The Dot, The Boat, and The Bargain Bin: How a Little Red Dot, a Ship Stuck in a Canal, and a $10 T-Shirt Showed Us the Real Cost of Globalization


It begins with a red dot. Not a metaphor. A literal red sticker.

Walk into any big-box store in the 1990s—Target, Kmart, maybe the glorious temple of consumer joy known as the Mall of America—and you’ll find racks of t-shirts, marked with red dots. Clearance. $10. $7. $3. The shirt didn’t change. The price just fell through the floor.

You, the shopper, think: What a deal.
But to understand how it got that cheap, you have to follow a trail that winds through Bangladesh, Vietnam, Shenzhen, and a port near Singapore, that little red dot on the map, home to one of the most efficient shipping operations on Earth.

Which brings us to containerization—the 20th-century innovation that quietly changed everything. Before it, global shipping was like a game of Tetris played by drunk dockworkers. After it, it became logistics porn. Uniform metal boxes, stacked high, tracked by satellite, unloaded by robot cranes. Suddenly, you could send a thousand shirts across the ocean for pennies.

And someone did. Everyone did.

So manufacturers shifted production offshore. Clothing companies stopped owning factories. Retailers stopped stocking warehouses. Everything was made just-in-time, with just enough, for just cheap enough. The global economy became a humming, fragile miracle of coordination.

Until one Tuesday in March 2021, when a ship called the Ever Given turned sideways in the Suez Canal—and the entire system face-planted.

The ship was massive. A quarter-mile long. Bigger than most skyscrapers. And for six days, it sat there like a middle finger to modernity, blocking 12% of the world’s trade. Goods piled up. Ports clogged. Prices soared.

It was globalization’s "oops" moment—a reminder that all those red dots came with hidden costs:

  • Exploited labor in distant factories

  • Carbon-heavy shipping that wrapped the globe

  • Supply chains so brittle a gust of wind could shatter them

  • Disposability disguised as abundance

And the kicker? We didn’t slow down. We doubled down.

We called it a “supply chain crisis,” but what we meant was:
Why isn’t this shirt $10 anymore?
Why can’t I get my thing from Amazon in 24 hours?
Why is my economy, which pretended to be efficient, now full of empty shelves?

Because globalization wasn’t efficient.
It was just outsourced risk, packaged as convenience, sold at scale.

The red dot on the price tag? That was never a discount.
It was a receipt for everything we’d chosen not to see.

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