I've been an electrician in the St Louis area for a few years now and have never had difficulty getting parts that I needed until recently.
The company that I work for does quite a bit of business with Home Depot as well as a couple of smaller, local supply houses - Butler Supply and Metro Electric.
Some things are cheaper at the local stores, some at Home Depot.
One thing that all these stores have in common are inventory shortages. These things are not specialty items. They are run-of-the-mill, everyday things: plastic nail-on boxes, metal 1900 or 4 square boxes, handy boxes... I have seen runs on 14 and 12 AWG wire, AFCI combo breakers and breakers in general.
I had to do a panel change earlier this week and picked up a new panel at Metro, but they didn't have the breakers. Fitz, the guy behind counter, asked me, "How is everybody going to keep working on panels when they can't get breakers?"
Good question.
He said that they'd had Seimens breakers on order for 5 months. 5 months.
We wound up putting in an Eaton panel simply because we could find enough parts to make everything work.
What this means for you, the home owner, business owner, etc., is that it may take more time for an electrician to get to you, higher prices, and more frustration.
I don't know how things are going for the other trades other than lumber costs twice as much now as it did a year ago.
What's it going to look like in a year? Two?
I think that it's time that American companies started producing more of what they sell. I know that this will cause an increase in price because American labor is much higher than Chinese labor, but if that is part of the price of inventory stability, I'm for it.
