I’d imagine there is no way to physically be ready to handle a sudden intense uptick in demand without seriously undermining the everyday allocation efficiency

I’d imagine there is no way to physically be ready to handle a sudden intense uptick in demand without seriously undermining the everyday allocation efficiency of things like storage space and production equipment. In an industry like shipping that goes doubly so because their main assets are sorting facilities and vehicles. If the plants/fleets are 10x as big as they need to be for 99% of the year it’s probably economically better to just deal with the crunch for that last 1% of the year rather than own too much infrastructure.