Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog 1/11/2022
Here’s a supply chain post that covers a few related topics and a little local reportage.
First, those long waits for port berths at LA/Long Beach are at an all-time high:
As of Friday, there were 105 ships waiting for berths at Los Angeles and Long Beach. That’s the highest number ever, according to FreightWaves.
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Second, #BareShelvesBiden has been trending on Twitter as people report largely bare shelves at their local supermarkets.
the shelves at target near my apartment. this is wild pic.twitter.com/pRaU2h5v3E
— Jordan Chamberlain (@jordylancaster) January 11, 2022
Meat selection at the local Whole Foods just outside of Philadelphia early in 2022. pic.twitter.com/GkTDKyOhBx
— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) January 10, 2022
Nothing to see here folks. No supply chain issues according to the Biden Admin. pic.twitter.com/xEXZNu4rp1
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Indeed, it seems to be happening across the country:
When you add up all of these reports, it seems like a lot of genuine and glaring problems for the White House chief of staff to dismiss as just “an overhyped narrative”!
It’s not hard to find Biden defenders who insist that the Twitter hashtag “#BareShelvesBiden” is “artificially amplified by far-right users to manipulate the trending section.” Fine, maybe they are, but consumers and local news affiliates aren’t hallucinating these empty shelves, and businesses aren’t imagining this inability to get the supplies and parts they need.
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I’m fortunate that here in Central Texas, we seem mostly unaffected. There are spot shortages of a few things at HEB (the only places I see really big holes are in luncheon meat; cuts of beef, chicken and pork in unprocessed form seem reasonably plentiful), and they’ve been out of V05 Extra Body conditioner for weeks. Sam’s also seems to be getting plentiful supplies of things, and last week they had Dog Pill Pockets (which they had been out of for several weeks before).
The nation’s supply chains may be poised to take another hit soon as Canadian vaccine mandates for truckers going into effect January 15.
Art Laffer has a recipe for fixing the problem: Get Biden Administration policies out of the way.
In an interview with “Varney & Co.” Tuesday, former Reagan economist Art Laffer called on the Biden administration to get out of the way of the supply chain crisis, arguing the administration’s economic policies are causing the problem instead of solving it.
More:
https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=50262
