Shipping Containers As Versatile Retail Shops

As online retailers continue to chip away at the market share of brick-and-mortar shops, smaller, mobile, shipping containers are providing consumers with an innovative means to examine, touch, feel and buy the goods they most desire at festivals, concerts and sporting events.  The business of customizing old shipping containers into versatile and mobile retail shops has boomed.  Seasonal and event retailers can take their products when and where they’re in demand, without being anchored to a single location with year-round rent. The containers also provide an economical means of testing out markets before committing to a location, and have proven a valuable solution for disaster recovery areas.  Retailers, consumers and even municipalities like them because they are cool, innovative, affordable, mobile, flexible and durable.  In San Francisco, a shipping container village named The Yard at Mission Rock recently opened in the parking lot of ballpark for the San Francisco Giants. It uses 15 decommissioned containers from the nearby port, and is the first phase of a larger brick-and-mortar development in the area.