PORTLAND, Maine — The on-again, off-again container cargo shipping service in Maine’s largest port is off again.
New York-based American Feeder Lines says it has shut down because of a lack of volume and the loss of private investment nine months after setting up a container shipping service linking Portland, Boston and Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Chief Operating Officer Rudy Mack told The Portland Press Herald the service wasn’t generating enough cash flow to continue.
Maine businesses including White Rock Distilleries in Lewiston, L.L. Bean in Freeport, Schnitzer Steel Industries in Auburn and a half dozen paper mills used the service to receive and send out shipments by sea.
The company’s container ship is now anchored in Halifax as lawyers and creditors decide the future of the ship and its cargo.
everything is made in china, it’s no wonder why there’s very little shipping traffic to maine.
Read the story again. It’s about shipping things FROM Maine.
“Maine businesses including White Rock Distilleries in Lewiston, L.L. Bean in Freeport, Schnitzer Steel Industries in Auburn and a half dozen paper mills used the service to receive and send out shipments by sea”
As it stated the listed companies used the service to receive and send shipmets by sea.
The influx of cheap Chinese products into the American
economy and the job losses left in the wake is mostly the fault of the
American consumer, plain and simple. We want our products as cheap as possible
without regard to where they are produced. Labor unions are partly to blame, by
driving up labor costs, the business owners who moved jobs overseas to keep
production costs down and profits up are partly to blame, the government for
allowing those goods to enter our economy with little in way of tariffs or
incentives to buy American is partly to blame. This is all in response to the
American consumer wanting everything as cheap as possible. The next time you
fill your cart at Wal-Mart or any other discount retail store, stop and look as
to how many of those items you are purchasing are made here in the United
States and you will have the answer as to why there is very little produced
here at home. Make a conscious effort to buy whatever we can that is produced
here and support what little manufacturing is left in this country and maybe,
just maybe we can reverse the trends of our past.
I have been conveying the same message for years at the top of my lungs and it falls on deaf ears. The parking lot at WalMart is still full. People consider themselves lucky to have a $10 an hour job. And our trade deficit with a communist nation was $350 billion last year alone. In an interesting foot note, in 1985 when famed commie hater Ronald Reagan was in office our trade deficit with communist China was $6 million. I tried to figure the percentage of increase, but my Abacus caught on fire.
Well, that abacus was made in China too.
If we all made the conscious effort to make sure we purchase
at least 50% of our goods domestically produced the tides would change. This is
the greatest nation on the face of this earth, all we have to do is convince
ourselves of this and things would be better. Wal-Mart did have a “Buy American”
campaign years ago when Sam himself was still alive, but the consumer did not
want to play that game. For a nickel savings the average American consumer will
purchase a foreign produced product, sad but true.
Big corporate America figured out a long time ago that the average American consumer has a cheap bone and they do not care about the long term cost to our economy from buying foreign products. Until their job gets sent overseas, then there is some outrage, but not much.
probably not actually.
please go out and try to find ANY television or computer monitor made in america.
go find some fruit juice from concentrate that hasn’t been made in china
try to find any piece of technology that we use in our everyday lives that wasn’t made in china or another country.
good luck.
i would disagree,
the job losses, the influx of cheap goods was made possible by legislation created by our so called “leaders” and the corporations that willingly decided to make a larger profit by outsourcing the labor and technology.
the “consumer” had little to do with it.
think of it this way: you’re working for a company making hand tools.
The owner of the company finds out that he can make the same product, with a little less quality, for 1/10th of the price of making it here, by making it in china.
Cheap labor, no insurance costs, next to no real regulation by china = great corrupt business climate.
so, the owner moves the factory to china, employs 100 people there for the price of 1 american here, and continues to pump out tools made by his “brand name” company, making a ridiculous profit.
With no where left that makes goods in america, the consumer is forced to by these goods made in china.
If you want manufacturing back, then put tariffs and taxes on imported products, de-regulate some of the laws and industries, and elect politicians that will put america first instead of the company that will line their pockets the most.
