What you're describing is the same as in any market—wholesale costs less per unit than retail because there are enormous gains in efficiency for the seller when they don't have to deal with smaller units.

In the case of shipping, I'm not an expert but I do know a few of them:

* The amount of time per mile a human needs to spend handling that shipping container is lower, because there are only a few very long legs rather than many transfers.

* The amount of time per pound of goods a human has to spend handling the shipping container is much lower, because the container is moved all at once, where your cubic-foot package has to be handled individually.

* The fuel cost per pound of goods per mile is lower with the shipping container because it is usually transported by boat and train, which are far more efficient than the trucks used in last-mile delivery.

What I'm getting at is that baseline costs for a cubic foot are about $1.50. A startup could sell cubic foot containers for $5 - shipped when able to fill a crate, and have a massive margin, for those willing to trade time for a 95% cost reduction. That no such service exists is so weird and dysfunctional.

This also applies to endless other real world things and services. Prices for so many things are completely out of touch with reasonably approachable costs, yet there's no Elon in shipping or these zillion other broken industries that, if fixed, could really reshape and perhaps even revitalize the American economy.

If you want to move less atoms than the standard(a standardized shipping containers worth), you are going to pay a premium for either the wasted space or for some other agent to figure out how to pack your shit with 100 other small customers and then also unpack that shit at the end and send it to the correct recipients.

This is quite literally, one of the benefits people are referencing when doing commerce in large quantities when they mention “economy of scale”.

In computer science terms the shipping containers are like bits. They either exist or they don’t. If you want something with more precision like an integer or a float, you can make it happen, but it’s more costly in terms of resources