Based on the most active thread here, I think this article has accomplished its goal, which is to lead (smart) casual readers to believe that the congestion and associated delay are due to increased exports to the US because of the predicted increase in consumer spending. (This is a trade publication that wants advertisers for people who want to buy more freight! Demand is a great reason why!)
In reality, I'm almost 100% sure that the real reason for the congestion is referred to in the one sentence from Hapag-Lloyd - which is that port workers in SoCal have been decimated by COVID. The massive spike of COVID cases in Los Angeles County that started ~11/1 and really hit hard by 12/1 (discussed many places), which has disproportionally impacted both POCs and workers in heavy-labor industries, is certainly impacting the supply of workers to offload and process. I've heard this anecdotally from two friends who run freight forwarding companies in SoCal.
It's also worth noting that the logic around shipping ahead to predict a generic increase in consumer spending doesn't play out. Planning for a single date (Halloween costumes, Christmas toys) - of course, ship it as close to the deadline as you can, but don't f'ing miss it. But for a rolling, undated, potential increase in spending? In a world of relatively fast manufacturing, ~4 weeks to get your items from the Shenzhen terminal to offloaded in Long Beach, and with storage costs being exponentially higher in the US than in China - it makes zero sense for what will be a diffuse wave (optimistically!) of consumer spending. No major manufacturer/retailer produces that far ahead of unproven demand, and no smaller one can afford to do it (and it's not like you can get money for this).
This is a staffing shortage, pure and simple. It's not going to get better for a while.
[Added 30min later]
BTW, I didn't see this before I posted, but Ryan Petersen (CEO of Flexport) shared on Twitter today
"Yesterday there were 800 COVID-19 cases amongst the 9,000 ILWU employees who run the port of LA / Long Beach. And there was already a backlog of 29 container ships waiting to unload in the port."
Used to bother me too, as a mathematician. Then I learned about linguistics. If enough people use words a certain way, then it's vernacular. Sadly, I think this usage is long accepted.
"x more than y" means "y + x" - a sum. "x% more than y" means "y + x% = y + y×(x÷100)" and "x% less than y" means "y - x% = y - y×(x÷100)".
To me, "x times more than y" means the same as "x times as much as y" only "y×x" and "x times less than y" means "y÷x". I guess this might seem ambiguous if you bracket the expression like "x times (more than) y", but in practice it's bracketed like "x (times more than) y".
My go-to example is "awful". The original meaning is literally to be full of awe. I think you would be hard-pressed to find a speaker today that adheres to that meaning over simply meaning "very bad", which is almost an antonym.
Languages change and are influenced by their use, so you need to pick your battles. If something can be unambiguously understood then you're going to be fighting an uphill battle and it's only a matter of time
It used to bother me too, and some usage still bothers the hell out of me, but there’s a way "exponentially large" works fine.
An exponential change is a change on a log scale. Instead of current+d it’s exp[current+d]. So exponential change makes sense. “Exponentially higher” means on a log scale it’s higher enough to be worth commenting on. It’s mathematically correctly synonymous with an order(s) of magnitude change.
Of course, that gets you into the debate over what exponent or log base to use. Is 2x an order of magnitude increase? 1.1x? 10x? It’s all fuzzy.
And then there are people who just use it as “hella” and that still drives me nuts. “It increased by 10% but that matters so much to me that 10% is exponentially larger!” That kind of usage seems to be catching on too as “exponentially” further enters the lexicon of people who don’t remember what an exponent is. I’ll fight that one forever.
The "exponential" is possibly referring the `n` in scientific notation `×10ⁿ`. IE, it's referring to being larger on a logarithmic rather than linear scale.
I am on board (badum-psh!) with diffuse causality for massive and complex systems like "retail-level" (or consumer-level) import/export trade, but your point would be more persuasive with a trailhead of links demonstrating to what degree this is affecting the outcome. Because it's true that American consumers spent more during this past holiday season than ever before, with CNBC quoting the National Retail Federation (retail trade group) as saying a driver of increased buying was that people aren't spending on travel, entertainment, and services. [0] Also, unemployment has gone down significantly from those crazy levels from last spring. [1] It also appears the port itself said in late November that there was an increase of 22% in container traffic to the port. [2] However the LA Times makes the same claim that you are making, but without citing any source. Edit to add two things: Interesting to note the LA Times also implied that the federal government might be investigating some potential shenanigans around empty container availability. [3] Also, any idea where the tweet you posted is getting those numbers?
