Only by your inane interpretation. If the goods coming from Europe are destined for the people of South Carolina then of course it makes perfect sense to send them hundreds of miles away. And in your world it makes even more sense that if the overwhelming majority of goods are destined for the people at Point A then you first send them hundreds of miles away to Point B. The people in Point A are happy to accept the additional shipping costs, the folks sending the goods in the first place have no problem adding to their customer's expenses, and all is right with the world.
In the end all that really matters is that the economic benefits of warehousing then shipping outweigh the cost in opportunity of the next best option, meaning shipping direct to Charleston.
But if the overwhelming majority of the imports were destined for southern consumers, as you keep claiming, then would it not have made more sense to send them directly to the consumers? It seems a matter of simple economics, ignored by you in your attempt to explain things away. The goods went to the Northen ports because that was where the customers were. The goods did not go to the southern ports because the demand for them wasn't there.
No, non-seq. The silly belief that it is inherently economical to always ship things directly from their point of origin to their final destination is yours and yours alone.
If the goods coming from Europe are destined for the people of South Carolina then of course it makes perfect sense to send them hundreds of miles away.
If some additional net economic benefit may be obtained from doing so such as warehousing, then yes. It does make sense.
And in your world it makes even more sense that if the overwhelming majority of goods are destined for the people at Point A then you first send them hundreds of miles away to Point B.
If Point B offers an additional economic benefit to the shipper and shipment between Point A and Point B costs less than the benefit offered by point B, then yes. It makes perfect sense. After all, is not my goal as a shipper to maximize my profit?
The people in Point A are happy to accept the additional shipping costs
The shipping costs are paid by the shipper himself, non-seq. And yes - if those additional shipping costs are less than the economic benefits he gains from going to point B first (of which warehousing is one), then yes that shipper will be happy to pay extra. It's a simple matter of mathematics. If the additional shipping cost is represented by -X and the economic gain from warehousing is represented by +Y then, ceteris paribus, the shipper will logically warehouse and pay the extra shipping costs so long as Y > X.
But if the overwhelming majority of the imports were destined for southern consumers, as you keep claiming, then would it not have made more sense to send them directly to the consumers?
Not if the economic benefits of warehousing and distribution points outweigh the extra cost of shipping. Though you seem not to think so, this tends to be the case more often than not. It is in fact for the same reason that airlines route their planes through hubs instead of going direct from every city to every other city. Suppose you live in Florida and want to fly to Alaska. By your logic, it would be inherently economical for every airline to offer a direct flight from Orlando to Anchorage, since that is the quickest route in between the two. Yet they do not. Instead you have to get on a plane in Orlando, fly to Chicago or Vancouver or Seattle, and switch to another plane to Anchorage. Is this because nobody wants to go to Anchorage? Hardly. Anchorage has one of the largest cruise ship tourism industries in the country. The clients of that industry do not all come from Orlando, Florida though. As a result it is more economical for the airlines to send out flights from their hubs of people from all over the country who want to go to Anchorage, so instead of flying direct to Anchorage from every single airport in the nation they route all the flights there into two or three hubs such as Seattle.