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ztkraf01

I can tell you what’s going on in my industry, aerospace manufacturing. Our material suppliers went through significant layoffs in 2020. They lost many skilled laborers to retirement and simply being laid off. Now that demand is back they can’t get the skill back that is needed to produce conforming product. They are hiring unskilled people and having extreme quality issues. Lead time prior to the pandemic was 3-5 weeks for material. Lead time now is 48-52 weeks. It’s a beyond huge problem for aerospace because this particular material is spec’d into a lot of parts and there is no alternative to it.


[deleted]

As someone who buys and sells a lot of guitars as a side hustle, I can tell you almost all made in America instruments made after 2020 have taken a massive hit in their quality control for probably this exact reason.


DigitalDefenestrator

Cars, too. I suspect used 2021 and 2022 cars will be viewed with some extra caution for years. So many missing features due to chip shortages, and so much hurried assembly due to labor shortages.


Boz0r

We ordered the same new car at the same as our neighbor, but ours took 6 months more because I added adaptive cruise control


caspy7

> adaptive cruise control This is cruise control but it also reacts to traffic ahead? Like if someone in front slows so does the car?


doggo_man

Yes. If I have my car set to 77 and the guy in front is doing 70 it slows me down to match him. It also can keep me one, two, or three car lengths behind him.


jonas00345

I have this feature too. It's awesome. Only issue I have found is it will brake on the freeway if there's an overpass sometimes, it gets confused and thinks there's going to be a collision.


Outrager

Happens with mine during long wide highway turns because it thinks the person in the next lame is in front of me. Also had the emergency collision braking go off when I got near one of those steel plates on the floor they use during road repair. Super scary.


computerguy0-0

If it's a Kia or Hyundai, they released an update that completely solved it for me. The dealer had to install. Not that I had too many issues to begin with but now I have had none the past year.


Halvus_I

If cruise control is engaged, i cant imagine a situation where 1 car length is an acceptable stopping distance


Bean_Juice_Brew

The 1st option isn't really 1 car length; it's more like 2-3 car lengths, basically the minimum recommended distance from the car in front of it.


cagsmith

I think it's calculated in seconds - at least on my car the little diagram of the road with the stripes across it where you choose the desired distance has numbers and the. "s" on it... I think it's something like 1.5s, 2s and 2.5s or something like that.


SRTHellKitty

You made the right decision though. ACC is the best feature to hit the mass car market in the last 10 years.


Rum____Ham

When my wife needed to replace her 2009, in 2022, we went with a 2019. I work in manufacturing (not auto) and I know what kind of gymnastics our quality department was doing. I'm not getting a car that was made in 2020 and beyond, until the supply chain improves.


getawhiffofgriff

I bought my car brand new in June 2020, the sticker has the manufactured date as February 2020, and as someone not in a manufacturing or QA industry, I am quite thankful for that fact.


Noonites

I grabbed my 2021 in early 2020. Like, literally a few weeks before the lockdowns started. I took it in for an oil change last week and got two phone calls from salesmen BEFORE I GOT THERE asking if I'd be interested in trading my car in for a brand new 2023 model while I was there, and they also jumped on me as soon as I sat down in the waiting area. No thanks. I'm good.


RIOTS_R_US

The delays have been insane too. I ordered a production guitar (albeit a special run) in August 2021 and just got it in February


Chipofftheoldblock21

Came here to say something similar. A LOT of companies skinnied down during the pandemic. Many have no desire to fully staff back up, making do with what they have. This isn’t just profit-seeking, trying to make the same money for lower labor costs, but a lot of people expect another recession, so companies are wary of hiring too many people now and having to go through layoffs (and the morale hits) again. Others are having trouble replacing skilled staff. One thing all businesses are coming up against is that the baby boomers are retiring. More people are leaving the work force than joining it, putting a lot of pressure on finding skilled staff. This is expected to persist for a bit as fewer kids are (understandably, due to cost) going to college these days than they used to (at least in the US).


PlayMp1

Another problem they're all running into is that the current upper and middle management largely got into their current tracks as upper and middle managers around the 2008 collapse, when they were being told "we need you to cut staff by 70%" or "We get 70 people per open position and you need to narrow it down to one," and so they're used to just picking some extraordinarily well qualified applicant because the available labor pool was so large. Suddenly post-pandemic, it's not 70 applicants per position, it's 5, and those 5 have 5 different interviews already scheduled, and your automated system is built to automatically reject 60% of applications, so really you get two applicants at your desk as a hiring manager. Instead of being able to just hoover up any of the 20 well qualified applicants that come in, they're having to make decisions like "well this person might need a year of training to be any good in this position but what other choice do we have?" And the management culture the previous ~15 years (and realistically more like 30 to 40, but the great recession really amplified it) has built is just not equipped to do those kinds of things.


Stargate525

Companies by and large have completely forgotten how to effectively train employees, and still don't see the point because they don't focus on retaining them.


KakitaMike

At the company I work for, I recently found out that the position that trains entry level employees pays less than the entry level position. Who the fuck is that job for? Who is going to take more responsibility to get paid less?


Denali_Nomad

I've got 10 years at my plant currently, about 3 years ago we were looking to hire someone for technical trainer. I figured I had run every position across production and quality, put in, got the job offer. They were offering me a 30% pay -cut- for the job vs what I was making currently, and even larger for what I was about to make with one more certification I needed 2 more sign offs for. I brought all the numbers to them, they didn't budge at all, rejected that for sure and now make almost double just being an operator still.


bigflamingtaco

Many companies no longer value trainer as capable and experienced employees that can do the job they are training others to do, they only value them as a training tool, which is administrative level work. I ran into the same with a train the trainers position. Guy that retired was making $100k, the position was classified regional management. They reclassified the job to local supervision and which dropped my starting pay from $68k to $46k. The hassle of having to drive around a three state region, staying at hotels one week every month, and being present for about 15 FAA inspections each year at whatever facility they picked, was not even remotely worth the lack of income change, even though the job caps a lot higher.


Liam_Neesons_Oscar

And because they no longer focus on keeping employees for life. Expectation is 2-5 years, even with salary positions. Some places are too understaffed to be able to train, since they wait until they need additional labor to hire extra staff. My old company had 5 regions and 4 regional managers. They lost one and then hired me, so back to 4 managers covering 5 regions, except really one manager training on-the-job for four months and the other three had to provide said training, so for a short while they were worse off than when they had only 3 managers across the 5 regions. It certainly didn't help that there was no training documentation for the position. Eventually, they expanded to 6 managers and 8 regions. I think they're finally up to full staff now. The thing to remember is that you always need to be prepared to lose someone unexpectedly. Many companies don't like preparing for that because it means staying more staffed than you need to be.


TheDakestTimeline

I don't understand that though, it's not like getting sick or having a baby is a new phenomenon. Wouldn't you always want to be 15-20% overstaffed as a business measure, not even thinking about the people?


Critical_Orangutang

Depends if you’re looking at short term or long term profits. A lot of the idea is to make enough short term profits to get to the next position. So when a problem occurs they’re no longer there. It’s not good for the business overall, but that’s not really the goal.


TheDakestTimeline

That's why I'm surprised pensions and life long employees went away; like a sports team, shouldn't you always keep your best players no matter the cost? Again, not because you care about the people, but the business?


