Tuesday, October 05, 2021

Recently, a guy I know told me the pandemic was costing him 10 grand a month. 

I'm like WOW! Is it disinfectants. Paper. What?

He says - I had to raise my wages 30% to get people to stay, and I have 10 employees.

So if you are wondering why there are 140 container ships off the coast and there are shortages of everything - that is why. At this point I would say it's a worker strike. And these people are going to prance themselves right out of a job. Oh! what am I saying? The government will just print 4 trillion dollars and everything will be fine.

10 comments:

  1. There are lot's of jobs out there right now, I'm guessing most don't want to (or can't) increase wages by 30%.

    Of course then the prices have to go up to cover the new cost....

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  2. I just read this, big bucks for truck drivers..
    https://altdriver.com/country/texas-company-offers-drivers-14k-a-week-during-truck-driver-shortage/

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  3. Holy insanity. I don't see how trucking companies can pay 60 GRAND a month. Where dafuk is all that money coming from?

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  4. I'm guessing from the pocket of whoever REALLY needs something moved. Like most times the cost is passed on.

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  5. That does seem to be how the world works. It's hard to figure out what products could withstand such mark-up. Maybe they are hauling lumber.

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  6. I had a customer tell me, the other day, that "if they really wanted to they could get all those ships unloaded, they're just trying to artificially create shortages to raise prices".

    Honest to god

    I have never been so glad to be forced to wear a mask in my life because I KNOW my face was not polite......

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  7. Oh, and my work is bleeding long time employees like you'd not believe, because they WON'T raise wages. Since I could increase my payrate by $6/hour just by walking into one of the local warehouses and not being picky about my hours, yah, this wasn't a surprise. Since I'm picky about my hours that hasn't happened yet.....

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  8. Genuine question. Why ~are~ the ships sitting out there. Even in Texas who I assume doesn't have the same issues as California. So... why?

    I personally believe that people who have been working the public this whole time deserve a raise. However I do not believe business can afford this.

    A couple of weeks ago I was at the car wash and noticed there was no staff. The owner was literally doing almost everything. I asked him if he was having staff shortages and he said yes. He also said the cleaning supplies for the car wash had gone up 80% if he could even get them. And he was an old guy. He mumbled something about seeing what happened in the next couple of months. I wasn't brave enough to ask what that meant and it's none of my business anyway. That guy told me he was even cleaning the toilets.

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  9. From what I'm seeing its a mix of issues.

    Basically we converted the world to the "just in time" supply chain method, and then we shut down the worlds manufactoring and transportation and assorted support functions, or scared people into not working, except for whatever the .GOV decided was essential, even though its all connected so it all affects each other.

    And at the same time we didn't stop people from trying to buy the same stuff we stopped making, so orders piled up at the same time that capacity to handle it dropped.

    And it all snowballed beautifully from there.

    No one in charge seems to have realized that by shutting down stuff you fuck over that section of the supply chain. And when you shut down essentially the whole goddammed world at once you fuck it over badly enough to seriously break that "just in time" supply chain.

    Its not JUST unloading all those ships thats the problem. Those containers have to go somewhere, the ports can only hold so many at a time. They have to move from the ports on chassis via truck or train. Chassis are short, drivers are short. I saw a report a couple weeks ago that some of the bigger lines can't get parts to fix their bigrigs, so trucks are sitting idle waiting on parts.

    Add in the warm body shortage, cause people were scared into not working, or forced to stop working and discovered they could make money sitting at home. Or burnt out trying to work through it and said fuck it. And the goddammed idiots hiding at home WON'T STOP ORDERING SHIT. So orders are continuing to back up. There are reports that some of those ship drivers haven't been off ship in over a year due to restrictions making it to hard to swap crews, and some of those ships waiting to unload are running out of supplies cause no one expected to have to wait so long to unload.

    *discovers I'm standing on a soap box again* sorry…..

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  10. Some of the wages are so low that I think some people were quitting or reluctant because it cost you more to commute and show up than what you get for the job.

    Charles Hugh Smith had a nice column about how the smart people, and this includes the white collar, realize that hard work and doing a decent job mean nothing so they are retiring if they can or finding some other alternative to the grind.

    I guess one thing the world masters did not consider is that since some people had some time to think about what is important in life, and it's not working. People want to work to live, not live to work.

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