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Future-Ready · Economics

A T-Shirt's Trip Around the World

Your shirt crossed the planet before it reached your closet — because countries specialize in what they do best, trade for the rest, and one plain metal box made shipping it almost free.
🧭Follow the Shirt: One Supply Chain
1 🌱 Mississippi, USA cotton farm · GPS pickers 13,000 bales ≈ 9.4M shirts 2 🧵 Indonesia spinning mill: fluff → yarn 6 miles of yarn per shirt 3 ✂️ Bangladesh manufacturer sews the shirt (women's shirts: Colombia) to the port ⚓ 4 🚢 Container ship thousands of boxes aboard up to 82,880 shirts a box 5 🏬 Warehouse → store arrives as a U.S. import ocean trip ≈ 10¢ a shirt 6 👕 You check your shirt's tag! more borders than you!
  1. 1🌱Mississippi, USA — cotton farm; 13,000 bales ≈ 9.4M shirts
  2. 2🧵Indonesia — spinning mill: fluff → 6 miles of yarn per shirt
  3. 3✂️Bangladesh — a manufacturer sews the shirt (women's: Colombia)
  4. 4🚢Container ship — up to 82,880 shirts in one steel box
  5. 5🏬Warehouse → store — arrives as a U.S. import, ≈ 10¢ a shirt
  6. 6👕You — check the tag: more borders than you have!
A supply chain is every step and stop it takes to turn raw material into the thing in your hands. NPR's Planet Money followed this exact shirt in 2013.
6 miles
of cotton yarn twisted into one shirt
82,880
folded t-shirts fit in one container
≈ 10¢
to sail one shirt across the ocean
≈ 80%
of world trade by volume goes by sea
📦The Box That Shrank the World
Cost to load 1 ton of cargo onto a ship ✋ By hand, 1956 $5.83 per ton a ship could sit in port a whole week just being loaded 📦 In containers, on the Ideal-X 16¢ per ton (that skinny bar is drawn to scale!) ≈ 37× cheaper 1913 · born in N.C. Apr 26, 1956 · 58 boxes sail 1969 · sells Sea-Land, $530M
Malcom McLean, a North Carolina truck driver, hated watching crews load ships one crate at a time. On April 26, 1956, a refitted oil tanker called the Ideal-X left Port Newark, New Jersey for Houston, Texas carrying 58 metal boxes — truck trailers with the wheels pulled off.
🤝Why Doesn't One Country Make the Whole Shirt?
🚜 United States huge farms · sunshine · machines grows cotton incredibly cheaply 🪡 Bangladesh millions of workers with sharp sewing skills sews shirts for less 🌾 raw cotton sails out = U.S. EXPORT 👕 finished shirts arrive = U.S. IMPORT both end up better off Each does what it is relatively best at = comparative advantage
Lemonade-stand test: even if you draw signs better than your friend, every minute you spend drawing is a minute you're not squeezing lemons — where you're the superstar. You squeeze, they draw, you sell more lemonade. It's an idea over two hundred years old, and it works for countries too.
🛃In, Out & the Toll Booth
⚓ the border 🏠 YOUR COUNTRY 🌍 THE REST OF THE WORLD 📦 EXPORT: goods you send out sold in another country 💵 made somewhere else 🏭 🛃 TARIFF IMPORT goods you bring in the tariff is paid at the door — so the shelf price nudges up ↗
A tariff is a tax a government charges on imports. It can shield home factories and jobs — but it also makes those goods pricier for everybody who buys them.
⚖️Globalization Gives — and Takes
👍The real wins
Cheap goods. T-shirts got so cheap they're souvenirs and pajamas, and cheap imports stretch a family's money further.
New jobs. Trade brought millions of jobs to poorer countries.
Bangladesh garment minimum wage: about $39 a month → about $68 after the 2013 factory collapse → roughly $105 in 2023.
👎The real costs
Lost jobs at home. Textile mill towns in the Carolinas — McLean's own region — lost thousands of jobs when sewing moved overseas, and some spent decades recovering.
Hard work, low pay. Many garment workers say the wage is still not enough.
Tariffs can protect some jobs, but they raise prices for everyone. People still debate the right balance — and both sides are describing something true.
🔑Key Terms
🌐Globalization The growing connection between countries as goods, money, technology, and ideas move around the whole world.
🤝Trade Swapping goods, services, or money because both sides end up with something they want more.
⛓️Supply chain Every step and stop it takes to turn raw materials into a finished product in your hands.
📥Import A product brought into a country from somewhere else to be sold.
📤Export A product a country sends out to be sold in other countries.
🎯Specialization Focusing on making one thing really well instead of trying to make everything yourself.
⚖️Comparative advantage People and countries do best by focusing on what they're relatively best at and trading for the rest.
🛃Tariff A tax a government charges on imports coming into the country.
🌎Where This Shows Up in Real Life
🏗️ Port of Los Angeles, California
Crane operators and logistics planners choreograph thousands of containers a day. One mis-stacked or delayed box can hold up products for stores across the whole country — so these teams live and breathe supply chains.
👟 Global sneaker brands
A sneaker might be designed in Oregon, made by a manufacturer in Vietnam, and spend weeks on a container ship — so supply chain managers plan release-day "drops" months ahead and watch tariff news that could change the shelf price.
🤔 Think about it: if your town could specialize in making one thing for the whole world, what should it be — and what would you want other places to make for you in return?
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Remember this:
  • Almost everything you own traveled a global supply chain — about 80% of world trade by volume crosses the ocean. Most of that weight is bulk cargo like oil, grain, and iron ore, but containers carry about two-thirds of the value ships move.
  • The container revolution made moving goods so cheap that a t-shirt can cross an entire ocean for about ten cents — which lets factories and customers live on opposite sides of the planet.
  • Countries specialize in what they're relatively best at and trade for the rest: real wins like cheaper goods and new jobs, and real costs like hard disruption for some workers and towns.
✏️ ClickClass Anchor Chart · A T-Shirt's Trip Around the World
From ClickClass — hundreds of free printables at clickclassedu.com/printables