Only if you can safely show how 95% of all Wal-Mart goods pass through Bentonville. You claim over and again that it's the largest distributorship of all the hundreds of Wal-Mart's distribution centers. How much of Wal-Marts goods pass do through there? 25%? 30%? 5%? 1%? Does that single distribution center support a disproportionate number of Wal-mart stores? Does it support 80% of them? 70% of them? 1% of them?
Bentonville is Wal-Mart's largest distributorship meaning Wal-Mart goods ship through Bentonville than any other place in America.
Don't tell that to the people in Georgia. They think that their's is. Link
Not necessarily.
Yeah, OK. You have ports capable of handling almost all your cotton exports but can't handle any more than 3% or 4% of your imports. All those ships coming to load cotton come empty after having dropped all their southern-bound imports in New York. By your reasoning it would make more sense to send the cotton to New York, Boston, and Philadelphia for export.
Similarly, NYC may be better geographically suited as an import hub than New Orleans, which requires navigation into the Gulf of Mexico instead of being directly accessible from the Atlantic coast.
How? Hub implies a central location. Why not Mobile or Charleston as a hub? They are more centrally located for the area consuming 80% of all imports than New York was. They had rail lines built to get the cotton to the ports, why not use those lines to get the imports to the consumers? And why not New Orleans? By far the largest percentage of cotton exports left from there. It was the gateway to the rest of the south via the Mississippi River. Steaming to the Gulf of Mexico to pick up cotton didn't seem to be a problem, why would steaming to the Gulf of Mexico to drop off all those imports destined for southern consumers be?
Or it could simply be the case that inland railroads and waterways are cheaper means of mass transportation than seabound vessles.
What inland waterways and/or rail lines provided direct and easy connection between New York and Alabama or Mississippi or Louisiana?
It is almost always cheaper today to buy an airline ticket that stops over in a hub city than a direct flight, even if the hub is hundreds of miles out of the way.
Delta Airlines used to have a lock on air travel in the south. Everything flowed through their Atlanta hub. The old joke was that if you died in Alabama you would have to change in Atlanta on your way to heaven. But for your analogy to be applicable, Delta would have built it's first hub in New York. After all, three large air ports already existed. It was centrally located to Europe. Why build or expand an airport in Atlanta when New York was already there?
The same has always been true of shipping - it is normally cheaper to ship indirectly through one common location then distribute outward from it than to go from each individual point on one end to each individual point on the other end.
I'll grant you that. It would be much more efficient to send imports to Mobile or Charleston or New Orleans for distribution than directly to individual towns and villages in Alabama, South Carolina, or Louisiana. But if 80% of your goods are destined for consumers in one area then it makes no sense to send them a thousand miles away first.
1. Transport by sea must always be cheaper than any other method of transport.
In the first half of the 19th century that fact was still true.
2. Direct transport to any given location must always be cheaper than indirect transport to that same location.
Not always true but not really relevant. Still, given prevailing winds and currents, sailing to the southern and central U.S. was often an easier trip than to New York or Boston.
3. Locations with no access to a seaport must be assumed not to consume imports for reason of that seaport's absence.
I haven't a clue how you managed to stumble onto that conclusion.
Not really. I need only show that the overwhelming majority of Wal-Mart goods are trafficked through a distribution center network rather than being shipped directly from point of origin to point of sale. That fact is pretty much undisputed considering how their business model operates, thus my burden of proof is met.
That said, I am willing to indulge your requests for the point of argument and for the reason that you will not admit your mistaken "rule" by any other means. First, I will make a simple correction in your statistic. If we are to play by your rules and if the comparison is to be New York City, I need not prove that Bentonville takes in 95% but rather somewhere in the 60 to 70% range - a rough estimate of NYC's dealings in imports for a mid 19th century year.
That discrepency aside, I can indeed prove that at a time from its 1969 IPO to roughly a decade later, Bentonville was the company's SOLE general distribution center and therefore handled 100% of Wal-Mart's distribution to about a dozen regional subcenters in 11 states and from them a total of 276 stores in 1979. I can also prove that by no reasonable measure does the Wal-Mart of today use a direct shipping approach to its distribution. That occurs from a small numer of sectional distribution sites, of which Bentonville is the main one, to 103 regional distribution centers around the country to approximately 3,000 stores.
