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All of this talk about supply chain issues are totally missing the point in my opinion. So many articles (and tweet chains I guess) have been written about supp

• markjspivey 5y ago
  what you describe is still an actual supply chain issue though, you are merely elaborating on a possible cause for particular supply chain issues .
• HWR_14 5y ago
  > yet every one of them seems to ignore the elephant in the room which is demand for goods vs services Considering almost every article I read about the causes cites the shift from services to goods (to the point of feeling like it's filler at this point), I wonder how we are reading such different sources. I'm thinking about sources like the NYT.
• FranksTV 5y ago
  Another missing piece is that COVID is still thriving in a lot of places, and typically in the places that are the "supply" in supply chain. So while the demand is waking up there are still a lot of places with large numbers of people sick and/or dying because they don't have wealthy governments who can afford mass vaccination.
• rossdavidh 5y ago
  The reason just-in-time is to blame, is that JIT assumes you have a reasonably stable flow (yes, I worked in manufacturing where we studied JIT a lot). Yes, it was a shift from services to goods that provided the current shock, but it was JIT that meant the system could not adapt to shocks. If you have no buffers (or very small ones), then you cannot quickly adapt. If you put a vase on top of your car and drive away, it's irrelevant which bump in the road causes the vase to fall off; it was bound to fall off eventually. The global supply chain was optimized for efficiency, to the point of fragility, and whether it was a pandemic or a war or something else, a shock was coming eventually. With climate change, we can expect more frequent weather-induced changes in the future. A supply chain which cannot handle frequent, large changes is too fragile, and that's what's wrong with JIT.
  • xyzzy21 5y ago
    Exactly! When I took inventory and supply chain course, JIT scared the shit out of me because it's was so obviously fragility.
  • deelowe 5y ago
    Yep. The push for zero inventory, just in time, outsourced manufacturing created a traffic jam when there was no buffer to absorb the shock.
    • eitland 5y ago
      It might be worth nothing that Toyota - from where the JIT idea came - hasn't been as much affected by it as many others.
      • jjk166 5y ago
        JIT may have originated at Toyota, but Toyota's version of JIT is not what is nowadays commonly referred to as JIT. Toyota's production sytem is a lean manufacturing method where stages of production are rate matched (ie operation B is using parts at the same rate operation A is producing them), but there still are buffers of inventory between stages. The goal is to make the whole system communicate in such a way that when one part needs to change rate, everything else changes rate at the same time. In conventional JIT, the goal is specifically to minimize inventory by minimizing the time between when something is produced and when it is consumed. This is good from an accounting perspective as money that would be tied up in inventory can be put to other uses such as investments. JIT is about eliminating the variability for which you would need buffers, really the opposite of what Toyota does.
• nodicksplease 5y ago
  The main take-way is, the design of the system is not fluid enough to scale up or down based on the demand. Rather, it has too many bottlenecks for it to choke and eventually die.
• Gigachad 5y ago
  Seems like the answer to all of these problems is that everything changed. Nothing in particular can be blamed for the fact that virtually everyone changed most of their behaviors significantly and for an extended time.
• kurthr 5y ago
  I think the difficulty in making that case is that expenditures are in $ not functional units. So what you may be seeing is more higher prices (a symptom of supply chain breakdown) not more purchases, while services largely stayed similar in price and similar in volume (to slightly down due to extra money spent on pricy goods).
  • cbdumas 5y ago
    The data in my second link is a quantity index, so I believe price is not a factor
• dpweb 5y ago
  Frankly, people buy a lot of stuff they don't need. But I wonder how the dependence on disposable items plays in. I could never understand stressing one bit about the most disposable items like paper towels. Completely non-essential items.
  • InitialLastName 5y ago
    re. paper towels: strictly non-essential items, yes, but it takes some lifestyle reconfiguration to make the alternatives work. My household is (I speculate asymptotically) approaching zero paper towel use, but we have ready access to laundry, the capital and bandwidth to have built up a comfortable supply of rags and towels, and our only occasionally messy coinhabitant is the cat (and you can bet that if he vomits, I'm using a paper towel to clean it up). We can make the conscious choice to reduce our dependence on disposable products, but at some point (for everyone, for every "easy" solution x) it's not worth reducing any more.
    • Natsu 5y ago
      I've really cut down on paper towel usage and I used to use a lot due to having several small animals who are entirely too prone to accidents. I found it best to keep a box of a few dozen small cloths that I got as a bundle, and a small hamper nearby that I throw the dirty ones into, which also happens to be near the washing machine. I end up doing quite a lot of washing of said rags, but it's far more economical than the paper towels ever were and quite a bit more convenient in general to boot.
