[oetnxkdrlgcexu]

Shipping efficiency generally: Boats > trains > trucks > planes

Aircraft are only used in time-sensitive situations. The standardized cargo container improved shipping efficiency, but in its absence boats are still the best method of transportation.

The fact that they're waiting for the cargo containers means that it's costing them less to wait than other options. I imagine if they were desperate they could hire out some cruise liners and stuff them with coffee. They'd have to be loaded and unloaded by dockworkers though, not sure if any port would support that anymore...

[throwanem]

The only even remotely break-bulk pier I know of here in Baltimore, unless you count stuff that's too big to containerize, is the one at the Domino Sugar plant down at Locust Point. That one might actually be pretty well suited for unloading raw coffee beans with the same bucket lift gear they already use for raw sugar.

Probably have it shipped in the same often ill maintained freighters, too - a few years ago I watched an osprey pull a three-foot length of steel wire out of a crane cable on one of those boats. Impressive that the bird could do it, less so that the line was in such a state that a loose wire was there to be pulled out of it. But you could fill their holds with loose beans, no problem.

Doing break-bulk with sacks of beans in a cruise liner could work, but you'd probably end up paying eighty or a hundred bucks a pound for the coffee - I don't get the sense that either cruise ships or longshoremen work cheap. Better just to lay in a supply now, before the shortage shows up in prices at places like restaurant supply stores, and wait it out.

(That's what I just got done doing, anyway. Not like I won't drink it in any case...)

[rwmurrayVT]

There is a breakbulk in Norfolk, VA at Norfolk Southern's Lambert's Point. There's breakbulk at Portsmouth and Newport News Marine Terminals.