Disclaimer: This content has been reposted here with the permission of Dwayne Chapman. Any tips earned on it will be sent to him (assuming that it's viable to do so); I'm not going to intentionally profit off another man's labour, because that would be unethical.

See; I have proof that I did ask first.

This is an expanded detailed breakdown of problems in the supply chain from a comment thread I posted because people seem to be interested in why their food is going through the roof in price.

The majority of this supply chain issue started in early 2020 at the start of this pandemic. Millions of people either got laid off of/from work or chose to stay home to do their part in preventing the spread of the virus. It was just supposed to be a temporary measure: Shut everything down, quarantine the infected areas, then open back up. Twenty-one (21) plus months later, a lot of the world is still shut down; now we're seeing the result of millions of people not working.

But why? Why is this a problem? Why can't people stay home and wait this out? We surely have enough resources to get through it. Well yes, we did. We had a surplus, and we've now drained a majority of the world's surplus of supplies in almost every sector.

The first sector that it became an obvious issue in was electronics. Chips are/were manufactured in China for many of the current generation computers. If you're not a gamer or out to buy a new vehicle, maybe you didn't notice that the companies are literally unable to produce enough units to sell and cater to the demand. This is all because, while they can have the rest of the console or vehicle made, the final little piece, that tiny little chip not being produced due to the mines and factories being shut down or at only partial capacity, is not available. People bought Xbox Series X/S and PS5s as well as high-end computer graphic cards, then sold them online for double and triple the price! Go to your local game store and ask how long is that wait list for a new console. Some areas might have restocks coming, but the fact remains it might be years before you can just walk into the shop, pick up a new console at the store without being put on a wait list and play games that same day.

Of course, not everyone in the world is affected by that. That's minor compared to what we're facing now, but it was the first sign of what was coming if people continued to stay at home.

I work at a food warehouse; we ship enough food out every single day to feed over four million (4 000 000) people. If our warehouse stops for any reason, those four million people might have to go without food being restocked on the shelves of their local grocery stores until we get back up and running. We're talking about a crew of fifty to sixty (50-60) people shipping out tens of thousands of boxes (ranging in size, but the average box has twelve of whatever shelf ready-product in them so we're more like talking over 600,000 units of food) every day. Over the past approximate six months, our crew has been overworked with only thirty to fifty (30-50) people in on nights, where we're shipping out holiday rush orders and making sure stores are stocked for every holiday season.

Now the reason I bring this up is because it's not just our one little warehouse this is happening to, it's not just the medical field experiencing burnout. Restaurants are operating on skeleton crews, the bare minimum to make your large fries and coffees ready to go. This is something that is affecting every work place. The average worker is now taking on about 50% higher workload not because of it being busier than usual, but because they need to do the same amount of work as if they had more people working there at full capacity.

You've all seen it in the windows: "Help Wanted", "Full time positions available", or some joke about how everyone is looking for employees and so are they [ed: the employees?]. While in the service industry people feel like it's empowering them to ask for higher wages, they don't realize it's not just minimum wage jobs that are taking this hit in people deciding not to work. Farmers have had problems most years to get help during harvest times. When the pandemic hit, they had a harder time getting even foreign aid in to help with the regular seasonal work. They were offering to pay people $15/hr to help. Which, for what the job is and most people's lack of efficiency at it, is pretty good to be taken off the street and paid that much. But they were getting literally 0 applicants. (Also most farmers pay under the table, which means you'd be getting about the same money as someone making $19.50/hr assuming you were to not claim that money on taxes). That's for someone off the streets, zero skill in farm work, just willing to show up and help.

Now fast forward to the end of 2021; that package of strawberries? $6-$8. That turkey for the holiday? $60-$110.

But again, why the big increase? Surely there's enough workers left to keep this supply chain running at minimal cost, right? A local man who does snow plowing for the government will not be able to work this year due to not having the vaccine. He spends his entire day in his vehicle plowing and salting roads, having zero physical contact with anyone but he's out of a job. Truckers who refused the vaccine are being forced out of work. I keep seeing truckers in training almost every week right now because they've laid off that many. Alberta went from about 100,000 healthcare workers down to about 70,000 while they (the government) are mandating vaccines. They looked at that percentage and saw like 60% climb to 90% of them vaccinated and saw that as a success. What they don't realize is that now those 70 000 healthcare workers remaining have to pick up the workload of the 30 000 they just laid off or who left due to refusal.

To put it simply, those who are willing to work and have worked all through the pandemic from the start are being chased out of their jobs for refusing to be vaccinated. They put up with the risks and have taken all the appropriate measures, but because of the mandates, they do not get to work any more and those who remain now have more work than they can handle and are getting burned out. Meanwhile, many who chose to stay home from the start, collect money from the government, and are vaccinated, are either holding out for higher wages to go back to work, or are not qualified for 90% of the available positions.

From the farmers producing the food, to the truckers transporting your food, to the warehouse workers shipping your food, to the grocery and restaurant workers serving you food, every part of this chain is affected. Now you'll have to pay the increased costs as the demand for the food stays the same, while the supply begins to drain.

Now I've read a lot of posts blaming Capitalism for everything. But the truth is, because of Capitalism, the prices have remained as low as they have for as long as they did because there were options and a competitive market for prices with a surplus in many sectors. That surplus is draining and so is the ability to replenish it at the rate of demand.