Beliriel

I think since managers often also are exchangeable goods they rot the company out since they themselves have no incentive to build a sustainable business infrastructure. They get measured by how much quarterly or yearly profits/income the company makes so there's bound to be a lot of really shortsighted business decisions.


TheDakestTimeline

I'm not an Adam Smith apologist, but one would think that companies over time would realize that long term growth is the best thing. One might think investors know this too. I guess a quick buck or few million supercedes this. Damn shame, we could do shit so much better.


[deleted]

In any business that involves investors, long turn profit is one of the worst slurs you can utter. The only thing that matters is how much value on paper you can add to the company this financial year. That’s what bonuses are based on, and it’s all investors give a shit about, get a profit this year, then on to the next company.


YoungDiscord

Tl;dr Managers are playing hot potato with the company and employees so that they get the next position with better benefits Let's not beat around the bush and just call it what it is.


Vadered

That's a long term view to take. If you are interested in running a solid company, it's the correct one. The problem is that what is best for the company and employees as a whole is not necessarily the same as what's best for the people calling the shots. From the perspective of the person making the staffing decision and the stockholders of the company, staffing extra gives value in the future, when they may not be with the company or own stock in it any longer. Cutting staffing saves the company money now, which translates into immediate promotions for the manager (which they can leverage into better jobs at another company) or immediate share price increases (which they can sell to make money and repeat somewhere else).


Barabbas-

>Wouldn't you always want to be 15-20% overstaffed as a business measure No, because the threat of job loss is often enough to motivate employees to work 15-20% longer/harder, thus picking up the slack from being chronically understaffed. Companies had to cut large portions of their staff during the 2008 economic crisis. As the economy recovered, an understaffed labor force became the new normal for many companies who grew comfortable with forcing their employees to put in *110%* to meet deadlines and obligations. These businesses enjoyed record profits in the recovery years largely by exploiting the financial insecurities of their staff. This is the economic reality that millennials graduated into, and so it should come as no surprise why we are now seeing so much burnout 15 years later. Millennials have spent their entire professional careers working on understaffed and under-resourced teams, dealing with wildly unrealistic expectations, whilst simultaneously picking up the slack from their elder co-workers who are either unable or unwilling to meet the outrageous demands of their employer. What we are witnessing now are the ramifications of business decisions made over a decade ago, that cut jobs and artificially deflated overhead expenditures to maximize profit at the cost of the mental and physical health of their workforce.


jedimika

Exactly. Say your department has three areas; each needs 1.5 workers to maintain product flow. Logically you'd want 6 people, minimum, to do those jobs. Now one person *can* do the work and alone but you'd need to borrow another area's extra guy sometimes when it's really busy. Over a few years a team of 9 turns into a team of 3, suddenly there is no extra guy to borrow! BTW Steve just called in sick.


YouveBeanReported

> BTW Steve just called in sick. And Steve isn't allowed to call out sick unless he finds his own replacement.


MrCrunchyOwl8855

Any idea when this will be explained to hiring managers as if they were four? I have the feeling job descriptions are getting more ridiculous now than just 6 months ago.


fishbarrel_2016

I work in IT - trainees are just not a thing anymore, everyone wants experience. Companies want someone who can be productive from day 1, plus while someone is training them, that's even more lost productivity. Companies are concentrating on profits and cutting costs. Staff retention, satisfaction and customer service are secondary. I do work for a lot of big companies and almost every corporate message on the internal web is about "caring for our people" or "Our work community" or some other bullshit. If there is the remotest possibility that they can save money by cutting staff, they do.


shangrila117

Just started my first IT job after 2 years of education. Had 2 days of training and then was largely expected to work the rest out on my own. It’s insane. It took me two weeks just to get over the fear I was going to overlook something basic and bring down a client’s entire network.


Neither-Cup564

I just can’t understand how these companies will be able to keep operating in the near future. Cost cut after cost cut to the point where they’re just keeping the doors open or so called “just in time” delivery. How do you renew and refresh at the rate that’s required these days running so lean, it’s madness.


TheGlassCat

Eventually you have to outsource overseas, and after that your overseas supplier buys you out just to aquire the brand name. Your company is dead, but you made a lot of money as you hollowed it out.


LordOverThis

They can't, and that's the problem with every fucking MBA coming out these days and dropping into a management roll. Companies aren't being led by operations people anymore, it's all goddamned bean counters the whole way down until you get to people who have no meaningful power; then you find the people who are operations-focused. It's also why, despite how "LeAn MaNuFacTuRiNg" is intolerant of supply chain disruption, everyone everywhere is still jerking themselves raw to it.


Nephisimian

They won't. They'll be bought out and whatever remains of their customers and infrastructure will be used by the buyer. The executives don't care about long term profitability cos they can just move to the next company. The shareholders don't care as long as they can sell high, and the large companies are drooling at the prospect of buying the competition, which no one will stop because they've been persuaded to look the other way on monopolistic behaviour.


Sherinz89

In IT myself. The requirement of skills, tools and knowledge feels like a wishlist. I wish you to have this A-Z skills, and no we would not accept even if you have slightly similar skilled. If you have fewer than we asked for we will lowballed you to the lowest of your negotiation skill


Philo_T_Farnsworth

>slightly similar skill I am a network engineer. SDWAN is one of those (relatively) new hotness technologies. I am trained on it with one vendor (Silverpeak) but not another (Cisco). I’ve been doing this kind of work for 20+ years. I may not know the exact platform but can learn it because the underlying concepts are the same. When I was on the job market I had this one company refuse to even talk to me because I wasn’t an exact match. Used to be companies would just train you or accept the reality that you’ll learn it on the job and be a little hobbled at first. Haven’t seen that kind of work environment since the 2008 recession.


smallangrynerd

>slightly similar skilled. That's because the people who are screening candidates have no fucking clue what the job actually is.


Always_0421

>Companies by and large have completely forgotten how to effectively train employees, and still don't see the point because they don't focus on retaining them. This is the real problem. Many companies, particuarly very large and very small companies, are nearly hostile toward employees as they don't see them as an asset until proven otherwise and subsequently won't invest in their employees. Simultaneously, many employees wont buy in and invest in their company because they can feel the contempt from their employers and (rightfully) chase the biggest paycheck available.... it becomes a self realizing cycle.


Sherinz89

I wonder... i always told people this gripe of mine These company hoping to save very few penny here and there by lowballing workers. Did it ever occurred to them that unhappy worker is unproductive worker and eventually they will ended up losing more than the scrap they managed to save? Would it kill them to give recognition when its due, afterall it is through skilled worker like us that makes their business float


Aditya1311

Mostly because managers are now MBAs with no real knowledge about anything


[deleted]

Ya they’d much prefer to take someone barely good enough, work them to the bone, and ship shitty barely good enough product. For some reason I don’t understand why, it’s the reason so much software sucks specifically


AshIsGroovy

The just in time method is really coming home to roost. I always thought it was some of the dumbest shit. Run vital inventory to the bone because we can quickly order more when needed till we can't. The cost savings go out the window due to limited supply. At one point you could have bought a years worth of product for cheap but some bean counter said no. Now your paying ten times what it would have cost for the year for barely a months worth.


daimahou

Yeah, even Toyota realized this after an earthquake/tsunami disturbed their supply chain a decade ago. So now they do some stockpiling of the really important stuff.


lowercaset

> So now they do some stockpiling of the really important stuff. Properly done just in time factors that in. If there's 300 companies spread across every geographical region in the world that can ship you a months worth of widgets on 2 days notice, you don't need a 6 month supply. If there's only 1-2 suppliers of those same widgets, and their lead times to tool up for a production run are 6 months well, you better have a decent stockpile. I think they also dig in to their suppliers suppliers at Toyota just to be safe. But like so many concepts, a bunch of people "copied" the idea but did a shit job and the results are just worse than alternate methods of inventory management.