Maine? Does anybody in the world even know where Maine is? Maine produces ZIP, Squat, Nothing anymore. Maine doesn’t even have money anymore to buy Chinese Garbage. The only thing Maine produces now are POVERTY and JUNKIES.
having a ‘half empty’ kind of day?
there should be some sun this weekend. take care
And yet the terminal is in the middle of a $5 million expansion that is supposed to quadruple the capacity for containers.
That CON in the movies, build it and they will come, trouble is they don’t come and never will come to Maine.
Pitiful state of affairs. Get some industry into this state so that people can make a decent living.
Start a business.
Heck, the only problem is they ran out of Federal money to make it profitable. Once they get that money skimmed off bankruptcy soon follows. Then they move on to start a new Federally funded adventure.
Too bad the ship wasn’t picking up containers in China and bringing them back to Maine. Then business would be booming and they would need more ships.
This is a grand article that shows that we in Maine do not need another big port build up. What we have already is still costing us money and still under-utilized. Any suggestion that we tax-payers ( dare I say the 99%-ers?) should borrow more money for useless big projects that benefit only the very large corporations when funding for schools is repeatedly told to do more with less is outside the pale.
We have to have legislators who see we are not in the 1970’s anymore. What was thought of as a goal then is now ancient history. And should be only brought up in a history class reading about the failures of the last years of the 20th century.
Assistance from BDN, please, on this AP story. Is it only this ship that is transporting cargo from these Maine businesses? More please, otherwise it appears that these businesses have no shipping alternative. Thank you.
The alternative is to continue down the interstate to Boston with the container on trailer where it will be offloaded and reloaded onto a container ship.
Thank you.
Another LePage failure. Probably the containers are corrupt.
what a stupid comment…… whats this have to do with LaPage. Grow up
were the bellybutton of the country….all we have is lint!
Maine is not business friendly. If the containers are not being utilized, then the owners of the cargo/shipping business cannot survive. More products need to be utilizing the port facilities rather than the turnpike; unfortunately, not enough products are manufactured in Maine.
Oh, well.
Most posters are not making the connection between the prolonged slowdown in the the economy and the economics of shipping. This slowdown is not just evident in Maines miniscule economy but is happening worldwide and is not expected to pick up soon. All container ports are seeing the same issue. The flip side of exporting Maine products is that you have to import container loads to really make this run profitable. A shipping company also has to have consistent on time runs to establish long term customers and cannot be on again-off again service. Running ships is a capital intensive business. I just don’t see the economy supporting a small shipping business like this where it needs the capitol to survive market slowdowns.
Meanwhile, the unimaginative sinecurists at the Maine Department of Transportation, still following the lead set by the corrupt Mr. Baldacci, continue to hawk Sears Island as a container cargo port.
Not one bite in the past five years because, as any simpleton ought to be able to figure out, the economics don’t make sense, but that doesn’t daunt such dim bulbs as Sen. Thomas. This Republican (!) solon is a big supporter of Baldacci’s generous offer to bond the people of Maine for a $300 million corporate welfare package to any — any! — port developer interested in laying waste to the largest totally wild island in public hands on the East Coast.
So far, the corporate world has shown more sense than the clueless senator but he’s still at it, this week promoting baby steps legislation to spend a mere $3 million launching rail spurs onto the island.
This would no doubt make the speculators at RailWorld in Chicago very happy. RailWorld has already partaken just this past year of $22 million of the Maine taxpayers’ money so the state might have the privilege of taking over maintenance of that half of the line that once stood for the Aroostook in the now defunct and bankrupted Bangor and Aroostook Railroad. The speculators behind RailWorld, which after a fashion operates what used to be the B&A under the re-branded guise of the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway, would just love to promote the profitability and more likely the sales appeal of the old railroad’s decrepit assets.
How wonderful for them to be able to claim the chumps in Maine are bound to hundreds of millions of dollars of public debt in support of a container port at the terminus of their line at Searsport.
Probably Mr. Private East-West Highway Peter Vigue, Maine’s most prominent corporate welfare queen, would be similarly delighted.