    • EdwardDiego 5y ago
      The whole point of paper towels, or disposable nappies, is removing the labour cost of cleaning them. My ex-wife was a stay at home Mom for her religious reasons, and was determined to be the "best" Mom, only healthy food, no TV or devices, cloth nappies etc. Once we hit kid #3, the time needed to launder cloth nappies wasn't viable with two other kids on the go. I encouraged her to give disposables a go, and she was hooked, but very guilty about it. But yeah, disposables saved us (well mainly her) many hours of scraping shit, stirring a giant bucket of nappies with Napisan, washing them, hanging them out in the sun to let the UV sort the stains etc. So while paper towels are technically non-essential, I'm reminded of the old sarcastic comment that "Linux is free, if your time has no value".
• majormajor 5y ago
  > If the spending doesn't re-balance again as restrictions are lifted this is not a temporary supply chain issue caused by just-in-time methodology, it's just the new normal. Even if spending stays shifted supply will be able to catch up eventually. Once people believe there's a predictable level of demand they will be able to plan output for it - or else someone else will capture that new market share.
  • rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
    Yes, eventually. From what I've read it's expected to take 6 months to a year after your "people believe there's a predictable level of demand" point.
    • thayne 5y ago
      And we have no idea how far out "people believe there's a predictable level of demand" is.
• zerocount 5y ago
  It has nothing to do with spending. This whole problem stems from shutting countries down. Now it's all stacked up ready to go back into the economy, but we can't move fast enough. In time it will iron itself out, but high oil prices don't help, empty shipping containers stacked up don't help, the ports only working 8 hours don't help. It's a bunch of little stuff that added up to make a major problem.
• raxxorrax 5y ago
  There is also a phenomenon similar to (inverse) traffic jams where a bottleneck wanders up the supply chain. Just in time delivery has some disadvantages and we basically use the road (or rail, sea) as warehouse nowadays. But ships, trains and trucks might not get filled when production halted because of lacking parts. Still the trucks and ships are bound to their current job and are sitting empty somewhere. It will slowly entangle as transport priority gets reordered.
• erispoe 5y ago
  The same rebalancing happened in Europe, and Europe doesn't have close to the issues the US has regarding supply chain. Europe's major ports are automated and operate 24/7, port to hinterland relies much more on rail than trucking. Overall, the US supply chain was already very fragile and outdated.
  • Gravityloss 5y ago
    Hmm, I thought US rail freight system is massive, excellent and envied by the whole world. When in the US, I saw these double decker container trains with the bogies at the ends (so the lower container could be below the axle).
  • roenxi 5y ago
    Did it? And doesn't it? How can you tell? Both Europe and the US are large and complicated. Last I heard Europe was in the middle of an energy crisis which could easily turn out to be linked to supply chain disruptions. It has been long enough for the slow-rolling-wave nature of economic disasters to start surfacing, but it is too early to raise a head up and talk about cause and effect without some citations.
  • bwilli123 5y ago
    https://medium.com/@ryan79z28/im-a-twenty-year-truck-driver-i-will-tell-you-why-america-s-shipping-crisis-will-not-end-bbe0ebac6a91 https://medium.com/@ryan79z28/im-a-twenty-year-truck-driver-...
  • fennecfoxen 5y ago
    That sounds nice. By contrast, the US makes moving goods between two US ports illegal. Okay, it doesn't technically do that, the Jones Act just requires you to use a US-owned US-built US-crewed US-operated ship. These ships, in general, don't exist. Oh, sure, there are a few that go back and forth to Puerto Rico, and there are a few wastewater ships running up and down the East River in New York, but no one would dream of using ships like these for general cargo. They are not up to modern container-shipping standards. Puerto Rico pays a premium for a few of these freighters and tankers but generally does more to import goods from the Caribbean and Central America than from the US; when there are hurricanes, the President has to issue a waiver so they can move disaster recovery supplies in from the mainland. Fish shipped from Alaska are unloaded on the east coast in Canada, where they put on trucks, and the trucks are put on a carrier train which makes a round trip back and forth for the length of the cargo terminal to qualify as being "shipped by Canadian rail" for US legal purposes, and then the trucks drive into the US with the fish. A related law afflicts cruise ships, which always stop somewhere in Canada, Alaska, or the Caribbean, on their way between US ports. One of the premises of the Jones Act was that it will preserve American shipbuilding for national security™ purposes. This has more or less utterly failed. However, Joe Biden's campaign promises specfically called out fortifying the Jones Act so that it would be even stronger, so, don't hold your breath on change.
• circa 5y ago
  I completely agree. I've been saying that and I thought it was fairly obvious too.
• snarf21 5y ago
  I listened to a podcast recently that spoke specifically about how the container unloading is a major issue. Certain areas have zoning restrictions about stacking empty zoning containers only 2 high (Santa Monica??). So the container hauling trailers have largely got stuck holding empties so they can't clear the docks which means we aren't clearing the ports quick enough. I know there have been recent strides to to bypass some of these rules but it is like a slinky and will take a while to catch up. My guess is that "normal" is still 9 months away. The other big factor in this speaks to your point. We are importing far more than exporting. Containers have gone up 10x in price over the last year and we need to get all these empties back to Asia, etc.
  • 8note 5y ago
    That or Santa Monica (?) Will become full of sky scrapers of shipping containers as no capacity is available to haul away the empties and there's no destination for them