Global Supply Chain Crisis 2021: Megathread - A cozy thread for watching the supply chain fall apart just in time for the holidays

[Rei is shit]

It's gotten to the point that we are looking at having the parts fabricated locally just to have blanks and replacement parts on hand.

How are you going to put non-certified parts onto commercial airliners like that? Is management really that desperate?

 

[spiritofamermaid]

Thank you for dropping in and giving us a trucker's perspective. If your rig is older (pre-2011) then it likely doesn't require the sensor and you'll never have to worry about it. The good news is that if this is the case you'll have work until hell freezes over, you get tired of it, or civilization fully collapses.


On a somewhat related note (soda delivery), I have pics I grabbed from a gas station I pass daily. Since I'm a regular and on good terms with the staff I inquired whether they were unable to get deliveries because there were no trucks, and the manager on duty informed me that it was because the vendor had no one to drive for them. Pics below.
View attachment 2560747View attachment 2560750
The store has looked like this for two weeks, and every time I've asked I've been informed they put their order for new stock in forever ago. This particular gas station has also removed half of their shelving units to make it look like they are better stocked than they are.

View attachment 2560754
From the local Starbies. You can drive for several hours in any direction and see this sign at almost all of the Starbies.

I have more but I'll have to drop it later, including an update on small fleet owner's experience trying to figure out a DEF work-around. No rest for the wicked and all that.

I live in an exurb and local Kroger and Walgreens are like that. All of it consumables, with a few non-consumables. I live near a lot of farms and a big transportation hub so it's been a little worrisome.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

It seems like a one two punch by the USA exporting pretty much every manufacturing job overseas (including food) and our entire western culture being based around replacing shit every fucking year regardless of quality (no more rich man/poor man boot theory). I wouldn't be surprised if the sensors needed to run the trucks cause more pollution in being manufactured and transported than the trucks could conceivably do without those. It also shows the scary reality that the few "high grade" manufacturing the USA does have are dependent entirely on possibly hostile countries.
Finally having big cities being higher on the receiving list than towns can be catastrophic if those towns aren't supplied by some local farming entity, but maybe some catastrophe will be better than the current course.

 

[Jimbobaggins]

FedEx says it's rerouting more than 600,000 packages a day because it can't find enough staff to process them. Also said in article they lost over 450 Million dollars due to labor shortages.
Locally I know of a business so desperate for workers they're spending over half a Million dollars to house new workers in hotels. They already have 100 workers in a hotel and looking for 200 more. They're also offering to pick up and drop off workers with no transportation. Another company also rented out a old hotel for 2 years to house workers, even though they have to bus them nearly 30 miles each way. This is all in a near 100k metro so not some shithole.

 

[Sanshain]

FedEx says it's rerouting more than 600,000 packages a day because it can't find enough staff to process them. Also said in article they lost over 450 Million dollars due to labor shortages.
Locally I know of a business so desperate for workers they're spending over half a Million dollars to house new workers in hotels. They already have 100 workers in a hotel and looking for 200 more. They're also offering to pick up and drop off workers with no transportation. Another company also rented out a old hotel for 2 years to house workers, even though they have to bus them nearly 30 miles each way. This is all in a near 100k metro so not some shithole.

If anything this shows how hard they were fucking over workers to begin with, if their margins were so huge they can afford to do all this on top of an increased sallery and still have a viable business model.

 

[Billy Beer]

If anything this shows how hard they were fucking over workers to begin with, if their margins were so huge they can afford to do all this on top of an increased sallery and still have a viable business model.

This is what makes me laugh about the people in the UK blaming Brexit. They say "Thanks to Brexit all of our migrant workers have gone home and now there's a shortage!" not realising that the reason there's a shortage is because the companies shafted British workers on wages and lowered them to the point where only the immigrants would do the work.

Now the chickens have come home to roost and companies are offering £1k a week to drive lorries. If they offered a fair wage like drivers wanted, years ago, there wouldn't be this issue

 

[Aqua Panda]

I won't lie, I've thought about getting a CDL and doing long haul driving.

I really like long distance driving and the extra demand/pay is appealing.

 

[Sped Xing]

That's a bit eerie since Biden has said he actively wants to break up the American meat industry and appears to be gearing up to scapegoat them for the upcoming meat shortages.

He says he wants to break up the meatpacking cartel. That's not anti-farmer or anti-consumer.

