Durable good in the context of Recession of 1937–1938

A container is any receptacle or enclosure for holding a product used in storage, packaging, and transportation, including shipping.Things kept inside of a container are protected on several sides by being inside of its structure. The term is most frequently applied to devices made from materials that are durable and are often partly or completely rigid.

A container can also be considered as a basic tool, consisting of any device creating a partially or fully enclosed space that can be used to contain, store, and transport objects or materials.

An intermodal container, often called a shipping container, or a freight container, (or simply "container") is a large metal crate designed and built for intermodal freight transport, meaning these containers can be used across different modes of transport – such as from ships to trains to trucks – without unloading and reloading their cargo. Intermodal containers are primarily used to store and transport materials and products efficiently and securely in the global containerized intermodal freight transport system, but smaller numbers are in regional use as well. It is like a boxcar that does not have wheels. Based on size alone, up to 95% of intermodal containers comply with ISO standards, and can officially be called ISO containers. These containers are known by many names: cargo container, sea container, ocean container, container van or sea van, sea can or C can, or MILVAN, or SEAVAN. The term CONEX (Box) is a technically incorrect carry-over usage of the name of an important predecessor of the ISO containers: the much smaller steel CONEX boxes used by the U.S. Army.

Intermodal containers exist in many types and standardized sizes, but 90 percent of the global container fleet are "dry freight" or "general purpose" containers: durable closed rectangular boxes, made of rust-retardant weathering steel; almost all 8 feet (2.4 m) wide, and of either 20 or 40 feet (6.1 or 12.2 m) standard length, as defined by International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard 668:2020. The worldwide standard heights are 8 feet 6 inches (2.6 m) and 9 feet 6 inches (2.9 m) – the latter are known as High Cube or Hi-Cube (HC or HQ) containers. Depending on the source, these containers may be termed TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units), reflecting the 20- or 40-foot dimensions.

Durability is the ability of a physical product to remain functional, without requiring excessive maintenance or repair, when faced with the challenges of normal operation over its design lifetime. There are several measures of durability in use, including years of life, hours of use, and number of operational cycles. In economics, goods with a long usable life are referred to as durable goods.

Because there is no objective measure of durability for clothing, price has become an important indicator.

In accounting, fixed capital is any kind of real, physical asset that is used repeatedly in the production of a product. In economics, fixed capital is a type of capital good that as a real, physical asset is used as a means of production which is durable or isn't fully consumed in a single time period. It contrasts with circulating capital such as raw materials, operating expenses etc.

The concept was first theoretically analyzed in some depth by the economist Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776) and by David Ricardo in On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1821). Ricardo studied the use of machines in place of labor and concluded that workers' fear of technology replacing them might be justified.

Consumables are goods that are intended to be used up, or in the case of food, eaten. People have, for example, always consumed food and water. Consumables are in contrast to long-lasting durable goods such as cars and washing machines. Disposable products are a particular, extreme case of consumables, because their end-of-life is reached after a single use.

Consumables are products that consumers use recurrently, i.e., items which "get used up" or discarded. For example, consumable office supplies are such products as paper, pens, file folders, Post-it notes, and toner or ink cartridges. This is in contrast to capital goods or durable goods in the office, such as computers, fax machines, and other business machines or office furniture. Sometimes a company sells a durable good at an attractively low price in the hopes that the consumer will then buy the consumables that go with it at a price providing a higher margin. Printers and ink cartridges are an example, as are cameras and film as well as razors and blades, which gave this business model its usual name (the razor and blades model).

Commodity plastics or commodity polymers are plastics produced in high volumes for applications such as packaging, food containers, and household products, including both disposable products and durable goods. In contrast to engineering plastics, commodity plastics tend to be inexpensive to produce and exhibit relatively weak mechanical properties. Widely used commodity plastics include polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), polystyrene (PS), polyvinyl chloride (PVC), poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA), and polyethylene terephthalate (PET). Products made from commodity plastics include disposable plates, disposable cups, photographic and magnetic tape, clothing, reusable bags, medical trays, and seeding trays.