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Nobody knows for sure. It's a complex phenomena. - Blame Toyota with their Just In Time inventory management ideas. - Factory closures, lockdowns, etc. - In
by YZF 5y ago
Nobody knows for sure. It's a complex phenomena.
- Blame Toyota with their Just In Time inventory management ideas.
- Factory closures, lockdowns, etc.
- Increased demand for certain items. Everyone's at home surfing the web, playing games on their computers, mining bitcoin?
- Monetary policies are creating excess (see bitcoin mining) demand.
- Shipping delays. Ports running at reduced capacity. Ships sitting at sea waiting to get access. Suez Canal blocked. Shipping companies have no spare capacity. Blame Toyota.
- Building new factories takes time, getting/building new machinery takes time, everything was set up to not have any over capacity (since that's loss) ... blame Toyota again.
- Big companies swallowed everyone so we don't have as much diversity of products as we used to. Probably related to easy money as well.
tl;dr Toyota, Greenspan, Covid ... Somewhat in that order.
EDIT: Should probably add the trade war between the US and China to that list.
- Multicomp 5y ago> - Blame Toyota with their Just In Time inventory management ideas. Toyota had a stockpile [1] of semiconductors and are only now-ish running into the same supply problems everyone has been since March 2020. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-07/how-toyota-s-supply-chain-helped-it-weather-the-chip-shortage https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-07/how-toyot... > But the Tohoku earthquake’s aftermath pushed Toyota to increase flexibility, and the value of inventory Toyota carries has almost doubled since 2011. Speaking at a briefing in February, Toyota Chief Financial Officer Kenta Kon said as part of the company’s business continuity plans, it keeps as many as four months of stock for some crucial components such as chips. Toyota didn’t expect the semiconductor shortage to disrupt production in the near term, he said.
- YZF 5y agoYes. I know that. They were one of the early ones to discover the limitations of their original ideas but that did not make its way to the rest of the industry.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- georgyo 5y agoToyota may have been the people who pioneered Just in Time, but there are also one of the few car manufacturers that actually had a stock pile of components. They realized that supply chain disruptions are too damaging not to have a cache. Saying blame Toyota is funny, but really all the execs who say a cost savings and took without consideration of supply chain problems are actually to blame.
- YZF 5y agoExactly. I was trying to be funny. Not literally blaming Toyota. Though it is their fault in some sense, the popularization of "lean" "just in time" manufacturing as a magic bullet that gives you everything while saving costs.