Interesting read on the American supply chain

[rjwilliams11741]

I do a lot of work in the manufacturing and distribution. We are currently specifying Texas and Florida ports for our Asia shipments. This is normally too long and too expensive to consider, but today it's faster and cheaper. The problem now is the scheduling on the Panama canal and the growing interest in Houston and Tampa shipyards. We have 50 sailings approved this year. This is for the spring markets , but already planning on early fall and winter market deliveries just to not miss the mark.

Christmas items this year are largely back stock and overstock items from prior years. The home furnishings are now advertising 15 year old backstock...good for clearing the shelves of what just a year ago we considered dead inventory.

I understand that some of the problem with diverting Asian shipments to Texas or Florida is the size of the ships. Many apparently can't transit the Panama Canal. It's also interesting that an article that hit my newsfeed this morning quoted the administrator of the Port of Oakland as saying they had the capacity to take more container ships. The article said that Oakland has experienced the least number of ships in port since 2015. I understand that Oakland had a backlog back in April and May but apparently it's not bad now.