Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Supply Chain mess, California self inflicted crisis

Bet you’ll get at least three recruiting calls on your days off.... .

Dutch agreed, closing the sector had people fat with cash and sitting around to realize "hey, we need more stuff" so they order and that clogs the supply chain, regardless of where it was located.

March-May of 19, you didnt notice. Shutting down auto work put 600k trucks in the pipeline looking for work. Drove rates down but then the order surge hit and Detroit went back to work.

It's really basic supply and demand. Most don't realize how skewed the ratio is.

91% of all trucking companies have 10 trucks or less.

The 5 largest trucking companies, all with more than 10k trucks haul 5-6% of all the freight in this country combined. Most of it moves on small/medium guys.

Shipper has an extra 30 loads today - that's full utilization of 3 full companies at the drop of a hat and spot prices. You just can't sustain it.

Honestly - the supply chain has operated at a phenomenal level for an extended time.

Fun fact: Biden’s China First policy will ensure we have no manufacturing base left so this fun fact won’t matter.

Our factory hasn't been too badly affected. We have had problems with
resin components, but the delays weren't bad. We have had orders pushed back because customers couldn't get necessary components to utilize the
product we would ship.

Ironically, we export way more to China than we import. At least direct. One of the biggest product lines pushed back, goes to China.
But, I'm pretty sure they play games. The week Trump
started his trade war with them, they pushed back orders, canceled them.
The whole time it went in the would mice orders up, push some back.
Basically screwing with us and keeping orders as small as possible.
Right after they settled things down, orders returned to normal.
They were pressuring us to pressure politicians. Just like they did farmers.


Trucks, have been a common issue. Both in getting things in from domestic producers, and out.
Our shipping guy often can't get any.

We are small, and lazy.
The big boys aren't interested in our 3 or 4 whole truckloads per week.
Our shipper has a couple smaller companies he relies on, and doesn't
look past them. That probably plays into it.

You all change your tune with every new news story with little fact or basis checking. Just bitch about anything... fact is we've known about this problem for more than 50 years, and working on changing it as fast as possible. After Viet Nam, things starting changing quite a bit in the mid west and we realized that our ports were too small, not deep enough, and the bridges were too low, There was inadequate rail service and what we had had to interact with road traffic every mile of the way. Warehousing was mostly leftover WW2 stuff (small built of wood ad with low ceilings). Even the docks were paved over wood deck on wood pilings. And even freeway access to the ports were 3 lanes leading to single and double lane side roads. All that had to be changed and it was, we rebuilt for what they thought would be needed for the next 100 years. Ports were dredged, old draw bridges were torn down and new bridges built, military bases closed (including Long Beach Naval Yard), the ports rebuilt and expanded, old warehouses torn down and new ones built. Containerization came into being along with all the new technology, new rail yards at the ports were built out, Number of tracks were increased and new rail corridors were built separating rail and road traffic so that neither would need to slow down for the other. These new rail corridors would allow trains to travel non-stop to newly constructed inland rail terminals and hundreds of miles of road separation was done raising and building new bridges every mile of the way.

All this work took trillions of dollars and years of building, but about 30 years into all of this building. We found out it wasn't going to be anywhere near enough, the super size cargo ships we had planed for were now being built 2 or even 3 times the size planed for, hell I think we're up to 26,000 TEU's now. So for the last 20 years, a lot of what was newly built needed to be expanded on and even some newly built-out again. You all thought that all those large company's were moving because they wanted to. no it was because all that real-estate became very valuable and needed for new infrastructure. Deeper yet dredging of the ports and yet more and larger berths, larger container yards, and more and larger warehousing, Not just within the ports areas, but throughout many county's of all the bay areas and throughout the major road and rail interstate routes.

Not millions but Billions of square-footage of new warehousing, and it a seemingly unending problem, just within the last ten years billions of more square-footage has been built, and we still don't have enough. Billions of more square-footage of more warehousing is needed in the next couple years.

Link

Just within the last 5 to 10 years we've built a new 2 billion dollar bridge inter-port at Los Angeles/Long Beach/San Pedro higher, wider, and with more lanes along with better access directly into the ports. Along with more grade separations for the rail routes, and increased the number of track from 2 to 3 going through the pass and over the mountains.

And its not only on the west coast.


Phil

Fùck off Phil.

The core of the problem is that we were convinced that a service based economy was the way to go.

Oh, admit it, Jim, you enjoy a good mani/pedi...... .

#allathatandthensome

#BuildBackBetterBaby