Is the Freight Fright Over?

At the peak of the pandemic freight shipping woes, we paid over $33,000 for a 40′ container from Shenzhen to St. Louis.

Prior to the pandemic, a container that size was around $5000 door-to-door. 5292 units of Wingspan fit into container of that size, so the freight shipping cost of 1 copy of Wingspan pre-pandemic was around $1. The jump to $6 per unit made for some tight margins in late 2021 and early 2022. To make matters worse, shipments were taking 2+ months to arrive instead of 5-6 weeks pre-pandemic.

We now find ourselves in May 2023. I checked in with Justin Bergeron at ARC Global Logistics (justin.bergeron@arcglobal.us) to see how things are looking now in terms of freight shipping costs and times. While this could change, as of now I have good news.

Cost: A 40′ container shipped from a major port in China to the middle of the US or Canada currently costs around $4200. It’s cheaper to go to the east coast ($2900) or to the west coast ($1900). The cost to get to Europe is around $1700. I didn’t get an estimate for Australia, but based on these prices, I’d estimate around $1500.

Time: The first-wave shipments of Expeditions are departing from China this week, and the estimated arrival time at port are in late June. We’ll then need around 2 weeks to get them from port to St. Louis. That’s around 6 weeks total, which is pretty much back to normal.

Justin’s predictions for the rest of the year–pending geopolitical crisis or major manipulation by carriers–is that freight pricing and schedules will follow traditional annual patterns. That is, rates will go up a bit and shipments will take longer in September as goods are shipped worldwide for the holiday season.

Big thanks to Justin for providing this update!

If you want to delve deeper into the supply chain–especially for tabletop games–I highly recommend this recent breakdown of publishers, retailers, and distributors from W. Eric Martin at BoardGameGeek. It’s an excellent, illuminating read; I’ll highlight two key paragraphs below:

“Distributors don’t have an incentive to push any particular product, which is a letdown for publishers since they would very much appreciate distributors pushing their products to retailers. Since that’s not happening, publishers are promoting direct sales to retail stores — not specifically to cut out the middleman, but to ensure that a store that wants a particular item will have access to it. (I’ve seen plenty of stores complain that game X is unavailable from distributor Y and Z, with the publisher responding that game X is in stock at their warehouse, so…drop us a line.)

Thus, even when retailers do order directly from publishers, they don’t tend to order everything from publishers — only high-volume games that turn consistently thanks to what’s hot in their local market, promotion at game days, etc. They order the rest from distributors, and they still don’t buy everything on the market…so if you’re a publisher, you start looking for the even more direct route of selling directly to individuals. Hence Kickstarter [or the publisher’s webstore].”

I’d love to hear your thoughts or questions on freight shipping and the supply chain!

Also read:

• Board Game Supply Chain Basics
• The Current State of Worldwide Fulfillment (2022)
• Then and Now: How Expensive Is Freight and Parcel Shipping?
• The Current State of Freight Shipping (2021)

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