)
I’ve always thought Argos epitomised the flooding of British households with dirt cheap, almost instantly disposable consumerist tat imported directly from China. Because they don’t need to use nice packaging your product is usually handed over in some grubby beige box with Chinese lettering and some barely understandable instructions in some strange variant of English. However, I didn’t realise quite how efficiently their operation works.
In 2007 Argos opened a warehouse (or what it calls a Direct Import centre) in Kettering (by the A14) which basically receives the containers from the docks at Felixstowe (or perhaps Immingham or Southampton) and pulls out the many smaller boxes from within and then loads them on to lorries to their regional distribution depots — which tend to be dotted around the motorways and trunk roads — predominantly in the Midlands as that’s where all the imports are channelled towards — flowing inwards to the depots and then radiating back out again to the stores. They handled 12,000 containers in 2007 — which is about 33 a day assuming 7 day a week operation. There’s a few big ones on the M1 (near Leicester and Milton Keynes) and there’s a huge one at Burton on Trent.
Argos has quite a useful website where you can check whether items are in stock at your local store and, if they aren’t, then search for stock at nearby branches. However, this facility isn’t quite as useful as it might seem because their stock control seems to be so centralised and ‘just-in-time’ that once an item disappears from one store then it’s often unavailable anywhere because the reason it’s not in stock at the first store is because there’s none left at the huge warehouses that serve more or less the whole country. If there’s been an unexpected rush on any stock then the replenishments are likely to be in a container going through the Indian ocean or, just as likely, it’s gone forever as the factory in China will now be making something else.
This is unlike the things we still produce in this country — food perhaps — where the supply lines are short enough to mean the producers can respond to demand.
The new Argos catalogue came out this week — a massive doorstep of a thing. It covers the period up until Christmas so shows the lead time involved. The catalogue will need to have been sent to the printers a couple of months ago so all the merchandising and pricing decisions will need to have been made several months ago…and the buying before that. The stuff will need to have been designed before that. It’s quite likely there’s at least a year’s lead time on a lot of the products before the catalogue goes on sale.
Of course there’s then a massive risk that these products — once manufactured won’t sell in the quantities that are required. That’s why global capital tends to associate a lot of the riskier stuff, like faddy toys, with huge marketing events — like films aimed at children.
Argos, because of their catalogue, are only an extreme example of this process of feeding global capital — big companies like Tesco and, perhaps, even those nice people at John Lewis are all rolling their containers along the A14, disguised anonymously with names like Hapag or China Shipping — but they’re still full of junk that they’ve decided we’re going to buy and their marketing departments will succeed in brainwashing us to comply.
