Supply Chain Problems: Why Shipping Shortages and Delays Could Last Through 2023



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It is mid-August and the phone for logistics manager RoxAnne Thomas keeps ringing. Its faucets, sinks and toilets are laid near Shanghai, hung in Vancouver, and buried under a stack of shipping containers at a rail yard outside of Chicago. As head of transportation in the United States for Gerber Plumbing Fixtures LLC, a Taiwan unit Globe Union Industrial Corp. who is based in Woodridge, Ill., Thomas is trying to weather the biggest shock wave to disrupt global trade since the the dawn of container shipping almost seven decades ago.

The pandemic has thrown the vital but generally monotonous world of logistics into a tendril, spur shortage of everything: masks and vaccine vials, semiconductors, plastic polymers, bicycles and even baseball figures. For Thomas, this made it difficult to ship the roughly 10,000 20-foot containers of bathroom equipment that it brings to the United States each year from China and Mexico, but it also revealed a structural challenge. most important.

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