You can order, but you can’t buy.
You’d better get used to it, Vox says (here), because shortages aren’t going away.
Why? Because the pandemic has throttled the world’s far-flung supply chains. And while the U.S. economy may be reviving, albeit in fits and starts, the rest of the world is way behind us. (Related story: GM is closing its assembly lines again, because of chip shortages originating in SE Asia, read story here.)
“Here,” says Vox, “is an incomplete list of consumer goods that have been subject to backorders, delays, and shortages:
- new clothes
- back-to-school supplies
- bicycles
- pet food
- paint
- furniture
- cars
- tech gadgets
- children’s toys
- home appliances
- lumber
- semiconductor chips
- chicken wings
- ketchup packets
As the Vox article explains, “Supply chains are global, made up of factories, processing centers, and shipping companies all over the world … [and] behind every sold-out product there’s a vast supply chain linking raw materials to factory floors to distribution centers.”
The pandemic has rippled through this system, with disruptions “affecting every step of this supply chain,” and “there’s no quick-fix solution.” Globalization can’t be turned off like a light switch. (And if you did reverse it, you’d lose the lower prices it gives consumers.)
Shipping is a troubled bottleneck, too. It begins with getting goods across the oceans. “About half of the world’s sailors … are from developing nations where vaccine rollouts have been slow,” Vox says. And when ships arrive in ports, they may have to wait weeks for unloading. Cargoes are piling up in ports, and here in the U.S., there’s a shortage of truck drivers. (That isn’t just a pandemic-induced problem; it had been building up for years, as a result of low pay and bad working conditions.) Consequently, even if goods can be made, they’re not making it to warehouses and distribution centers.
Think you can beat empty shelves by shopping online? Nope. Online retailers have no better access to goods than brick-and-mortar stores. They might tweak their websites to alert customers that products are unavailable, backordered, or have extended delivery times. But if you can’t get it in stores, you probably can’t get it online either. And there’s plenty of price-gouging and counterfeiting of goods going on in the online marketplace.
Something else that has happened during the pandemic is this: With travel, restaurants, and other services shut down, and consumers flush with cash, a lot of consumer spending shifted from services to goods. People who couldn’t take vacations spent their money on cars, appliances, and furniture instead. Thus, consumer demand for certain categories of goods skyrocketed at the same time the supplies of those goods were dwindling.
The reopening of the U.S. economy has brought some shift of spending from goods back to services, and some shortages and temporary price spikes are beginning to ease (lumber, for example), but the pandemic isn’t over, and Vox predicts the shortages will persist into 2023 at least. That situation could even drag out longer if the Covid-19 virus keeps returning as new surges of new variants.
The pandemic has required a lot of adjustments. One of them is having to live with less “stuff.” But that’s not necessarily a terrible fate.