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U.S. retailers are struggling to meet demand as consumer spending soars, along with a shortage of shipping, truck and warehouse space, leading inventories to historic lows and fueling fears about stock levels over the holiday season.
The chain from Costco to Dollar Tree has warned in recent days that there is a backlog of ports increasing freight costs and extending the time required to bring goods to the U.S.
Stores with a stockpile a month and a half before the pandemic hit inventory inventories dropped to 1.1 by March, at least since 1992, the U.S. Census Bureau data show.
“For every 110 TVs a trader can have in stock, they sell 100 of them [each month]. That leaves very little room for safety stock, ”said Noah Hoffman, CH Robinson, vice president of surface transportation for North America.
The logistics company said many vendors have advanced holiday orders from June to April to exceed the bottles. However, consumers can have four to six weeks to wait for Christmas e-commerce shipments, Hoffman added.
Waiting for ships from Asia to unload for 12 to 15 days and for domestic transport carriers such as Union Pacific and FedEx to accelerate to a faster pace for months, “we don’t anticipate the inventory until early 2022,” Hoffman said.
Several vendors confirmed in profit announcements last week that they had accelerated orders to avoid running out of stock.
John Garratt, chief financial officer of Dollar General, said the purchase has “strategically progressed”. The dollar store chain was comfortable with its inventory, he added, but “without stocks it’s bigger than some of the high-demand products we’d like.”
Best Buy CEO Corie Barry said consumer demand for electronics store products combined with “extremely high” supply chain disruptions created “limitations” in the availability of appliances, computers and televisions.
Costco “pre-loaded” the orders, Richard Galanti, his chief financial officer, told analysts, noting that the time allowed for containers to arrive in the U.S., deliver content and return abroad had doubled to 50 days.
“The feeling is that it will continue mostly in this calendar year,” he said.
Shipping costs are also far from the usual levels, with basic tariffs from Asia to the US ranging from $ 4,000 to $ 5,000 per container at $ 1,500 at the same point in 2019, said Gartner CEO Brian Whitlock. Some customers pay $ 3,000 in addition to ensure capacity.
The delay caused by the container shipwreck in the Suez Canal in March in Whithez exacerbated the fact that China left the pandemic faster than the US and Europe, leaving many containers in the wrong places, Whitlock said.
LoadMatch chairman Jason Hilsenbeck, who agrees with cargo and trucks, said the delays in imports were “worse than anyone remembers,” but predicted that consumer demand would decline, easing capacity in August to ease the crisis.
Gartner’s Whitlock confirmed that the delay in west coast ports is improving, but said the “container imbalance” could continue in the third quarter when traders typically receive holiday goods.
In February 2022, “We expect 2021 to be a challenging year,” he said in February 2022: “The supply chain is very fragile and I think we are crossing our fingers and hopefully we will be able to achieve events without more significant time.”
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