Bare shelves in the land of plenty? Biden’s America.
Stores across America have empty shelves thanks to a series in supply chain problems that are prolonging inflation and could stretch into the new year, with some retailers like Costco and Walmart limiting the amount of toilet paper people in fear that they may soon run out.
More than 60 cargo ships are waiting to dock in California, carrying hundreds of thousands of containers, and may be stuck for months in a traffic jam after arriving from China and Asia. Millions of dollars of American goods are still sitting in warehouses in China, awaiting shipment.
There are similar problems with homegrown goods that can’t be transported quickly enough by truckers or on freight trains.
Just think for a second how fucked the crews of those container ships are. Little food, no pay, no way off the ship until it can dock. Fuck Joe Biden.
Another problem is the lack of truck drivers.
Many drivers do not want to go to California, but if they do, it will cost them big time
High fuel prices in Cali, the vaccine mandates some trucking companies face because they contract with the Feds, over regulation, the traffic, especially around LA etc.
I live and work near I-40, which is a major east-west Interstate and you rarely see a truck carrying the shipping containers. The trains carry many shipping containers, maybe a hundred per train, but not nearly enough.
And this totally on Truck Driver Joe Biden and his puppeteers who are pulling his strings.
Mar, the trucker problem is everywhere. You mentioned trains….
Train shipping is in chaos, too. In late July Union Pacific actually halted all east bound container trains for almost two weeks because of their jammed up rail yard in Illinois (80 miles west of Chi-town). It was estimated that this left upwards 40,000 containers stuck in California. In spring Memphis reported one railroad had 1600 containers stacked on the ground and 3000 containers were on trains sitting just outside Memphis waiting to come in and be offloaded.
If they can’t get the rail cars unloaded, they can’t get empty containers and the chassis they sit on back to the coast. But there aren’t enough empty containers because there are not enough final deliveries of the full ones and return of the empty ones.
(For reference, a doublestack container train can haul up to 300 40’ containers, but many factors – route, destination, # of available locomotives, etc. – determine actual counts. Its usually 200 or less. They also combo 40’ and 20’ boxes. )
MJM, you’re right about the trains.
And if you had a race between a truck and train between the coasts, the truck would win.
We have become Venezuela because we let the evil socialist take over. Awful. Just awful.
Well, Mar, BNFS has a route from the ports in CA to Chicago that takes 60 hours, or 3.5 days. A trucker driving non stop could do it in about 29 hours.
But truckers can’t drive nonstop. The Feds dictate they can drive a max of 11 hrs a day (be “on duty” for 14 hrs) then have to take 10 consecutive hours off. So a trucker would take about three days. Not much difference there.
OTOH, you’d have to hire 200 truckers to match the train’s capacity, a train with a crew of two, maybe three.
OTOH, a truck goes from Point A to Point B whereas train cargo goes from Point A to Point B to Point C and the trip from B to C is…. on a truck.
OTOH, ‘prolly be a lot less fuel cost for the train vs. 200 semis.
So the comparison is not what you would call precise.
Btw, reported at the beginning of last month: trucking rates from CA to Chi-town doubled. And train cargo and storage has been going up, too. What a cluster.
MJM, a 2 person team can drive non-stop.
And while the train might make it to Chicago in 60 hours, the container will have wait at the rail yard ate ports and at yards in Chicago until another truck arrives and takes it to it’s final destination.
In the last 2 week’s, the price of fuel went up from $3.62 to $3.98 a gallon where I work. Now, it’s not uncommon for the driver to pay $800 or more to fill up their tanks.
Yes, I agree that a train probably costs less in bulk.
Another fact, I work at the country’s busiest truck stop in terms of fuel sold, 3.3 million gallons a month, the majority of drivers I see are not from the US. It’s not a good old Bubba job anymore. I bet over 25% of the drivers have the last name of Singh, another 25% are from Asia, with more from from Eastern Europe, and many of those cannot speak English. How they passed the driving test, I’ll never know.
We notice a lot of Russkies driving big rigs lately.
Not hard to tell the younger, foreigner truckers; they drive like idiots.
They also seem to have an affinity for using dock bumpers and door frame pads in lieu of brakes. Some driving school somewhere evidently teaches them to just roll back until the building stops them. Either that or functional depth perception is no longer a job requirement.
And those UPS/Fedex knobs aren’t a whole lot better. You can tell just how damaged your delivery is by how fast they run from the drop.
“Some driving school somewhere evidently teaches them”
Many don’t go to driving school, they learn on the job, especially if it is a family business
Dealing with some of them makes you wonder how they got their license.
Oh, it just got much, much worse.
California law AB 5 pretty much outlaws owner-operator truck companies and many of the trucks at the ports are owner-operators.
The Ninth Circuit just said it was ok to do it.
Liberals hate the United States and small business.
And I might add that liberals also hate minorities as many of these owner-operators.
And then you have the problem that California demands very strict emission standards on trucks and basically outlawing trucks in 2035 when the trucks have to become electric, which of course, they don’t and exist.
This is stupid beyond belief: tractor trucks no older that 3 years old are required to pick up or deliver containers at the SoCal ports
>tractor trucks no older that 3 years old are required to pick up or deliver containers at the SoCal ports
Is Biden’s DOJ going to take this to the Supreme Court like Texas’ law they don’t like?
Jason, you jest. Babblin’ Joe loves the stupid CA law. He loves any stupid controlling g’vment overreach.