You claim over and again that it's the largest distributorship of all the hundreds of Wal-Mart's distribution centers.
There are only 103 regional distribution centers in the U.S. so there cannot be "hundreds of Wal-Mart distribution centers" as you claim. The number of general distribution centers is significantly smaller and allocates by section of the country (i.e. there is one for the mid-atlantic states somewhere in Virginia and so forth) though I cannot find a precise stat on how many of those there are.
Yeah, OK. You have ports capable of handling almost all your cotton exports but can't handle any more than 3% or 4% of your imports.
Who ever said they can't handle them? I'm sure if it was economically more efficient to ship direct to those cities rather than distribute over land, they could have handled a large capacity and certainly would have accomodated that demanded in the long run.
All those ships coming to load cotton come empty after having dropped all their southern-bound imports in New York.
Not necessarily. First, it is no certainty that an English ship in NYC will next go down to Charleston to pick up cotton. They may instead pick up exports that have already made it to NYC and go back to England, or, conversely, pick up other foreign imports stored for reexportation in NYC warehouses and head to South America. Second, for the same reason it is no certainty that a ship that arrives in Charleston, SC will have come from a NYC. It could just as easily have been engaged in the carribean trade or be a domestic shipper working its way down the coast. Your model is simplistic, naive, and wholly mistaken in its key assumptions, non-seq. That is why it fails you so frequently.
By your reasoning it would make more sense to send the cotton to New York, Boston, and Philadelphia for export.
How so?
How?
The east coast is geographically closer to Europe than is New Orleans. That's how.
Hub implies a central location.
Really? Then why are so many airport hubs are located not in the geographic center of America (i.e. Kansas) but rather along its east and west coasts (i.e. NYC, Boston, Los Angeles)? The answer is simple. A hub need not be centrally located. It need only be located at a geographically advantageous point, of which the eastern coast is perfect for flights to Europe, the west coast for flights to Hawaii, Texas for flights to Mexico and so forth.
Why not Mobile or Charleston as a hub?
Mobile is on the gulf coast like New Orleans. Charleston was every bit as much of an export hub in the cotton trade with Europe as NYC was an import hub in the manufactures trade with Europe.
They are more centrally located for the area consuming 80% of all imports than New York was.
Suppose you are a ship captain coming from France and want to take the shortest route possible to arrive in the United States. You have two ports to choose from: New Orleans and New York. Based on geography alone and no other consideration, which would you choose? Would you sail south around the tip of Florida, northwest to the mouth of the Mississippi, and up the river to NO? Or would you sail to NYC on a relatively direct route?
They had rail lines built to get the cotton to the ports, why not use those lines to get the imports to the consumers?
And why not use those same lines to get imports from NYC to consumers? After all, isn't a train travelling at 50 mph moving faster than a ship at 12, 15, or 20, or even the unrealistic 40 knots?
What inland waterways and/or rail lines provided direct and easy connection between New York and Alabama or Mississippi or Louisiana?
In 1860, well...practically any railroad line that connected NYC with the Ohio or Mississippi rivers, of which there were dozens, made it to an inland waterway that could reach both LA and MS.
If you wanted to go the whole way by rail there were a couple of different options. First, you could take any of the east coast lines to the famous Baltimore and Ohio railroad, which moved south from Maryland through Harpers Ferry up to Wheeling, VA and into Ohio. From Ohio a connection could be made to the Louisville and Nashville RR or Memphis and Ohio RR at the Kentucky border. From either of the two TN cities you could reach the deep south by any number of routes. The Memphis and Ohio line became the Mississippi and Tennessee RR from Memphis to Jackson, where it then became the New Orleans-Jackson and Great Northern RR, which went to the Mississippi delta south of NO. Or you could go from Nashville to Chattanooga, catch the Western and Atlantic RR there through west Georgia to Atlanta. There it switched to the Atlanta and West Point RR, which ran southwest across the AL border, where it became the Montgomery and West Point RR to Montgomery. From Montgomery it was the Alabama and Florida RR, which extended to Pensacola and Mobile.