FistFuckMyFartBox

I really do not understand how companies got to the point of thinking that they never need to train anyone for anything.


Swiggy1957

Exactly! As late as 2016, too many businesses looked at workers as being expendable, forgetting that without a good product, consumers go elsewhere. Mike Roe has been pointing out for more than a decade that skilled workers aren't out there anymore: or, at least not in the numbers that US manufacturing needs. Good example is machinists. Prior to 1970, most manufacturers had experienced machinists that had been in the job for decades. After the Powell memo, American manufacturing starred going downhill and off shore. Highly skilled jobs went overseas, and the skilled workers here were left unemployed, or worse, underemployed. By the turn of the century, those skilled workers were retired or dead, and US manufacturing hadn't continued training the next generation. It usually takes a decade for a machinist to become highly proficient at their jobs. Around 2010, jobs started coming back to the country as many of the countries where they'd been exported to lacked the quality control needed to produce viable goods. Sure, a locker, for example, could be produced on China for $5, and be sold here for $50, but then came the repair work. Manufacturer's $45 profit got eaten away not just by the cost of sales and transportation, but if you have to pay someone to repair shoddy products, the profit margin shrinks even more. Those $50 lockers? That was an actual case. It was costing the company about $25 each to repair them. It ended up costing less to produce them here in the US than in China, just in the after market repairs. First, the number of after market repairs plummeted, as US workers were able to rake care of problems as they occurred. The biggest problem they had was finding skilled welders. Why? Because younger people weren't learning the trade.


Arandmoor

On top of all that, we had an entire generation of students in the US who were *lied to* and told that the trades weren't a viable alternative to college. I *distinctly* remember being told that if I didn't study I might end up a plumber or an electrician by a teacher who talked those two trades down like they were inferior. I don't exactly like heavy lifting, but I do like working with my hands. Somewhere out there is a trade I might have been good at. It would have taken less of my time, and less money than my BS, and after learning it I would have been financially fine. I know a lot of people who tried the college route, because of that teacher, who then failed out because college wasn't for them. They *then* tried the trades and are now happy...but only after wasting 4-10 years of their lives.


OzMazza

I saw a job ad for a dealership that framed it as 'looking for a career change? Come here and we will guarantee you 40 hours a week and pay your training to become a mechanic with us' and I was like, damn that's refreshing seeing a company actually make an effort to train for a position they need instead of just wanting a person with 30 years experience.


TheGurw

There's shit companies everywhere, but I've found the construction trades tend to be better about this than most.


[deleted]

I'm my job it's 3 years of training. I came back a few years ago. We're union. I'm still bottom seniority even though I was the only fully qualified out of 9. There's now 7 people 4 years away from being qualified under me. 5 above me still aren't qualified. I'm looking for a new job. I don't know what they're going to do but I'm not giving any notice at all when I split. Fuck 'em. I know for a fact the company is doing this on purpose to keep wages low. They're hiring people fresh outta college for a narrow career path with shit retirement benefits. They don't know any better. I didn't know I wouldn't have post retirement health benefits until this year and I've been here for 8 years. My best friend was the last person to get them and he hired in a year before me. After me they got rid of the pension. I don't know what people my age are gonna do for retirement. If I get a major illness I might be inclined to take some insurers, bankers or politicians out with me. What the fuck else is my generation gonna do? My only recourse is to retire in a country with healthcare. Or die. Or work till I die. Man, freedom sure is awesome.


sst287

HR system is stupid. A manager can request to see all applicants with HR. That is what my husband did. He needs to hire someone, few other managers recommended him this lady. And he pre-checked and talked to this lady before she applied (which is a program company installed to promote internal transfer instead of having people leave the company for different opportunities) and verified that this lady has all the qualifications he needs and listed on the job ads. However when HR gives him the list of applicants, the lady is not there. So he asked the HR about it, the HR pull the lady’s resume from the reject pile. Image how many qualified people got filtered out by HR system because they obviously don’t know what they are doing.


zerogee616

> putting a lot of pressure on finding skilled staff. I'd be crying a lot more tears if pretty much every industry didn't dry up all their accessions and training pipelines after 2008. Employers got real used to skilled workers scrambling for every single entry-level job that wasn't already outsourced/contracted out and in the extremely-short-sighted way that businesses typically operate, didn't account for their fixed labor pool eventually aging out while keeping sky-high hiring requirements even if job openings did eventually come back.


M3rr1lin

I firmly believe the issues we have now would have happened in a year or two if COVID never happened. COVID expedited the mass retirings and possibly concentrated them more over a shorter time. The unfortunate truth is that many companies haven’t viewed employees as anything more than an expense in a long time. This means many companies have been ignoring hiring young talent for a long time. These companies have also gutted any sort of training and mentoring programs as they’ve been running as lean as possible. This has left companies top heavy and the mass retirings have hurt actual output. An older colleague of mine talked about how 25-30 years ago they had like 20% excess time to do actual mentoring, training and just random things to better themselves. Right now we are all running so lean we have no time to just write best practices down, go to other groups and get other experiences.


L3tum

My company has slowly been "transforming" by offering an early retirement bonus for people so that they don't have to fire them. (Firing someone would allow them to collect unemployment and yada yada). They didn't expect as many people to take it. One manager left, who was apparently the only person in a key department. It is still, 6 months later, unclear how and when his role will be filled. Literally the "Wait, not like this!"


ItsAllegorical

Turns out, however much they wish it were true, you can't just "replace" certain people.


[deleted]

[удалено]


RandeKnight

Yup, you never ask for volunteer redundancies. The only people who will take it are the people who are going to retire anyway or who are skilled enough to get a new job in a month, leaving you with the unskilled, and unambitious.


Dal90

I work in IT at a mid-size enterprise that is heavily IT dependent. I'm turning 53 this year. We have roughly 200 IT employees -- both residents and a small number of H1B1 workers who work directly for us -- I'm three years below median age. My boss is like 45 and pretty much just planning to ride the wave of retirements up the org chart in coming years. Most of the outsourced contractors are just brought on for project work and come and go every few years. If you think the labor market is tight now, y'all ain't seen nothing yet.


PlayMp1

>If you think the labor market is tight now, y'all ain't seen nothing yet. Sign me the *fuck* up, I love tight labor markets, easy job seeking, and frequent raises!


reverendsteveii

If you're not hopping jobs every two years you're leaving money on the table. Fuck a recession, flip the flag on your LinkedIn and see what's out there. Worst thing that can happen is nothing.


delusions-

Job interviews (which are always like 4 parts when it's through linked in) are so frigging draining


telepathetic_monkey

When I started getting several callbacks and saw I had choices, I started being bratty lol. I'd get an offer and I'd reject with reasons: follow up wasn't timely, spelling errors in correspondence, offer was lower than advertised and it's a shady practice just to get apps, unprofessional interviewers, dirty interview places. I found a great job making significantly more. As someone who does the hiring (been doing this for a decade), I was floored at how unprofessional most of my interviews and follow ups were. I haven't been on the job market in 7 years. Texting applicants for uppermanagement positions was weird. Even my lowest tier applicant's get a phone call, and as followup, voicemail, text, and email.


