This is the question that ties into mine — if the economic incentives have changed (i.e. there is no penalty for renters of containers to not get containers back to their primary shipper) then this is a perfectly reasonable response to the change from Covid to today — i.e. the new game is moving the ship as fast as possible with no downtime. If the demurrage is still incurred, then there’s some other alternatives that do not appear to be completely without nefarious intent.

I can’t help but think these decisions are being made on some assumptions from data produced by buggy software algorithms…

Hopefully we’re doing better than that!

If a single extra trip is lucrative enough and at current rates it’s 5-10 regular prices that would make sense to forgo loading in the us and just hurry home

For awhile that’s beneficial to the shipper until all containers are empty in LA and none exist in China to fill.

pretty sure chinese companies will be happy to produce new containers for a small fee

I suppose at some point it becomes cheaper to melt down the containers and ship them back as raw steel to be rebuilt in China.

It might be other forces driving their decision. Maybe the ships are booked and are already late to pickup next load with penalty clauses for delay, or the port has other costs that mean it wants to speed up getting the next ship unloaded.

And what is the delay time if the ships decide to wait to load containers for the return?