Well, Alex, they're asking about $700 to ship an 18-ft container 1,167 miles. That's $0.59 per mile, which is pretty steep.

On the other hand, incense has an extremely high cost-to-weight ratio. An 18-ft container is a huge amount of incense, which is normally sold at retail by the ounce. Amortizing this increase across all the retail packages you'll get from one bulk shipment makes this increase negligible.

If you were selling something big and light, the cost of transportation would be very important for you to monitor. Since you're selling incense, you're free to accept this increase magnanimously - but feel free to pressure them for faster routing, or reduced late fees for your January invoice, in return.

I think you offer to pay them ten times the rate requested if they guarantee to run the trains twice as fast, AND they have to throw in one of those engineer hats and a train whistle.

You also want to know how much it would cost for an all-rail route from Bangalore to your other factory in Sri Lanka.

Whatever reply they make, you reply you are "incensed" that they would say something so outrageous to someone of your stature.