Surprisingly, Corona is not actually the primary reason for the shipping crisis, though it's a big second factor.
The primary reason shipping is so messed up is due to that one ship plugging the Suez canal for so long.
Nah. That was just six days. It was a big thing, and there are certainly ripples from it, but things were effed up before that.
Deep down, the problem is that global trade is a really complex web with lots of moving (heh) parts, and there are lots of parts of that web or that feed into that web that have incredibly fine tolerances. Basically, for a long while global logistics ran like a fine-tuned machine, and the result was that buffers became a lot smaller. Factories don't keep lots of raw materials on hand, because they know there's a flow of them coming in, and storing things takes money. You don't have spare parts lying around, because you know you can get them really quickly when you need them. People in charge had taken principles of lean production and applied it all over the logistics and production chain, trimming out all the "fat". The problem with that is that "fat" are actually reserves for when things aren't going so well, and if you are already lean when things get bad, you don't have any cushion.
Then Covid hit, throwing a bunch of gravel into this finely tuned machinery. The most immediate effect is on the ports themselves, where many dockworkers got sick and in many cases died. Those who didn't are working with safety restrictions which makes things go slower. Customs take longer for similar reasons. And at the same time, people are trying to buy more things because they are sitting at home and are bored, and being at home instead of at the office makes them more likely to want to improve things around the house and things like that. These things then get compounded over many steps. The wood needed to make paper takes longer to reach the paper mill. This in turn delays the production of paper that's needed to print a book. A truck breaks down and needs a spare part that in turn needs things from five different sources, all of which have their own issues and their own delays, and now you have one less truck shipping things domestically, slowing things down even more.
This then gets exacerbated by a shortage of shipping containers. Basically, both America and Europe have quite a negative trade balance with China – we import a lot more than we export. Under normal circumstances, a lot of the containers on ships going back to China are empty. But because of effed up logistics, some portion don't make it back (I guess because the ships are in a hurry to get back and don't have time to fill up with empty containers). Over the course of almost two years now, those add up, to the point where the container shortage means the cost of shipping a container full of stuff from China to the USA has gone up by a factor of 10.
To some extent, various actors have taken measures to try to compensate for these failures, but now those measures are running out, and we customers start seeing the results. It's like in the Expanse episode Cascade, when Plex notes that plants in the air scrubbers aren't doing so well, investigates a little, and comes to the conclusion that the station is already dead, they just don't know it yet. By the time you can see the symptoms, enough things behind the scenes are already broken that it's impossible to fix.
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