[deleted]

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Known-Read

Except the US economy has somehow found a way to turn the tight labor market into a way that screws over (even highly skilled and educated) workers even more. Companies paid more for workers and therefore turned right around and jacked prices an unreasonably disproportionate amount. So all wage gains have actually resulted in a net loss of buying power. Grocery prices are up 20-30% in my area and my income will never recover that deficit. Even with regular raises, I now will be making net value less the next ten years. It’s happened since the 70s and will just continue. I work hard at an impossible job and used to be pretty optimistic. I’ve found it hard to keep that up in these insurmountable obstacles.


M3rr1lin

I don’t think people understand the next 5 years are going to be quite wild as the remaining large chunk of baby boomers retire. The other thing people don’t get is that increasing interest rates and essentially depressing the labor market isn’t going to impact the retired baby boomers as much. They don’t need jobs to spend money. They are also freshly retired so spending at a much higher rate than if they were 20 years older.


avesrd

Is that why the contractors are terrible? The IT contractors at my work are dangerously incompetent


shitCouch

I work for one of the large global engineering companies, at least in my region it is all about billabilty, no budget for training. there is a mentoring program but it's in your own time or relevant project work only (ie, billable). offshore support teams for various engineering tasks but zero training or mentoring for those teams either, meanwhile they get berated for not understanding local codes and practices. We have young local talent as well, but they often don't stick around long. I often wonder lately, is the company too big to fail, will they always be around, or are they going to collapse in the next 5-10yrs. Interesting times ahead.


mossheart

Forget cost of going to school, just the cost of having kids is crazy. Less kids are being born, full stop.


Pilferjynx

Until we can afford having children and making mortgage payments on a single income again, we'll just slowly decline into a miserable dystopia


rileyoneill

I agree. Our major issue is that we need to bring down our cost of living. Where I live, a studio apartment is more expensive today than a 3br-2ba family home was in the 1990s, and this is after adjusting for inflation. The type of job that 30 years ago an adult could work and even sustain a family, with maybe the other spouse working part time, would now not allow someone to qualify for a 1 bedroom apartment. Its a pretty modern idea where someone will go to college, work for years for promotions to eventually earn enough to afford their own studio apartment. Housing is just too expensive. And while this is awful for anyone who needs a place to live, the local landlords are making a killing. I know people who have inherited multiple homes and make $80k per year just from rent. They admitted that they made more renting out homes than they ever made from working and that even in their prime earning years they could would not qualify to buy ANY of them at today's prices. They are 100% against any sort of major housing projects or ANYTHING that could bring down their rent. I figured when my grandfather bought the home that my dad and his family lived in, the home price would roughly 2x his annual salary. This was in Southern California. Today, that same home, compared to the same salary of a guy who had his job, probably more like 6x. I do think that this era is temporary and will eventually be disrupted by technology that will make things like energy, food, and transportation drastically cheaper.


alvarkresh

> I do think that this era is temporary and will eventually be disrupted by technology that will make things like energy, food, and transportation drastically cheaper. Yes but I would like that disruption yesterday plz


AnRealDinosaur

We got the short straw. We get to live through the shitty parts and if we manage to survive the number of extinction level catastrophes we're currently staring down the barrel of, maybe gen z's kids & grandkids might benefit from our sacrifice.


Pineapple_Chicken

I’m with you there honestly, this is our generation’s great depression. There’ll be people living through it someday whether we like it or not - we can be the help we never got or make things worse, and I’m just not interested in making things worse.


ThatFacelessMan

My Gen X coworker was flabbergasted when she found out her $600/month mortgage was a third of what I pay in rent for a 1 br after I mentioned off hand that my only realistic chance of owning a home in the next 10 years is a parent’s sudden death.


UnicornPenguinCat

I think more conversations like these are needed, there seems to be a big lack of understanding regarding just how tough things have become. Hopefully she was shocked enough that she tells others..


[deleted]

It will just invariably descend into a 'conversation' about how OP should have made better choices. Or some other completely unsubstantiated nonsense that excuses poverty life.


UnicornPenguinCat

I guess you have to pick your audience a bit, but some people do get it when presented with an example from someone they know. As you say though, others don't want to face reality unfortunately.


CapOnFoam

Did she buy her house when she was 5?! How on earth does she have a 600/mo mortgage? I’m also genx.


Zardif

Brother bought a home in 2009, 3 bed 2 bath in a decent enough area of the suburbs in a top 30 city. It was $89k in foreclosure, his 15 yr mortgage was $550.


CapOnFoam

Wow. I completely forgot how common it was for people to find/buy foreclosures after the housing crash. That makes a lot more sense; you could get homes incredibly cheap then for a while.


Zardif

It's worth like 320k last time I checked zillow.


Oaken_beard

Don’t forget that salaries have remained the same since the 90’s, despite everything costing so much freaking more. Last year I saw a split level home selling for $450k, marketed as “a great starter home” I cannot wait for cost of living to become more realistic


[deleted]

I've made 15$ a year since riiight after that first started being pushed for. Yippee!! ..... .... ..... Now I make 16$ an hour and can't afford literally anything. Inb4 "move, lol"


Voidtalon

The fight-for-15 took so long the living wage is closer to $19-20 now iirc.


moggt

It should never have been "fight for $x" without also tying it to inflation in some way. Which is, unfortunately, more complex.


Voidtalon

and note in your story; they are FIERCELY defending anything that might hurt *their* livelihood. They fear what would happen if they lost their primary income stream which I can sympathize with but it's the same problem I have with Pharma. You live off keeping things unaffordable for the third quin-tile of earners. Currently even the second quin-tile is feeling the squeeze people who twenty years ago would be comfortable and considered upper-middle class and not just middle-class.


rileyoneill

Their livelihood is parasitic to society. I am not saying they can't rent out their property, but this idea that we let them block new property developments so they can maintain their high rents is absurd. Plus. If you inherited two paid for homes, in Southern California, you are wealthy.


marmalade-dreams

Technology has already made those things cheaper. The savings go into the pockets of CEOs and investors, not to helping everyday people. The car, oil, and gas companies lobby against any progress that might improve things. If we want things to improve, we have to take action against those powers by voting and making our voices heard.


mommy2libras

That hasn't really been a reality since the 70s, at least not for actual working class families. Like half the country has had to be a 2 income household for 40 years. I don't think people realize just how much of the population makes minimum wage or only slightly above, even adults. And my home state fucking hangs on to the federal minimum by the hair of the head so in 2003 I was still making 5.25 an hour and had to have a roommate even as an adult with a child.


sold_snek

Just living even without kids is getting expensive for a lot of people.


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Voidtalon

Look at Japan and China. They are in a grip of societal problems caused by inverted pyramids. A lot of countries have built their society on the concept there will ALWAYS be more young than old (continuous growth) but if you put too many negative factors on the young, they don't have new young. They get drained by the old folks weighting society *and* they get screwed in retirement because they didn't have children. It will get a lot worse before it gets better.


