BEFORE HE put up his own cargo-forwarding company in 1993, Concepcion was into property management in the US, running his family's apartment buildings in California. But he said he noticed something amiss among existing freight forwarders: there were no fixed departure and arrival dates of shipments, and senders could not commit to relatives back home, who waited forever for the delivery vans to show up.

"I studied the industry and I introduced new features. I introduced certainty," explains Concepcion, whose company Alpha Cargo is a holder of an NVOCC (Non-Vessel Operating Common Carrier) license. The company's shipments left and arrived on a set schedule, and if timetables were botched by unforeseen circumstances, clients were informed immediately. For those living in America and whose lives are ruled by the clock, these things mattered, Concepcion says.

Now, he says, Alpha Cargo has overtaken much older competitors in Northern California, and is at the top of the heap, at least in that part of the United States. In an interview conducted at the impressive family mausoleum that Concepcion built at the Holy Mary Memorial Park in his hometown of Angeles City, the businessman analyzed the habits and profile of the typical balikbayan box sender. He explained his company's marketing strategy as he toured me around the gleaming mausoleum built partly from the profits of the balikbayan box business. The mausoleum is divided into rooms, which have crypts made to look like beds and marble panels that conceal the interred remains of various family members.

Alpha Cargo, says Concepcion, targets apartment dwellers, immigrants who have yet to start mortgage payments on a new house and can still allocate portions of their salaries to regular balikbayan-box shipments. Once they decide to acquire property, immigrants are left with neither the time nor the money to send pasalubong home since they usually end up taking two jobs just to meet the payments.

The market of the cargo-forwarding business is just a tenth of all Filipinos in America, since, according to Concepcion, 70 percent are already citizens who have brought their families with them, while the remaining 20 percent are undocumented residents or workers. Yet the business is highly lucrative. Alpha Cargo, for instance, ships either a 20-ft or 40-ft container every three days out of the port of Oakland in Northern California; the 20-ft container holds 180 boxes while the 40-ft version can take as much as 400. With a fee of $65 charge per box, the sum of all freights makes for a very profitable venture. Alpha Cargo also ships out of Los Angeles and Chicago.

Gino Galang, who operates a local handler, ERG Express, says that while it's a small market, there is a regularity to the shipments. "Hahabol sila sa fiesta o kaya sa graduation (They'll try to send something in time for fiesta or graduation)," notes Galang, whose company receives balikbayan box shipments and delivers them to recipients. The busiest time for balikbayan box arrivals is obviously Christmas, when migrant workers still hope to play Santa Claus to extended families in the Philippines.

Galang's company handles shipments from cargo forwarders in the United States and Canada, and has yet to tie up with those in Europe where business is slower, one reason being the distance and consequently, the higher cost of shipping. From the United Kingdom, for example, the shipping charge for a Manila-bound box can go anywhere from £45 to £100, which converts to about $83 to $189-definitely a lot of money, even ifboxes originating from there are usually bigger than those coming from elsewhere.

But the frequency of shipments may yet pick up, Galang notes, because "nurses are already entering Europe," and it is they who seem to make the kind of money that allows room for regular pasalubong shopping and shipping.

NURSES OR not, though, Filipinos take gift giving to the extreme, especially when they get the chance to travel and sometimes buy items for no particular occasion and with no specific recipient in mind. They tend to storm the malls during sales, buying things they don't need just because they're cheap, observes Concepcion. The inclination is to spend, rather than save. Instead of putting their money on long-term investments, they splurge on consumer goods, used and brand new. It can even be argued, that the gift-filled balikbayan box has slipped from being part of a practice employed to maintain ties across the seas and has been reduced to an excuse to indulge in the Filipino addiction to shopping.

That is why those at the receiving end of balikbayan-box shipments get all sorts of stuff. I thought my family was already getting the motherlode. But one of my co-workers, Yolly Nicolas, has a network of close and not-so-close relatives, friends, and neighbors working or living in the United States, Japan, and Europe who send anything and everything imaginable that can be packed in a balikbayan box. A sibling's sister-in-law who works as a domestic helper in Greece ships bigger items that have, in the past, included a chair, an ironing board, huge pieces of Tupperware plastic containers, and large cooking utensils. Another distant relative who is a singer in Japan once managed to I fit a used PC in that country's tiny version of a shipping box. A sister-in-law who works as a nurse in California sends two balikbayan boxes each year that contain huge jars of coffee, rubber shoes that have their insides stuffed with assorted cosmetics, freebies from McDonalds, cans of corned beef, towels, bags, and chocolates, which are pasalubong perennials.

For some reason, the boxes contain even ordinary items that can be purchased locally like spaghetti, sotanghon (rice noodles), and sugar. Nicolas says, "Siguro mga sobra lung nila any mga 'yon at wala na silang maipadalang iba (Maybe those are extras from their own shopping and there is nothing else they can think of sending)."

There are also those who send hand-me-down clothes in varying states of usefulness and wearability. Nicolas, for one, has received her share of used clothing, which she says look like they could have been meant for ukay-ukay or second-hand stalls.

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