Supply chain disruptions?

StarSong said:
Interesting article. It appears that fuel and energy shortages are now or will shortly be a serious problem in many parts of the world.
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yes well as you know we in the UK had a massive shortage of petrol and diesel this last month and it's still ongoing in some places still.. blamed not on fuel shortage but delivery driver shortage... but if you read this about the USA specifically....it shows that a Gas shortage was and might still be expected country wide in the US

People planning vacations around the US this summer could be in for a nasty surprise. According to industry experts, gas shortages, especially in vacation hotspots, are looming because of a lack of tanker truck drivers to deliver fuel.

According to the National Tank Truck Carriers (NTTC) – an industry group that advocates on behalf of tank truck companies and has over 200 companies on its books – nearly a quarter of the tanks on its fleet are sitting unused at the moment and waiting for drivers. CNN was first to report the news.

Experts from the NTTC told CNN that the pandemic is primarily to blame for this. As travel came to a standstill and demand for gas dwindled, drivers were left with no work. Many took this "as a cue to retire" rather than retraining to start delivering Amazon packages, for example, Holly McCormick – who heads up the workforce committee for NTTC – told CNN.

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-summer-vacation-travel-threatened-gas-outages-2021-4?r=US&IR=T
 

hollydolly said:
yes well as you know we in the UK had a massive shortage of petrol and diesel this last month and it's still ongoing in some places still.. blamed not on fuel shortage but delivery driver shortage... but if you read this about the USA specifically....it shows that a Gas shortage was and might still be expected country wide in the US

People planning vacations around the US this summer could be in for a nasty surprise. According to industry experts, gas shortages, especially in vacation hotspots, are looming because of a lack of tanker truck drivers to deliver fuel.

According to the National Tank Truck Carriers (NTTC) – an industry group that advocates on behalf of tank truck companies and has over 200 companies on its books – nearly a quarter of the tanks on its fleet are sitting unused at the moment and waiting for drivers. CNN was first to report the news.

Experts from the NTTC told CNN that the pandemic is primarily to blame for this. As travel came to a standstill and demand for gas dwindled, drivers were left with no work. Many took this "as a cue to retire" rather than retraining to start delivering Amazon packages, for example, Holly McCormick – who heads up the workforce committee for NTTC – told CNN.

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-summer-vacation-travel-threatened-gas-outages-2021-4?r=US&IR=T
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These articles were written in April and referred to this past summer. If the US had gasoline shortages during that time they must have been rare and isolated. On the other hand, gasoline is up 42% from a year ago and there are repeated warnings of much higher heating and energy costs this winter, which doesn't bode well for us.

Perhaps CNN & Business Insider were off with their predicted timing, but it sure appears the US's various fuels will be dramatically more expensive very soon and might be in short supply, as well.

Have your petrol shortages eased up any?
 
StarSong said:
These articles were written in April and referred to this past summer. If the US had gasoline shortages during that time they must have been rare and isolated. On the other hand, gasoline is up 42% from a year ago and there are repeated warnings of much higher heating and energy costs this winter, which doesn't bode well for us.

Perhaps CNN & Business Insider were off with their predicted timing, but it sure appears the US's various fuels will be dramatically more expensive very soon and might be in short supply, as well.

Have your petrol shortages eased up any?
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yes ours have eased up significantly to what they were however the prices have gone through the roof...
 

I've been camping the past week with a group of ladies in a national RV club. A woman in the group from Atlanta does merchandise logistics for an international company. She said within a year, her price for a full shipping container from China to the States has gone from $10,000 to current ...as of last week.... $21,000.
 
AnnieA said:
I've been camping the past week with a group of ladies in a national RV club. A woman in the group from Atlanta does merchandise logistics for an international company. She said within a year, her price for a full shipping container from China to the States has gone from $10,000 to current ...as of last week.... $21,000.
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That's what I'm hearing. Surprised her rates have only doubled.
 
I remembered to buy some chicken sausages this morn to freeze for the holidays. They had gone up from around $6.99 or so to $9.42 for a pack of just four sausages. They used to give 6 per pack.😫😭
 
Liberty said:
Longshoremen's union is for the dock workers. The Commercial Carrier's driving schools closed during covid and that has created a real long haul truck driver's backlog. What with the normal attrition; retirements, job quits and changing professions, the truck drivers are in short supply. It takes quite a while to properly train a big rig driver.
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Unless you join Swift trucking company. 😂🤣:eek:
At Swift, training for your CDL takes as little as four weeks – from beginning your training to receiving your license.
 