 

[DiggieSmalls]

FedEx says it's rerouting more than 600,000 packages a day because it can't find enough staff to process them. Also said in article they lost over 450 Million dollars due to labor shortages.
Locally I know of a business so desperate for workers they're spending over half a Million dollars to house new workers in hotels. They already have 100 workers in a hotel and looking for 200 more. They're also offering to pick up and drop off workers with no transportation. Another company also rented out a old hotel for 2 years to house workers, even though they have to bus them nearly 30 miles each way. This is all in a near 100k metro so not some shithole.

Fuck Fed Ex. Shitty company that treats their package handlers like shit.
I hope the go under.

 

[Puff]

No shop or trucking company is going to defeat the an emissions system on their trucks. The EPA would fuck them massively. They have handed out multi million dollar fines to companies that sold ECU flash controllers. Spartan Diesel comes to mind with their $4 million dollar fine. Another one I cant remember the name of got hit $7Million.
EPA would let people starve before they issued an emergency order suspending an emissions law.

A desperate owner operator might do it and keep his mouth shut to get his own truck to get back on the road. But thats a lot different then a trucking company full of employees who might drop a dime to the EPA.

We were floating it as something the EPA could allow in a crisis.

 

[Kramer on the phone]

If anything this shows how hard they were fucking over workers to begin with, if their margins were so huge they can afford to do all this on top of an increased sallery and still have a viable business model.

exactly, you know what would put asses in seats? $30/hr. Vince James was amazed they're paying $2+abover minimum wage at McDonalds, thats not good enough. hell even finding a job paying above $20/hr is tough in a shitload of places, especially if minimum wage is $15/hr. if corporations can pull the shit they are doing now and still make a profit that means they could have been giving people more for decades.

 

[contradiction of terns]

He says he wants to break up the meatpacking cartel. That's not anti-farmer or anti-consumer.

I didn't know how to rate you because the subject matter is complex AF. I raise poultry and have always followed agriculture issues closely. If you want to discuss the meat industry I'm here for it.

Here is the Meat Industry's response [Sept 16th, after the earlier linked article was published.]

An industry trade group has accused the Biden administration of scapegoating the nation’s meat producers instead of addressing what it says are the real reasons the price of beef has risen.

In a letter sent late Wednesday to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, the North American Meat Institute blamed a nationwide labor shortage for soaring recent food prices.

“Recent press stories report the industry’s recruitment efforts, including wage increases, signing bonuses, relocation bonuses, retention bonuses and generous benefits,” NAMI President and CEO Julie Anna Potts wrote in the letter. “This labor shortage impact is not only on processing lines but also warehouse workers, maintenance positions and other jobs critical to maintaining the supply chain.”

Now, I won't argue that Tyson (one of the companies named as 'problematic') doesn't have a history of outsourcing an almost unfair amount of costs onto the farmers they contract with for their chicken. I'm not as familiar with the other companies named, but willing to dig into it.

With that said, our meat processing was largely done by illegals prior to the pandemic. I can source some articles on it for anyone interested; Arizona had particularly bad issues. There is, in fact, a labor shortage. It's undeniable. Those rising feed costs I mentioned a few pages back? That factors into the meat prices too. Rising gas prices and transportation shortages are also going to increase costs and eat into margins.

There's a very real case to be made that the meat industry needs reforms, but I feel like this raises two questions:

1. Why now?
Mid-crisis is a terrible time to try and reform anything. The ramifications if Biden's policies further cripple or demolish the meat industry without propping up small time operations to replace the big players are mind-boggling.

2. Why the meat industry, specifically?
Biden's stated desire is to crack down on meat processors for 'profiting off the pandemic', but wouldn't you think the medical industry is profiting from the pandemic far more? What about the tech industries, which have seen record profits even as they help steal our freedoms?

Oh, wait, the meat industry doesn't benefit Biden in any way and starving people are easier to control. NM. Carry on.

 

[Focken Kiwi]

Oh, wait, the meat industry doesn't benefit Biden in any way and starving people are easier to control. NM. Carry on.

I don't know. If I was starving with no access to food, I'd find my nearest gated community and start pillaging. I'm pretty sure I'd be harder to control if I were hungry and I'm sure it'd be the same for a lot of other people.

 

[Billy Beer]

The average man is only 9 meals from a riot

 

[Fomo Hoire]

The average man is only 9 meals from a riot

Is 9 a magic number representing something, or is the general idea of food the only important thing?