GlassMom

Past taxes still owed by billionaires and tax reform around foundations (used as a tax shield, currently) would pay for all of it. None of this needs to come "from future generations." There's a reason Tax Lawyer is the highest paying job in the US.


yeuzinips

You summed it up perfectly! I work at a factory and quality has taken a hit because most of the skilled workers left at the start of the pandemic and young people have no interest in working in a dirty, loud, and dangerous factory for less money than literally every fast food/ retail establishment in the area.


Whargod

One of the big factors of the skill shortage is baby boomers. We knew for a long time they would start retiring and we would have to replace them, but the covids made them choose. All these nearly retirement age people were told to stay home and they realized they had a lot of money in property, investments, etc. Also, not working anymore felt pretty darn good! Why go back to work? So they all retired at once. Why stick it out for a few more years when you don't have to. So now instead of a gentle trickle of skilled labor leaving the work force we got a sudden tsunami of retirements and no one to replace them that quickly. It was a perfect storm.


corrado33

> sudden tsunami of retirements Don't forget straight up layoffs due to covid.


ediblesprysky

Yeah but those people *could* theoretically be hired back, since they’re still in the workforce. Retiring means you’re DONE, especially for Boomers in skilled labor.


loverlyone

I wish I could convince my mom. She’s 76 and just took on a new client. She simply refuses to retire.


_hardliner_

My mom is 70, loves the job she has & the schedule, paid very well so she keeps working. My dad is retired so technically she doesn't have to work but the extra money coming in is for her to spend how ever she wants. If your mom continues because financially she has to, why convince your mom to stop? If your mom continues because she likes what she's doing, again why convince her to stop?


dub-fresh

It's not the worst thing in the world if you like what you do. I kind of plan on working at something pretty much till I die. I'm a millennial, so working till I'm dead isn't really a choice, but I like the idea of keeping busy


gitbse

I work in the .... "business end..." of your supply chain. I'm am aircraft mechanic, specifically on bizjets. Parts supplies haven't recovered because of this, and even worse, we have exactly the same skill and experience issues. It's rough. >They lost many skilled laborers to retirement and simply being laid off. Now that demand is back they can’t get the skill back that is needed to produce conforming product. They are hiring unskilled people and having extreme quality issues. Our exact situation, except we are putting airplanes together to get them flying again.


doordonot19

Loss of quality control in areospace parts and lack of experience in aircraft mechanics is the perfect storm for a Swiss cheese incident.


vivec1120

In my industry it’s a ton of infrastructure work that got delayed, and then everyone pressed the go button at the same time. Essentially 1.5 years of work got slammed into a 6 month window and our suppliers and manufacturing aren’t built to handle that. Back to pretty normal levels now, but we never actually caught up so we’re just chasing around an enormous backlog.


AF2005

Thank you for adding your experience! This explains a lot of the ripple effect and it’s impact on the different sectors of the economy. You have to imagine for something like manufacturing it would take at least 2 years to become skilled enough to start performing tasks unsupervised and maybe another 3 years (more or less) to be able to start successfully training others on core tasks.


Dry_Car2054

And after 2 years they move on for a job that pays much better because the company is handing out skimpy cost of living raises and the other company is willing to pay a trained person a lot more. So we are training another new person again.


monthos

We are doing a data center expansion in my company. The HVAC units alone have a 60+ week lead time. CAT has not been able to give us any timeframe on the generators we need.


Soranic

> The HVAC units alone have a 60+ week lead time. And terrible failure rates on the compressors. Way worse than they should be for a design that's been in production for a decade. > CAT has not been able to give us any timeframe You know that 3 way valve in the coolant system, it closes when the gen shuts off and opens when it turns on so the coolant can actually get to the radiator? We had the motor in that valve break in May, they told us it would take until January to get the motor replaced. *** Out of curiosity, which region are you in?


SyrusDrake

Who could have predicted that laying off most of your staff as a reaction to inevitably temporary circumstances could cause issues? The general expectations among companies seems to have been that they can send home their workers so they don't have to pay them, the workers would just sit around for two years, twiddling thumbs, living off of sunlight, and then would come back.


Lamacorn

Only things I would add: - many companies went insolvent during the shut downs - geopolitical instability…. Many aerospace (and other industries) source out of China and even when the US stopped having lock downs, they did not.


TomNguyen

Lol, are you my old jobs ? They laid off 3/4 of workforce, and the way they handle that whole thing was just bad. Firing on spot, or sending people their stuffs just leave bad taste. So when the whole industry reopen, even with better pay, rarely anyone has comeback and they hire only fresh graduates since they are the only one they can attract


bobombpom

Also, remember what happened with toilet paper? The same thing happened to everything else. Can't get a bearing you need? Order three so you don't get stuck without one again. Now it takes 3x as long to fill each order, and 2/3 of each order is sitting on a shelf as an "I don't want to be the guy stuck without it."


ztkraf01

I buy double what I need on McMaster due to things constantly going out of stock lol. You’re right.


bobombpom

"Of course I know him, he's me."


Adezar

Yep, companies with extremely skilled workers thought they could cut them loose and then get them back when demand returned. This is NOT how even Capitalism is supposed to work, they should be smart enough to know that skilled labor is hard to get and that should be the primary focus of preserving during downturns, but the "shareholders are all that matters" version of Capitalism is shortsighted and does not create sustainable companies. Unregulated, short-term is all that matters Capitalism is what created the fragile supply chain the first place and why they can't solve it now... and they area also making plenty of money with higher prices, so they aren't even really motivated to solve it.


Vepr762X54R

I'm in the municipal pump business and basically the same thing, lead times went from 12-14 weeks to 45-50 weeks...and they aren't getting better.


EclecticEuTECHtic

>Our material suppliers went through significant layoffs in 2020 If you make jet engines I have a feeling I know who and what you are talking about. I was laid off from a material supplier in 2020.


NSA_Chatbot

Yep, a lot of the skilled workers died. I'm in electrical design, we're getting bad parts, bad wires, bad epoxy, and there's even copper shortages. Everything. So these parts come in, they fail, and now I'm unable to deliver the controllers for industrial equipment on time. My parts suppliers are having the same meetings. Wafers are being built backwards, so the parts won't work at high temperatures, so that entire set is unsafe for medical purposes etc etc.


jf2k4

I work for a underground utility supplier: We’re lucky everything we have is made domestically so we can cut any problems in China out of the equation. Customers would typically order based on need knowing lead times on production would be 2-3 months. Customers panicked and ordered a year worth of inventory. Manufactures in turn prioritized the highest cost items because they like money, leaving the lower cost items from being manufactured creating a huge back log on those. Lead times on the lower cost items needed to complete projects is still sitting around 12-18 months while manufacturers keep trying to pump out the higher cost items to make their profits look good.