Alternatively, one could take any of the east-west lines across PA, OH, IN, and IL to the Kentucky border, then south to either Memphis or Nashville where to catch the same lines into MS, AL, and LA.
The third choice was an appalachian route, first taking the coastal RR's south to Richmond, then onto the Virginia and Tennessee RR through Knoxville to Chattanooga, and then follow the same routes further south.
A fourth choice was the east coast. Take the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac RR from Washington to where it became the Petersburg RR south of Richmond and then became the Wilmington and Weldon RR at the NC border. It turned west there as the Wilmington and Manchester RR through SC, forking at Florence South Carolina. From there you could either go south through Charleston into GA and AL or west through Manchester into GA and AL.
Delta Airlines used to have a lock on air travel in the south. Everything flowed through their Atlanta hub. The old joke was that if you died in Alabama you would have to change in Atlanta on your way to heaven. But for your analogy to be applicable, Delta would have built it's first hub in New York.
Not necessarily. The issue at hand is that they use a hub, not if that hub is NYC. Heck, they could put a hub at an abandoned military base in the middle of Nevada if they wanted to and the analogy would stand so long as all the flights from east to west or west to east had to stop in Nevada.
After all, three large air ports already existed. It was centrally located to Europe. Why build or expand an airport in Atlanta when New York was already there?
First, Atlanta's airport was already there when Delta moved in. It was first built in 1925 and previously known as Candler Field. The military took it over during WWII and doubled the size with military hangers. In the late 1940's the hangers were converted into terminals and by 1948 it was the nation's largest airport in daily traffic. It's been continuously expanded ever since into the aviation complex that it is today.
Second, the NYC airports are indeed hubs for different airlines, each of whom took advantage of a preexisting location when the hub system emerged. Continental has a hub at Newark, which they basically moved in and renovated from being one of the dumpiest airports in the nation. United and Jet Blue both established hubs at JFK, which was built back in the 40's.
I'll grant you that. It would be much more efficient to send imports to Mobile or Charleston or New Orleans for distribution than directly to individual towns and villages in Alabama, South Carolina, or Louisiana.
Perhaps, or by contrast they could be shipped inland to non-coastal cities like Memphis and Nashville and Jackson and Atlanta for distribution to towns and farms.
But if 80% of your goods are destined for consumers in one area then it makes no sense to send them a thousand miles away first.
If rail is more efficient than sea at shipping, sure it does. There is more than one way to get something to Memphis from Northern Europe. I could sail across the atlantic, down the coast, around florida, into the gulf, and up the mississippi. Or, by contrast, I could sail across the Atlantic to New York, put it on a train and take one of many far more direct railroads to Memphis from there. One would probably take about a month longer than the other. I'll let you guess which one that is.
In the first half of the 19th century that fact was still true.
Prove it.
Not always true but not really relevant. Still, given prevailing winds and currents, sailing to the southern and central U.S. was often an easier trip than to New York or Boston.
Not true. The major east coast ports are close enough to each other to render these differences of little substance. The main central US port on the east coast, Philadelphia, is but a few hundred miles south of NYC. Washington and Baltimore are only a few hundred miles south of that. Richmond is a hundred miles south of Washington. Wilmington is a few hundred miles south of Richmond and so forth. The real substantial difference in sailing occurs between a Europe-to-east coast route versus a Europe-to-gulf of mexico route. The latter of those two will almost always take longer for the simple reason that one must navigate from the east coast south around Florida then backtrack north again to get to any of the ports.
It is also true that since the early 19th century the transatlantic voyage from Britain to NYC has consistently been the dominant route to North America from Europe. Steam minimized sail dependency and further solidified this route. Boston is also irrelevant to the picture along side NYC's trade volume.
I haven't a clue how you managed to stumble onto that conclusion.
Your entire premise is that New York's status as the largest consumer is demonstrated by the fact that it was the largest collector of tariffs. If that is true, it is impossible for any non-port city to achieve a consumer status of any substantial ammount since tariffs collected at inland cities are, by necessity, zero.