Supply Chain Breakdown and Inflation

[JohnHurt]

There is a supply chain breakdown due to ships that cannot unload at the ports, and a lack of truck drivers.

In Tennessee, we are seeing toilet paper and paper towels in short supply at Sams Club. But not a lot of empty shelves at the moment.

Regular Gasoline has gone up to $3.19 per gallon. Food prices are up.

PVC pipe prices have nearly doubled in the last year.

Houses and Land prices are skyrocketing. A house that cost $140,000 last year is $200,000 this year. Many people are moving to Tennessee from California and the West Coast. We are in a very rural area, and houses are being built everywhere.

What is the situation where you live? Are your shelves bare, or is that hype? Gasoline prices? Since the Port of Los Angeles is jammed with over 100 ships that can't unload, I would imagine the West Coast has more scarcity of goods than Tennessee.

Your information and opinion is welcome!

[Grace]

Hubby and I usually don't frequent expensive places, but yesterday I broke that rule and went to the gas station.
Last year it cost between $30 and 35$ to fill the gas tank on our VW Jetta. Yesterday it cost almost $50.

After that I went to the grocery store (fast becoming another expensive place) and many of the frozen vegetable shelves were empty. Thankfully I have some vegetables from our small garden.

However I am thankful and grateful, as there are many people around the world who have so little. I fear many of us have been molly coddled and feel entitled to an abundance of goods, rich foods, etc.at our finger tips.

[steve-in-kville]

I have my hand in the food industry and the sporting goods culture. It would appear to me that shortages are a combination of hoarding and lack of labor (factories having to shut down and/or employees riding the unemployment train).

Our local grocery store (Giant Foods) often has bare shelves, especially in the frozen departments. Seems like fresh meat for the most part, has been in stock, although at higher prices. Fresh produce has been consistent from my experience.

Guns and ammo are back, albeit maybe 15% higher than two years ago. Again, shortages are a combo of hoarding and worker shortages. I read that archery hunting for our state hit an all-time high. Even airguns and pellets were hard to come by over the summer.

[Ken]

Here in the Pacific Northwest I haven't seen any meaningful shortages of anything. Store shelves are pretty full. But I also haven't been looking for very specific things like say a dishwasher or air conditioner or some such. Gas is about $3.25 at our local Costco which is pretty ordinary.

Housing prices are up around the region but that is a long-term trend that pre-dates the pandemic. They have been rising steadily since at least 2015 or so. We bought our house in 2016 and would have difficulty buying the same house again today. Median home prices in our region are over $450,000. I don't know how our kids are going to do it without our help. Or perhaps they will just be renters. But that trend has nothing to do with the pandemic.

The biggest disruptions around here have not been supply chain, but lack of labor for typical lower paying part-time jobs like school bus drivers. No one seems to want those sorts of jobs anymore. And a lot of corporations are struggling to find workers, mainly I think because they refuse to reform their labor practices where they use software and algorithms to minimize the hours worked by employees and keep them on irregular and unpredictable schedules. Who wants a 30 hour/week job with minimal benefits and irregular and unpredictable hours that make things like child care and family life or a second job difficult or impossible? Even at $15+ per hour, people don't want that anymore.

[RZehr]

Yesterday I saw Walmart and Panda Express and McDonald had banners out advertising for workers at $18 per hour.
I think it is inflation from the last 15 years of government stimulus finally hitting, a large amount of which has been sitting in banks and keeping interest rates low. And I think the labor problem in the low paying jobs is in part connected to a crackdown on illegal immigration, and paired with low birth rates / high abortion and birth control.

The supply problem is because we have been buying stuff like crazy in this country. Many businesses are selling more than ever. Additionally, the west coat ports are an unmitigated disaster of which 99% can be laid at the feet of lazy port crane operators, who are powerful union members. We have dealt with the ports exporting and importing goods for decades and they have always been unbelievably worthless in terms of productivity and ethics and normal human behavior. Our trucks often sit for hours at the port, sometimes return without being able to load/unload.
The import backlog is 99% because of the crane operators. It could be solved immediately. Force them to work 24/6 and hit production goals, or be fired. It’s long past time for the government to deal with them as they did the air traffic controllers.

[QuietlyListening]

Our stores vary. Sometimes shelves are empty and other times they aren't and never the same shelves empty. From what I have been hearing it is also lack of labor to stock shelves and stores like Walmart are catering to the online folks and so just keep supply back in storage. So it's a big combo of things.

Gas prices are up and food prices. I keep things stocked up at home but I did that before covid as I can't or won't just run to a store for an item needed any day of the week but shop once a week. 10-12 miles to nearest stores which isn't that far but gas adds up so we minimize trips.

[Ken]

My daughter worked the past summer at our local Safeway grocery between graduating HS and going to college so it wasn’t a permanent job and she had total flexibility of scheduling. It was her first real job other than babysitting and teaching piano lessons so she didn’t know better. And they paid $15/hr so not bad. But what I noted was the ridiculous and unpredictable scheduling. They used some sort of scheduling software and her hours were automatically limited to 30-35 per week even though she could have easily and happily worked 50 if given the opportunity. But the most egregious issue was the seemingly random scheduling. The place was open from 6 am to 11 pm and she would get shifts randomly assigned, sometimes early mornings, sometimes closing, and on random days. I don’t know how someone who needs to arrange child care, wants to have a family life with their kids, and/or work a second job can actually work under these conditions. They refuse to give you a full time job with benefits, but at the same time demand that you are basically on-call 15 hours/day 7 days/week. And then in service jobs you have to deal with increasingly rude and aggressive customers.