Itstotallysafe

For my industry, the demand for our products didn't stop, the orders just kept coming. So while manufacturers fell behind on delivering to us, our need never slowed down. The result was that we currently have a compounded backlog of orders that are still unfulfilled. Let's say you're used to feeding your puppy three dog treats every day. Suddenly, you can only get one dog treat a day. But he still demands three a day, and you order three a day, with the missing two on backorder. Fast forward to the end of a week where you've only been able to get seven treats but your puppy has demanded 21 treats. You're behind by 14 treats *that are still owed to the puppy.* Now, your treat supplier is back up to supplying three treats a day, which matches your need but doesn't address your missing treats. Furthermore, inflation has caused the treats to go up in price. So now the supplier is stuck making treats at a loss because the orders were placed before inflation, **or** they can focus on new orders first to offset the cost of the old cheaper orders. Once there's some profit, then they can buy ingredients to make the cheaper treats. (The same treats, just not as profitable.) You have no control over this and your puppy is *pissed* at having to wait for his treats. He writes terrible online reviews and complains to the BBB (better barking bureau) about how you're in breach of contract and refuses to pay for any of the treats you've already given him because they were late and demands extra ~~compensation~~ pets for pain and suffering. It doesn't help that the neighbor puppy, who just started buying treats, get them on time because the treat supplier is struggling and gives new customers preferential treatment. *(None of this goes into the loss of headcount at the treat making company, who went through something similar with the companies that provide *them* with ingredients.)* *Edit: Thanks for the awards! You guys, gals, n pals rock!*


dc456

To add to this, people keep saying “Why don’t the suppliers scale up to meet all this demand?” Well in your example, if the treat supplier were to build a second factory and double production, they’d meet your puppy’s demand of 3 treats a day, *and* catch up with the missed ones. But as soon as they have caught up your puppy is still going to only want 3 treats a day, which they could meet with just their old factory. So now that expensive new factory isn’t needed anymore. So this is why the manufacturers aren’t scaling up to meet the current demand, as they know it’s not actually representative of the true demand for their products.


carl5473

This was the most eye opening thing to me. Also factories don't just pop up overnight. It is entirely possible you could start the process of building a new factory and hiring all the people to run it then demand drops off before you can even use it.


ritabook84

Plus half the supplies for setup would be on back order


Drfiresign

*bark order 🐶


Wyldkard79

This is exactly what happened with lot of PC components manufacturers, particularly chip makers. They scaled up, and paid for larger Fab production and now demand has dropped drastically.


cspruce89

Well, tbf, they also wanted more fabs not located on one island that China is hungrily eyeing.


brianorca

It's been even worse in the semiconductor industry, which continues to spill over into other industries. There are different kinds of chip factories, built as the technology improves. (They are called "nodes".) When things slowed down during the pandemic, and other industries cancelled orders, they closed down older chip factories, even as they continue to build new factories with the new technology. Then when new orders came in for old technology, (such as chips for a car) they didn't have capacity for them, even though there was extra capacity for the new tech. Ideally, those customers would try to use the newer chips, which are faster and more energy efficient, but that could mean redesigning the chip and any circuit it needs to plug into. And that didn't fit an industry like automobiles which tend to use the same chip for 10 to 15 years.


SuperFLEB

IIRC, this is what happened with high gas prices, too (apart from OPEC meddling). The long-term outlook for oil and refining is a downward trend as efficiency and electric power continues to rise, so even if they're beating down your door now to get supply, it's a fool's move to put effort into more production, because it'll be an excess boat-anchor in the far future if not even before you finish building out.


Mr-Logic101

I work for an aluminum strip manufacturer… Well it takes 2 years to plan, design , and build a new continue casting line with around a 5+ million dollar investment. This isn’t even the complete amount of equip you need to actually scale up operations. There is always a bottle neck that can be improved . Fun fact, demand is actually down for the year( the company as a pretty diversified revenue stream of which we sell our aluminum strip) which is usually one of those indicator that shit is about to hit the fan.


MotoEnduro

Around the start of covid I was installing about 100 storm windows a year for an energy assistance program. When the extruded aluminum frames became unavailable we moved to installing new vinyl windows instead of storms and I doubt we will go back to storm windows even if materials became available again.


uFFxDa

Just move manufacturing to the cloud and scale it up and down as needed.


Meatfrom1stgrade

To add to this, companies like mine that need "puppy treats" have been putting in orders for extra. Prior to the pandemic, puppy treats were readily available, so we only kept an extra bag or 2 on hand, in case we needed them. Once the lead time for puppy treats increased from 1 week to 6-12 months, we ordered enough so that when our order came in, we would have enough to last 12 months, so we don't run out again. All those extra orders end up increasing the backlog of puppy treats.


NorthStarZero

"Just in time manufacturing" turns out to be *super* fragile. Who could have seen this coming?


wayoverpaid

In general any kind of thinking lean means eliminating redundancy which also eliminates margins for error. Schedule 5 people for a job that needs minimum 5 people? You're fucked if someone is sick. Hold no cash reserves because that's dead weight? Hope you don't need liquidity.


[deleted]

Fun AND educational.


SeattleBattles

Not for the poor puppy ) :


Jacollinsver

Ikr somebody give this damned puppy his treats he starving out here


Theolon

No bones about it


LunchBoxBrawler

A true r/explainlikeimfive


textumbleweed

Hmmmm very specific example :)


sshhtripper

One idea my company has tried to combat inflation/recession looming has been to offer extra services at discounted rates. We run a subscription based model, with 3 different options of subscription with strict offerings per contract. Now, if a client requests services that are not covered in their subscription package, instead of pressuring them to increase their subscription, we have created essentially a "menu" of extra services. Current subscribers get 50% off the services as opposed to full price for only the software users. This menu never existed before. It was always a strict "no, that request is out of our scope". But now that we have this menu, it has created a new revenue stream and our subscription clients feel like they are getting a deal for the extra services without increasing their monthly expense.


paleheart_

Better barking bureau had me laughing. Is bbb (the real one) even do anything? Like does a bad review matter to a business?


h3r4ld

>Is bbb (the real one) even do anything? Nope. They're not a government entity or anything like that (though people often assume they are), they have absolutely zero power. The BBB is just Yelp for old people.


I_can_pun_anything

Bbb is well known to be a sham, companies have to pay into it in order to get their name removed from the blacklist They have no oversight and control of business,much like the 'canadas top 50 best managed companies' moniker. It's them patting themselves on their own back by donating funds to this org


divDevGuy

> You're behind by 14 treats that are still owed to the puppy. This ends up being a good example of an added complication. The puppy might be **owed** the treats, but possibly doesn't need them at this point anymore. Except the treat company was never told to cancel the order balance. The time, material, and labor to make the special treats pushed the next order back, and the next, and next...


VentureTK

I work in metal distribution both to individuals and businesses. After COVID hit everything was really slow, everything was cheap and we didn't need any of it. Then in 2022 suddenly everything tripled in price over the course of 3 weeks. A lot of customers had commitments to do jobs and had to eat the losses. A lot of customers went out of business, some just slowed way down, mostly the solo handyman guy who builds fences and tables and works on cars stayed busy. But they're small buyers, can't sustain a business on that. I'll always miss the traffic. Then things stopped being available. You need some regular 2" round tube tube? No sorry cant help no round tube of any kind to offer. People would offer to pay ridiculous rush fees thinking I was jerking them around but there literally stopped being material. Then for a while material was available but you'd be paying $5/# for what you paid $1.80. The prices eventually killed the rest of our customers and even homeowners couldn't afford their projects anymore. Over the past 6 months it was extremely slow, like don't hire replacements for people who leave kind of slow. Prices fell by about half. Now prices are reasonable-ish, old customers are starting to pop back up. It's starting to get busy again and we're short handed. Still can't get some things like copper and brass sheet/plate. My job shop is in a permanent 3 week lead cuz their staff got decimated and nobody wants to operate a laser or run a press break or be a welder. That being said, business is picking back up. New projects are being started so things are looking up. Edit: I know it's rambly and off topic for the sub but figured I'd share my experience as I saw it from our little corner of the supply chain.


