Why do your umbrella hats have to wait so long for a truck driver? The ship slides in, and a sky-high crane reaches down, latches onto the container with your umbrella hats, and hoists it into the air, moving it to a yard where it will wait to be loaded onto an 18-wheeler truck. Your products sit patiently inside one of those containers on one of those ships waiting to unload in the US.Īfter weeks of waiting its turn, your ship is finally given a berthing assignment, meaning it can float into its assigned dock slot. So let’s say you're an Amazon seller in 2022. The massive clog at these two ports spurs a colossal ripple effect that hits everyone-from the college student waiting for her Amazon-purchased USB drive to land on her front doorstep to the businessman trying to book a car rental to get home to his family after a draining three week business trip. In the words of Gene Seroka, Executive Director of the Port of Los Angeles, “ a critical gateway to the American economy.” Together these two ports account for 40% of all of US imports and nearly 30% of America’s exports. The port of Los Angeles and its neighboring port of Long Beach are now just two of five major ports dotting the US’s Pacific coastline. Piling up in the ports of southern California. He said, “5 to 1.”įor every five shipping containers filled with products leaving the ports in China, only one is returning. Ker Gibbs, from the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai used a curious phrase. With a reduction in labor force and an explosion in shipping container numbers, the problem exacerbates itself as the supply chain starts to choke on rising demand. More than 80 ships loiter out at sea, waiting their turn for orders to dock.Ĭovid hits southern California and thousands of longshore workers call in sick. The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach look like a fleet of invading ships. More cargo ships from China leads to clogged shipping ports along the United States’ west coast. More manufacturing leads to fleets of cargo barges stacked with containers en route from China. The rise in online spending fuels demand for more manufacturing. With limited access to pleasantries like travel, restaurants, and the theater, people start spending their pleasure funds on online products instead of in-person services.Īmazon’s 2020 sales spike to over $386.1 billion in revenue, 38% growth compared to the previous year’s growth of only 20%. March and April of 2020: 43 governors across the United States order residents to stay at home, minus essential trips for survival.Įconomists predict that demand for goods will sink, and yet…the exact opposite happens: people buy things like the end times are here.Īnd not just toilet paper and hand sanitizer. This was all because of the supply chain crisis, which forces us to wonder: Is now a good time to sell on Amazon? The historyĭecember 12, 2019: A cluster of patients in Wuhan, China experience shortness of breath and fever. Rick Waldenburg paid a million dollars in storage fees in September alone after paying ten times the normal shipping cost. They were stuck at the bottom of a pile of containers…for nine weeks. Rick observed, “Pony express could have gotten it here faster.” But the train carrying his products from the port to Chicago took 45 days. The products arrived at the Port of Los Angeles. It all started when his trusted freight forwarding company quoted him $30,000 to ship a single container from China to the US, ten times what it cost him the year before. Rick Waldenburg runs a $25-$50 million dollar ecommerce toy business called “ Learning Resources.” ~ Christopher Mims, Technology Columnist for the Wall Street Journal Could Pony Express do it better? When you add up all the automation of all the algorithms, all the hundreds of people who had to touch those goods or transport them in some way, it’s in total one of the most complicated endeavors that human beings ever engage in… …And we take it for granted because all of that has been rolled behind this ultimate convenience of one click ecommerce shopping.
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