 

[contradiction of terns]

I don't know. If I was starving with no access to food, I'd find my nearest gated community and start pillaging. I'm pretty sure I'd be harder to control if I were hungry and I'm sure it'd be the same for a lot of other people.

I will not argue this, but...

Consider the IQ of your average communist and that starving their enemies is a move in their playbook.

I'm not going to archive it because this isn't something I want to argue seriously. I have yet to witness anyone start screeching about global conspiracies and not get mad side-eye. The link is merely a good overview of a similar situation in Russia, and yes, it does go into the fact that the plebes became violent before they died of starvation.

Actually, to be more precise, there were no natural reasons for this famine. There was no weather issue. There were no insects, none of the things that normally cause famines. This was a famine that was entirely caused by political decisions. And so first there was a general decision about collectivization. And that meant that the Soviet peasantry - and this is all over the Soviet Union, not just in Ukraine - were forced to leave their homes and to join collective and state farms.

And this caused an enormous amount of disruption. Peasants resisted it. They fought back. Sometimes they fought back violently. There were, you know - teams of activists were sent into the villages to persuade them to do it. All of farming was reorganized. And the effect was a huge drop in food production. Partly, as people left their homes, they had no incentive on the new farms to work, but also just the general disruption led to a - far less food being available.

But as I say, that famine reached, you know, became - it became clear that people were starving in 1932. But what happened in Ukraine was that at that moment, the Soviet Union took - the Soviet Politburo took a decision to exacerbate the famine inside Ukraine. So within this general Soviet famine which affected many people in Russia and Kazakhstan and other places, there were also decisions taken that particularly affected Ukraine - the cordon drawn around Ukraine. There were villages and towns and farms that were blacklisted in Ukraine. There were - decisions that only affected Ukraine were made to make the famine worse there.

GROSS: What was Stalin's goal and collectivizing the farms and basically throwing peasants and landowners in Ukraine off the land?

APPLEBAUM: The goal of collectivization was, in effect, to turn the peasants into a kind of proletariat who would be - they wouldn't be independent. They wouldn't have their own land. They couldn't make their own decisions. They would be under state control. I think his - one of the ideas he had was that this would be more efficient. I think there was also a political reason to in that this would extend Soviet power into the countryside. So you know, inside the cities, it was easier to control people. You could nationalize industry. You could make people work. You could decide where people worked in the countryside. People had their own property. So this was, in effect, removing people's private property as a way of controlling them.

His goal in Ukraine specifically was a little bit different. In other words, the collectivization was the first wave of political changes in Ukraine. And then the famine had an additional goal, which was to weaken the sort of peasant resistance in Ukraine and to weaken the Ukrainian national movement, which he saw as being connected to the peasantry.

 

[Billy Beer]

Is 9 a magic number representing something, or is the general idea of food the only important thing?

I think it comes from some quote back in the day, which was originally 3 meals, but because we eat 3 meals a day, it's now 9. Or something.

The idea is that if the modern western man didn't eat for three days, providing he could drink water, he would lose his shit on day four.

 

[JohnDoe]

Is 9 a magic number representing something, or is the general idea of food the only important thing?

After three days of no food most people revert to the deep 'hit another ape with a rock' territory of the don't-give-a-fuck-what-happens-after lands.

 

[WinchesterWhiskey]

FedEx says it's rerouting more than 600,000 packages a day because it can't find enough staff to process them. Also said in article they lost over 450 Million dollars due to labor shortages.
Locally I know of a business so desperate for workers they're spending over half a Million dollars to house new workers in hotels. They already have 100 workers in a hotel and looking for 200 more. They're also offering to pick up and drop off workers with no transportation. Another company also rented out a old hotel for 2 years to house workers, even though they have to bus them nearly 30 miles each way. This is all in a near 100k metro so not some shithole.

Man I hope my gun parts arrive. I'm getting them shipped through FedEx from the east coast to the midwest.

 

[Fomo Hoire]

I think it comes from some quote back in the day, which was originally 3 meals, but because we eat 3 meals a day, it's now 9. Or something.

The idea is that if the modern western man didn't eat for three days, providing he could drink water, he would lose his shit on day four.

So... It's more like 9 missed meals away from a riot?

It makes more sense with that detail, I have heard the rule of 3s before even if I don't remember all the tiers.