Amanda Mull writes:

Lately, news stories about the supply chain tend to start in similar ways. The reader is dropped into an American container port, maybe in Long Beach, California, or Savannah, Georgia, full to bursting with trailer-size steel boxes loaded with toilet paper and exercise bikes and future Christmas presents. Some of the containers have gone untouched for weeks or months, waiting for their contents to be trucked to distribution centers. On the horizon, dozens of additional vessels are anchored and idle, waiting for their turn in the port. More ships keep arriving. Everyone involved—sailors, longshoremen, customs clerks, truckers—works as fast and hard as they possibly can. It’s not fast or hard enough.

The supply chain, as you know, is having a bad time. That’s been true since the pandemic began. Shortages in consumer goods have persisted far beyond analysts’ initial expectations, then beyond their subsequent revisions. At the moment, for most types of goods, shelves aren’t exactly bare yet. For the relatively well-off Americans accustomed to the astonishing abundance of big-box retail and grocery stores and the near-instant gratification of online shopping, it’s more a matter of having to settle for your third-favorite brand of Greek yogurt or wait six weeks for back-ordered jeans. But what’s already a genuine crisis for people who work in the global supply chain could very well turn into one for all of us; the manufacturing and distribution of necessities such as food and medicine require many of the same resources as the consumer economy’s various conveniences and diversions.

What news stories generally don’t show you is where all of this stuff is going. At least anecdotally, much of it seems to be headed directly into the overflowing package room in my apartment building. As Slate’s Jordan Weissmann recently pointed out, it’s not as though the volume of goods getting through this mess and to retailers has slowed to a trickle; imports last month were actually at an all-time high, eclipsing the same period in 2019 by 17 percent. Rather, Americans are buying an extraordinary amount of stuff. Especially in the past six months, the system has been rocked by explosive demand. [Continue reading…]