NEWARK, N.J.—From ultra-thin laptops to drones to smartphones, the shelves of big-box retailers overflow with gadgets to help us communicate and conduct business at greater and greater speeds.
What’s largely unchanged is the way many of those goods arrive on those shelves, as they did in the era of the rotary phone and transistor radio.
It’s a supply chain fraught with the potential for disruption, particularly in the sprawling ports that hug Newark Bay just east of the New Jersey Turnpike—an aging complex where weather, labor issues and even computer problems have caused significant delays in recent years. But other factors embedded in the process itself are a concern as the ports prepare to begin accepting larger ships when work to raise New Jersey’s Bayonne Bridge is finished in two years.