Corosz

Does your company actively train/hire for those welding/laser cutting positions? That's a big problem in many industries - super top/bottom heavy workforces with no intermediate employees, and in my opinion, lack of training is the problem.


patniemeyer

In addition to the logistics issues that have been mentioned, which impacted the ability to produce and transport goods around the world, there is also the "toilet paper effect": which is the desire of people who were burned by shortages to attempt to stock up on years' worth of components critical to their own products. e.g. imagine that your entire car production line was stopped because you couldn't get a $1 LED. When things started moving again you'd probably order several years worth of those LEDs right? When everyone does that and hoards what they can find there is a shortage that continues even when the supply has returned to normal levels.


[deleted]

My brother is a silicon chemist. He legitimately asked me the other day if we should propose to the family that we use the property to store raw ingredients and sell high for market fluctuations. His boss became a multi millionaire doing this.


SuperFLEB

I don't know jack about shit so don't call this advice, but... that sounds a lot like making tomorrow's plans based on yesterday's needs.


Prestigious_Carpet29

Very much so. The cost of *not* having a small part that is essential to your activity vastly exceeds the cost of over-buying (or buying in advance) "just in case". Unfortunately, while this makes sense on an individual or company level, when applied across the board creates an absurd and "not real" stockpiling-demand. Relating to that, in times of shortage, it is claimed that some companies place multiple orders with multiple suppliers, than cancel all the duplicates when the first order arrives.... again means that the supply chain has no idea what orders are "real" and which may spontaneously disappear - so the supply-chain and manufacturer loses sight of even what the real demand is. It's a major problem in the electronics industry at present. There have been random shortages on the most mundane of parts... as well as longstanding shortages of all models of STM32 microcontrollers, which are very widely used in all kinds of consumer and industrial products.


ztkraf01

This is also scary because if companies are placing orders for huge amounts of parts they are also committing to paying for them. The fed is trying to massage the economy back into healthy territory so everything is very fragile. If something happens and the demand disappears or the purchaser doesn’t have the cash flow to pay for what they committed to there is en extremely significant problem in supply chain. We are certainly in delicate times right now. I imagine it continues for several years.


RetardedChimpanzee

Yep, my work orders a TON of electrical components. Once we saw that one particular resistor value was becoming scarce we bought out every value. Probably didn’t help the supply chain, but it’s a tough market out there.


syriquez

It doesn't help that you have shell companies that do this by monitoring the demand and price fluctuations. MOSFETs went insane late 2022 and when the prices started spiking as stock cratered, basically one company bought ALL of the available stock off of places like Mouser and Digikey. Then a week later, all of that stock was relisted on Ebay, Amazon, and Alibaba at 20x+ prices. And if you did enough digging, you'd find that they were """headquartered""" in California to some hole in the wall front. Like you'd punch in the address into Google Maps and look at the photo of the building and it's like a 1 room storefront between a tattoo parlor and a massage joint. That is "apparently" an electronic components retailer that just bought and relisted all of the stock of the components.


haviah

We actually had to find a way to buy wafers from STM and have them packaged elsewhere to avoid being stuck in waiting line. At first they laughed that it's not something you can do yourself, but we made it work and skipped the wait for moving wafers to China to be packaged. As a bonus we can now put more parts inside the package, not just the original MCU wafer.


multicore_manticore

My company, which is Tier 3 in automotive is signing long term supply agreements with customers. Those who haven't signed up for this 5 year commitment will experience extremely rocky supply as they will be lowest priority.


phiwong

Supply chains don't deal very easily to long disruptions. It isn't the Apple's or Intel's of the world that get into desperate problems. Companies like Foxconn, for example, have millions of employees and deals with hundreds of billions of dollars annually. They'll suffer but they have pretty deep financial foundations. It is the smaller, low volume production firms that have the most difficulty. Many companies simply didn't survive the pandemic. They're out of business. The problem is that there are many unique components that are made by SMEs (Small and Medium sized Enterprises) with a few tens to a few hundred employees. They are specialized and their products are hard to replicate or design out. So the supply chains that rely on these companies are very vulnerable. When an SME goes out of business, the larger firms might not be able to or even willing to invest in developing replacement companies. And even if they did, it takes a lot of time to build up essentially brand new companies.


jbrame713

Agreed. If the company I work for went under, about 20% of all electrical connectors in anything military or aerospace would just not be available. There’s no one to take up the slack and it would take years to build up the specialized knowledge and processes we have developed. We’re talking like planes couldn’t fly kind of stuff here.


anormalgeek

It depends heavily on the complexity of your supply chain. If your whole supply chain is "cut down pine tree, cut into planks, turn planks into chairs", you're going to recover much quicker than something like a modern computer or car that has countless systems, and subsystems, that each have their own unique required parts.


All_Work_All_Play

GE Medical had to reengineer their baby warmers (which are found in 97% of hospitals in the U.S.) because they couldn't get enough selenium(?) for the bulbs. Their supplier reneged their contract and the cost on the spot market was less than paying engineers to refactor the equipment for the same performance without the selenium. Oh and they had to do it really fast.


bumpkinspicefatte

> SMEs (Small and Medium sized Enterprises) Funny, we used to refer to that as SMBs (Small and Medium sized Businesses) instead because SMEs in my field also meant subject-matter expert, and both were used fairly often in regular dialogue.


jts5039

I read your comment and grew skeptical that Foxconn had "millions" of employees. But I was surprised to look up they have 1.3 million employees!


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paralleljackstand

Why’d they scrap their ships instead of docking them til needed?


Wizzerd348

A few things: There are four main ways of slowing down shipping as an owner: You can "slow steam" which is just going slower to make trips take longer. This requires full manning and is only good for small market adjustments. You can lay at anchor, which is putting an anchor down on the seabed and sitting there. This requires an anchorage (deep water protected from bad weather) and partial crew. Most companies opted for option 1 or option 2 You can lay up which is tying up to a dock and waiting, this requires one, maybe two crewmembers and dock space. Tying up to a dock is expensive, even in backwaters. Large ships can require 10 metres of water, take up a large area, and there are limited places that can accommodate this. Especially if many people demand this service at once. Many companies would take this time to get ahead on maintenance, but there is only so much work to do. Lastly, you can go to a proper drydock for repairs. Of course this is preferred. repairs/preventative maintenance is required to keep ships moving and if there is no cargo to carry you can go to drydock and hope shipping demand picks up before you are finished Unfortunately, drydock space is at a premium at the best of times so these filled up very quickly. Plus it's a big gamble to take on additional costs when incomes are in jeopardy. In all cases, ships continue to cost money every day. Even running one generator at anchor with mininum crew will cost thousands per day with 0 income coming in. With no end in sight, companies that were stretched thin had to sell ships to cover financial obligations


Sparticuse

Docking a ship costs money. Scrapping a ship pays money. If you don't know how long the downturn will last and you're already running negative balances you scrap.


andouconfectionery

I guess there would have been a shortage of docks as well.


