One of the things no one talks about much is that the newer cargo ships—some launched recently—carry about 25-30% more cargo. Obviously, this takes 25-30% longer to unload. You toss three or four o those into the mix and you have backlogs.
Plus if you don’t expand crane capacity to unload ships, you aren’t going to catch up by moving stuff out of the ports faster.
In the midst of Covid in China there were literally hundreds of thousands of containers sitting around Shanghai. Resources were coming in…but nothing was going out. Fast forward a year and those containers are all coming back, full of stuff.
It’s going to take a while before the system isn’t being jerked about.
True that. And true to California's environmental regulations making it so that only the big boy crony trucking companies can haul cargo (with expensive newer trucks).
And don't forget almost all businesses spending the past decade or two shifting to Just In Time (JIT) inventory models. Basically, companies have been operating with bare bones inventory with little margin for error before the plandemic + workers being paid to avoid work + California's trucking rules + generational changes of baby boomers retiring and Generation X getting too old for too much heavy labor work + even if Generation Z/millennials didn't have less of a work ethic than prior generations there's still less Gen Z workers to go around anyway compared to prior generations even though there are way more consumers today.
“newer cargo ships—some launched recently—carry about 25-30% more cargo. Obviously, this takes 25-30% longer to unload.”
If you spend 25% more time to get 25% more cargo then this slows nothing down.
Larger ships could actually speed up unloading. There is less down time between ships. 1,000 containers is 1,000 containers. If they were all on one boat I think it would be faster than if they were on two boats because you would have to wait for one to pull away and the next one to dock.
“One of the things no one talks about much is that the newer cargo ships”
But it’s not the size of the ships. It’s the amount of goods that America has bought from faraway places.