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Definitely a manufactured crisis - some pretend it's because people won't apply for jobs as truck drivers. Bah! Complete garbage argument. Jobs as drivers often start at $80K per year. If you just graduated from high school and was not going to college, wouldn't you take a job at that salary if it was offered to you? How about those just discharged from the military or the homeless? Wouldn't they take such a job if it was offered? Of course they would - I certainly would take it in half a second. The greedy capitalists can easily hire anyone to take those jobs but are withholding them so that a crisis would exist: artificially create shortages, increase demand, then they have an excuse for increasing prices and profits. As always, it's capitalist greed and the never ending quest for profit maximization that is the problem.
 
old medic said:
As long as they aren't taxed out of the profit... AKA part the reason it went overseas to begin with
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After all these years of Chinese dominance in the supply chain, I would think the concept of making changes would be something to entertain.
The time certainly seems right.
 
oldiebutgoody said:
c81994d4-ae59-44b1-b8de-1bc7566b59f6-jpeg.186959





Definitely a manufactured crisis - some pretend it's because people won't apply for jobs as truck drivers. Bah! Complete garbage argument. Jobs as drivers often start at $80K per year. If you just graduated from high school and was not going to college, wouldn't you take a job at that salary if it was offered to you? How about those just discharged from the military or the homeless? Wouldn't they take such a job if it was offered? Of course they would - I certainly would take it in half a second. The greedy capitalists can easily hire anyone to take those jobs but are withholding them so that a crisis would exist: artificially create shortages, increase demand, then they have an excuse for increasing prices and profits. As always, it's capitalist greed and the never ending quest for profit maximization that is the problem.
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If someone isn’t qualified they can’t apply for the job. It doesn’t happen overnight unless you drive for Swift which @squatting dog referenced in post #208.

I don’t want just anyone driving those big rigs.

Here they’re finally cracking down and creating more rigorous training for our drivers.
 
It’s not just supplies that are in demand. Listened to someone talking about having a massage. Told to book ahead several months for appointments. There’s no staff. The schools couldn’t function so there’s no new graduates.
 
Jules said:
If someone isn’t qualified they can’t apply for the job. It doesn’t happen overnight unless you drive for Swift which @squatting dog referenced in post #208.

I don’t want just anyone driving those big rigs.

Here they’re finally cracking down and creating more rigorous training for our drivers.
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CDL-A truck driver training can take as few as 3 to 6 weeks to complete. But your CDL program may take up to 3 months depending on your school and its scheduling options. Some “advanced” CDL training programs take even longer, but those are less common options.

how long does it take to train to drive a big truck - Bing



Had any of those companies bothered to hire a kid that graduated from high school this past May or June, by now such a graduate would know how to drive a truck and the problem would be solved.

Do not buy into this garbage that there is a labor shortage. It is nothing more than capitalist propaganda garbage designed to increase prices and corporate profit maximization.
 
StarSong said:
If the US had gasoline shortages during that time they must have been rare and isolated.
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You remind me of the contrived gasoline "shortage" of 1979. The leftist newspaper The Village Voice reported that there was no real shortage and that NYC harbors were filled with tankers. One day I looked for myself and was startled to see tankers all over the harbors. Not one other news media source reported that truth. Too bad people did not have portable camera phones so that the entire world could see the phoniness of these shortage claims. Same thing today - there is no shortage of labor or commodities. Just the same damnable profit maximization motive.
 
oldiebutgoody said:
You remind me of the contrived gasoline "shortage" of 1979. The leftist newspaper The Village Voice reported that there was no real shortage and that NYC harbors were filled with tankers. One day I looked for myself and was startled to see tankers all over the harbors. Not one other news media source reported that truth. Too bad people did not have portable camera phones so that the entire world could see the phoniness of these shortage claims. Same thing today - there is no shortage of labor or commodities. Just the same damnable profit maximization motive.
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I'm not suggesting that there haven't been recent gasoline shortages in various parts of the world, merely that there apparently hadn't been widespread shortages in the US this past summer. Early 1970s oil crisis occurred because of an OPEC embargo that raised commodity prices dramatically while decreasing supplies.

In 1979 a war between Iraq & Iran created shortages once again. Rumors swirled both times about numerous tanker ships floating near US harbors but being unable to offload their crude. If that were true, I never saw a shred of evidence - not a single photo. Tried to find one today and still came up with nothing. The LA Times and NY Times would surely have been all over that.

Our current mess is unlikely to be due to contrived circumstances. This avalanche was started by the large Covid snowball and exacerbated by foreseeable and unforeseeable complications, including just-in-time inventory levels, intermittent factory closures due to illnesses, intermittent shipping port closures for the same reason, truckers who were already underpaid and overworked, and US ports that were already operating at maximum capacity.

Companies don't make money by NOT shipping to their customers.
 
I think that the supply chain disruptions are real but overblown.

A few days ago on the news they said there was a three week backlog of ships waiting to be unloaded.

The thing that I’m curious about is how and why it developed.

I find it hard to believe that there is not some sort of real time tracking of the location of every container and container ship. It seems to me that someone fell asleep at the switch and didn’t take steps to authorize overtime and 24 hour work schedules when the backlog was only 24-48 hours instead of three weeks.

Also many of the things that are missing from my local markets are things that are grown and processed in the Inited States.

The dollar store is well stocked with foreign made Christmas goods so I tend to think that this will be another crisis that will suddenly resolve itself when it falls out of the news cycle.
 

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