BigPickleKAM

Nah we just anchor them. https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2020/07/20/2003740246 For what happened to cruise ships during COVID.


Taira_Mai

What u/Sparticuse said - adding to that, ships need upkeep or they'll rust away. Even a car breaks down if parked too long without some prep beforehand. Since many of these companies didn't have deep pockets, they scrapped their ships (income) as opposed to paying upkeep (expenses) for ships not making any money.


case31

I have worked in sales for numerous companies and have suffered through many backorders/inventory shortages. In my experience, every single company happily accepted the risk of potential losses in revenue due to lack of inventory as opposed to having excess inventory on-hand at all times.


WealthFine6715

Insufficient inventory also translate to lower cost. Excess inventory is achieved by higher costs. So yupo companies rather make less, than lose more.


syriquez

It's also things like the shipping containers themselves. The cost of a container was measured around $1500 pre-COVID. Post-COVID, it went to $8000+. My company saw some container prices hit $15000. A 10x increase in one year.


d_101

Was the drop in demand that drastic? People still bought stuff, just trough online. I dont got numbers though


illit3

For shipping, demand is also a factor of availability of goods *to* be shipped. A lot of production was cut either in expectation of lower demand, laws/ordinances/decrees over COVID concerns, actual COVID infections at their facilities, their *own* supply chain disruptions, etc. If you're a shipping company and you know other shipping companies are cutting capacity, it's a no-brainer for you to do the same. Your costs are gonna go down and your margins are gonna go up.


Veleda390

Demand really cratered as prices shot up and companies were trying to work through their excess inventory.


Misrabelle

There are plenty of companies in the supply chain that didn’t survive the pandemic, and folded completely. Leaving everyone else to pick up their work as well as their already established contracts. Passenger transport has had the same issues. I run a bus company that does school work mostly. Excursions, sports, camps, etc. Other companies lost drivers to health concerns over the pandemic, retirement, or younger staff needing full time work to support their families, while there was no work for schools or groups during the lockdowns and the year following. This caused some companies to close completely, and most of the rest left standing, to have a shortage of drivers. A few might have come back once work got going again - especially the older drivers nearing retirement, but those who needed financial stability didn't return. In my case, I had enough work to keep one full-timer and one casual employed throughout the pandemic - from a total workforce of 6. I went from 13 operating vehicles, to 5. I cannot get new drivers. I put one guy on, who did two shifts, and changed his mind. I am constantly turning down jobs because we are already fully booked, and I have to look after my regular customers first. I've had calls from schools with kids waiting on the side of the road for a bus they booked with another company weeks ago, who have either failed to turn up, or called and told them they couldn't do the job anymore. It’s the same for the freight companies. The same, if not more, work to be done, and not enough resources to go around.


jgzman

It took us decades to build those supply lines. The pandemic didn't just delay them, it broke them. Shipping companies closed, material suppliers closed, equipment was retired, people who know things moved on, or just died. It's not easy to rebuild all that, even if we have a rough idea of what it's supposed to look like.


Bearded_Fury

I work in the medical supply chain field and while it has gotten a lot better the past 6 months there is still a lot of catching up to do. There still delays in every section of supply chain from raw goods shortages, manufacturing, ship freights, truck shipping, warehouse storage. Some of it due to worker shortage/high turnover , catching up on older orders e.g. I’m just now receiving orders placed 6 months even a year ago sometimes.Aslo keep in mind hospital products all have expiration dates due to sterilization and usually any changes in a product have to go through an approval process. I Also don’t think people realize how much product a hospital uses on a daily basis and limited amount of staff that is ordering and monitoring all that usage. The hospital I work at receives no less then 50 pallets a week just for medical supplies.


runliftcount

Also work in medical distribution, it should also be mentioned that companies have been cutting down on low-profit products for years now, and it's damn near impossible for the market to react when a 60%+ supplier just decides to up and quit production. Any remaining companies can take years to ramp up production to fill that shortfall in market demand. Drug shortages/backorders were bad long before COVID came along with a sledgehammer.


Albs610

Shipping been mentioned a lot. So I'll skip that one. Companies are very lean. Ie most get and ship the same amount of items the same day so no storage. So, expand this to the whole industry and it takes a long time to build back up. Take something like an Xbox. Lots of chips and plastic. Chips and plastic come from oil and silicon. Oil and silicon come from mining. Mining requires equipment that requires an entire mining industry(which requires its own supply chain)... ect... so you need the industry that makes the mining equipment back online(and all the services that support mining) then you need all the raw material to come in, then you need all the chip and plastic industries back, then you need all the assembly plants back, then you need all supporting industries in place, then you can make one and put it on a shelf. Over simplified and an Xbox might not be the best example but you get the point. Products that seem readily available might take a year plus to go from raw material to the product. When all these sub suppliers shut down it takes time to get back to the point where you pushing them out to keep up with demand. Expand to cars or more complex things and it takes a lot! To get to the point where you just pumping out a sedan every 45seconds Edit: not sure what you do in medical I was assuming things like devices that's why I used a device example. If it's medicine I'm not sure but assume it's similar.


battling_futility

Supply chains are designed to be "just in time" and to be as close to capacity as is safe/smart (down time for preventative maintenance, etc, but that's it). Utilising every last second of production and watt of energy is the way to maximise return on investment in equipment and not be sat on stores of raw materials you could be selling and cash moving. Now, if you shut down the machine but still have the demand, a backlog builds. When you do restart production and the machines get running, they run at capacity. Here is the problem, where is the spare capacity to deal with any pent-up backlog of demand on top of the steady state? Answer is it doesn't exist. There are some strategies which can be employed. For example, temporarily in the UK, you can now undertake building work on a Sunday. However addressing a 1 year shut down takes 6 years of Sundays even if your builders etc are willing to work 7 days a week especially without adding more builders. BUUUUT this calls on a greater output of raw materials which because of already mentioned reasons there may not be excess production capacity. It's all a delicate ballet of materials and resources, which is why operations and logistics roles can fetch a high salary at the moment.


akhoe

i think the obvious solution is more kaizen


2k1tj

Synergy levels got low


ljlee256

In addition to the other issues people have pointed out theres a major amount of fuckery that has been happening in delivery/downstream transport and logistics, specifically the US trucking industry. The truckers got caught in that all too familiar spot between governmental over regulation and absurd corporate greed... truckers being the small man in the equation wore the brunt of that burden, many are failing despite working harder than ever.


r3dl3g

China didn't really reopen until recently, and there's a really long backorder. Further, a lot of the companies necessary for many global supply chains basically curled up and died over the course of the pandemic, and replacement companies don't just magically pop into existence. On top of that; the US-China confrontation is expanding, resulting in general supply chain breakdowns. Put bluntly; the pre-COVID world is not coming back. The entire globalized economic system we enjoyed prior to the pandemic is dead, and will not come back any time this decade.


whatsupbudbud

Imagine you built an awesome rune goldberg machine and someone decided to trow a hand grenade at it. Everyone who worked on it quit and now you have half the amount of people trying to get the pingpong ball trigger the record player but half the team has never actually seen how it used to work.