Entire cargo boats filled with supplies sit off the coasts awaiting to be inspected for weeks. Go take a look at BC's harbours. Each container holds about $24 000+ worth of supplies and each container ship carries about 24 000 containers. So every one of those boats is carrying about $576 000 000  worth of supplies and there's about 50 ships off the coast of Vancouver waiting to be unloaded. That's literally billions of dollars of market supplies from food, of computers, furniture, toys, whatever, just sitting there, waiting for a held-up system to inspect them. A small business owner from Ontario was on the news talking about how she was paying more than what her product was worth every day for her product to be stuck in one of those containers on one of those ships because they pay a rental fee for it. Until it's unloaded, she (and others) have to keep paying that fee. Carry those costs over to the customers and you'll see some inflation there on products that simply should not cost as much as they do.

Then you look at feul. We've all experienced it: An all-time-high price. While that's inconvenient for us and tightens our spending further, for the supply chain and hundreds of thousands of truckers on the roads, those carbon taxes the government introduced to curb net output carries with it a higher cost than just our own price at the pump. We also need to pay for increased shipping costs from higher diesel prices. The technology is not quite yet there to transfer all those trucks over to electric. While people hate Elon Musk for his wealth, his projects are getting us closer to that day with Tesla Trucks. However, we're not there yet and every truck on the road needs to burn diesel to carry every container to its destination.

Hopefully this is enough of an explanation as to why the supply chain is in crisis. If you have further questions or have an area I haven't mentioned explained or something further detailed, ask them in the comment section below. [Ed: I'll put them forward to Dwayne.] I know it's a big post (and a bit abstract/broad), but we've covered everything from labour shortages, to mandates, from held-up container ships, to carbon taxes., from production problems to burnout in the workforce. Every single change carries with it a cost. We will get through this, but please, do not praise the governments for their actions. We should be holding them accountable, both in the media and during any future polls. While the virus is a new virus, protocols for dealing with them have been around for decades. To them (government officials and politicians), it's a popularity game and they took increased salaries over the pandemic while many of us will have to pay the costs of what happened. This is a serious issue that has seen many people go homeless over the past twenty-one (21) plus months and may yet see even more go without proper nutrition or accommodation in the months to come.

The Money Supply

The problem with printing money is it does nothing to help with production in the long run.

To make it easier to understand, we'll involve six people from an older trade system: A farmer, a hunter, a seamstress, a soldier, a king and a trader.

The farmer harvests vegetables and livestock, while the hunter collects meat and pelts. At first it's going fine: They bring the supplies to the trader, and the trader gets them the equipment they need. Then the hunter becomes very ill. He can no longer hunt for meat and pelts. While at first the chain is fine, the trader is still able to collect what the farmer and hunter need from the market. Eventually, there comes a time when clothing stops coming, because the seamstress had no supply of pelts to make into clothing for the trader. Which is fine, everyone still has the clothes on their back and the farmer can still send food to the market for the seamstress and can provide food to the hunter as well.

But the clothes on the farmer's back become worn and torn. The hot sun is beating down upon his bare skin every day. He suffers from heat stroke and can no longer produce the same amount of food as he once could. He needs increased coin from the lower supply of food he's able to produce. Otherwise, he'd have to choose between feeding his friends the hunter and seamstress or trading it to market for the other supplies he needs. So to feed them both and keep the equipment rolling in, he must increase his prices. The blacksmith that makes his tools now has to pay more for food and must also increase his prices. The soldier who protects the kingdom must demand a higher wage to pay for the increased price of food and increased price of his equipment. The king who pays the soldier's wages must now increase the taxes on the entire kingdom to pay for increased cost.

What it boils down to, is you can print off as much money as you like, but it becomes worthless once the actual value behind the money begins to lose production. Throw as much money as you want at a bag of apples, but at the end of the day, it's still only one bag of apples. You can't get more of those just by printing them. (Well, at least not yet, anyway.) If the production is not there to back the money's value, increased costs (which means increased inflation) occur.

A lot of people don't see why printing money is useless. You can't simply throw money at a problem that's more deeply-rooted than price. Hopefully, the little example I gave shows people the supply chain side of that value and why it's being lost in the inflation.

Most are uninterested about these issues until they are negatively affected by them. Unfortunately, now is too late in the game to do anything that will see quick results. I personally know too many people who have gone homeless during this.

I think the right thing would've been to put a temporary freeze on the economy, suspend all politician wages and taxes, root out the virus in the beginning and properly quarantine it until it completely died off. But that was more of a March/April 2020 chance. At this point it's too far gone for that to have any effect.

Thank you, Dwayne, for taking the time to write this post (and for allowing me to reproduce it). Reading it has been most informative.

"This is something that is affecting every work place. The average worker is now taking on about 50% higher workload not because of it being busier than usual, but because they need to do the same amount of work as if they had more people working there at full capacity."

Yeah, that certainly happened where I was working, after we returned to work once the first COVID lockdown was lifted in my country. However, things were already bad before that happened. People left the company regularly and weren't replaced (or, at least not with people of equivalent skill sets/experience). We went from already working at 2x capacity to 4x capacity. For some, like myself, it was just too much. I ended up quitting because I couldn't take the stress and literally forgot how to do my job. Yay for resurgent mental health issues. I've been out of work since, because the resultant recession/economic downturn means people in my field (software and Web development) just aren't as in demand as we once were. Now I understand why, having read your post: Fewer computers (or at least less push for applications and innovation for them).

The only job I have been able to get, interestingly enough, is part-time unskilled labour for farmers who pay under the table. (Well, technically, it's a small holding, but still ...)

"This is a serious issue that has seen many people go homeless over the past twenty-one (21) plus months and may yet see even more go without proper nutrition or accommodation in the months to come."

I could very well be one of them. Me, with my highly specialised skill set that I learned/honed in college and which has kept me employed for over a decade, just because I folded and ended up in hospital due to the stress of increased workload (and the company for which I worked was already understaffed before the pandemic hit; we went from 2x to 4x).

Post thumbnail image: Photo by Pixabay from/on Pexels