It doesn’t surprise me that these sorts of employers have a hard time attracting and keeping employees. It isn’t just the base wage, it’s the working conditions. The first thing they need to do is throw out these profit-maximizing scheduling software programs and give people stable shifts and full time jobs. I think the pandemic is revealing some of these trends that have been longstanding frankly. My daughter would have been happy to work more and earn more but the corporate software prevented that. Yet they constantly were whining about not having enough workers.

[MaxPC]

Yesterday I saw Walmart and Panda Express and McDonald had banners out advertising for workers at $18 per hour.
I think it is inflation from the last 15 years of government stimulus finally hitting, a large amount of which has been sitting in banks and keeping interest rates low. And I think the labor problem in the low paying jobs is in part connected to a crackdown on illegal immigration, and paired with low birth rates / high abortion and birth control.

The supply problem is because we have been buying stuff like crazy in this country. Many businesses are selling more than ever. Additionally, the west coat ports are an unmitigated disaster of which 99% can be laid at the feet of lazy port crane operators, who are powerful union members. We have dealt with the ports exporting and importing goods for decades and they have always been unbelievably worthless in terms of productivity and ethics and normal human behavior. Our trucks often sit for hours at the port, sometimes return without being able to load/unload.
The import backlog is 99% because of the crane operators. It could be solved immediately. Force them to work 24/6 and hit production goals, or be fired. It’s long past time for the government to deal with them as they did the air traffic controllers.

The proverbial nail; thank you, RZehr. Spot on.

[RZehr]

My daughter worked the past summer at our local Safeway grocery between graduating HS and going to college so it wasn’t a permanent job and she had total flexibility of scheduling. It was her first real job other than babysitting and teaching piano lessons so she didn’t know better. And they paid $15/hr so not bad. But what I noted was the ridiculous and unpredictable scheduling. They used some sort of scheduling software and her hours were automatically limited to 30-35 per week even though she could have easily and happily worked 50 if given the opportunity. But the most egregious issue was the seemingly random scheduling. The place was open from 6 am to 11 pm and she would get shifts randomly assigned, sometimes early mornings, sometimes closing, and on random days. I don’t know how someone who needs to arrange child care, wants to have a family life with their kids, and/or work a second job can actually work under these conditions. They refuse to give you a full time job with benefits, but at the same time demand that you are basically on-call 15 hours/day 7 days/week. And then in service jobs you have to deal with increasingly rude and aggressive customers.

It doesn’t surprise me that these sorts of employers have a hard time attracting and keeping employees. It isn’t just the base wage, it’s the working conditions. The first thing they need to do is throw out these profit-maximizing scheduling software programs and give people stable shifts and full time jobs. I think the pandemic is revealing some of these trends that have been longstanding frankly. My daughter would have been happy to work more and earn more but the corporate software prevented that. Yet they constantly were whining about not having enough workers.

I can't understand why companies still do this. I suppose they had their reasons, but people want consistency in their work hours. I expect it may stem from certain undesirable shifts being meted out to everyone because of the difficulty in finding people willing to work those shift full time. But that is just a guess. I know we have more difficulty finding people willing to work night shift.

[Ken]

Yesterday I saw Walmart and Panda Express and McDonald had banners out advertising for workers at $18 per hour.
I think it is inflation from the last 15 years of government stimulus finally hitting, a large amount of which has been sitting in banks and keeping interest rates low. And I think the labor problem in the low paying jobs is in part connected to a crackdown on illegal immigration, and paired with low birth rates / high abortion and birth control.

The supply problem is because we have been buying stuff like crazy in this country. Many businesses are selling more than ever. Additionally, the west coat ports are an unmitigated disaster of which 99% can be laid at the feet of lazy port crane operators, who are powerful union members. We have dealt with the ports exporting and importing goods for decades and they have always been unbelievably worthless in terms of productivity and ethics and normal human behavior. Our trucks often sit for hours at the port, sometimes return without being able to load/unload.
The import backlog is 99% because of the crane operators. It could be solved immediately. Force them to work 24/6 and hit production goals, or be fired. It’s long past time for the government to deal with them as they did the air traffic controllers.

The proverbial nail; thank you, RZehr. Spot on.

Not to defend the longshoremen’s union which is egregious I agree, and they single-handedly blew up container shipping out of the Port of Portland a few years ago over a ridiculous spat with another union. But my understanding of the current crisis is that it is system-wide. The Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles are reportedly overflowing with containers to the point that they are getting stacked up in nearby neighborhoods and the shortage of truck drivers, especially for big companies like Wal-Mart and Home Depot is a big part of the backlog. In other words, speeding up offloading isn’t going to accomplish much until they are able to clear out the backlog of containers sitting in the ports waiting to be transported out.