Didn’t you read the article? COVID is definitely part of the equation and listed as a cause under “Congestion cause”.
“Terminals are working with limited labor and split shifts,” it said, asserting that this is related to COVID. “This labor shortage affects all terminals’ TAT [turnaround time] for truckers, inter-terminal transfers and the number of daily appointments available for gate transactions and delays our vessel operations.”
I didn't assert that COVID wasn't part of the equation, and it's nicer for everybody if we don't assume somebody hasn't read an article (though I agree it's a natural thing to wonder sometimes).
I walked away from the article thinking exactly that it was a reduced work capacity thanks to COVID, it's said as such in the article. Perhaps I skimmed some of the more leading paragraphs, but my takaway was the cause was decreased capacity at the ports.
I did a tour once and its basically people sitting in a control room running robots remotely. One of the first places where they used self driving cars as early as the 90s. And its all run very efficiently, they plan up to the hour when ships arrive and leave.
It's answered (I believe) right below the chart: "Importantly, the data does not solely include TEUs arriving in a particular week. It also includes TEUs arriving in prior weeks that the port expects to handle in the stated week."
In other words, it includes the backlog that's building up. "Expects to handle" isn't the same as "can handle." That's going to go up until the backlog is cleared.
(There is data that could prove me right or wrong, but the article doesn't provide it.)
False. Getting a container in China is very difficult right now and around 2-3x the normal cost. Supply chain constraints are stretched way past just the local ports.
> which has disproportionally impacted both POCs and workers in heavy-labor industries
What does POC mean in this context? I come from software engineering and in my world it is an acronym for proof of concept, but it looks like it's about something entirely different here.
> port workers in SoCal have been decimated by COVID
The general narrative seems to be that unless you're older and/or obese, Covid doesn't usually affect you much (yes there are outliers). I would imagine the port workers to be physically fit - is this a misconception?
I don't know about the rules in California, but in most places you're not supposed to go back to work for at least a week if you've tested positive regardless of your symptoms. This is to prevent further spread, of course.
It's quite likely that most of the workers in question aren't worse off than with a "normal" flu, but they're still going to be away from work for a while.
Someone defined the difference as "if you think you're going to die, and feel that dying might be better than staying sick - then you have the flu. Otherwise you have a cold.".
I don't think these people can afford to take that week off. Most of these people are paid by the hour. If you aren't working, you aren't making money to pay bills and get groceries.
I am making some assumptions here, but I would venture to guess a lot of these people just fake it and grind through it just to stay employed.
I had it mildly (as in I didn't feel in mortal danger) early on, and it completely knocked me out for over a week. I'm a software developer and couldn't even have considered getting out of bed and working for the majority of that time, there's no way in hell someone who does actual labour for a living is going to manage it.
Not to mention what's called "long covid" - basically even if you are an athlete, you risk lung damage to an extent even a life of chain smoking can't achieve, and there have been reports of coronavirus passing the blood-brain barrier and damaging the central nerve system.
Coronavirus has many, many, MANY ways of affecting a person for decades to come, and we're learning more about it every day.
Edit: since I'm getting downvoted, I assume this comes from people who want sources, so here they are:
It's not yet clear that covid can result in lung damage more severe than a life of chain smoking, this kind of long term research hasn't been done yet.
Is the answer to ignore anecdotes until long term data has been done? Sometimes science doesn't have the needed solution quickly enough to minimize damage. Being overly cautious in times of uncertainty has always been a human risk minimalization technique, might as well wield it, in moderation of course.
Can you restate your point in non programmer jargon? The downside is chronic health problems, the upside is minimal. Theres not much unwise about waiting for more info and staying cautious.
Not really sure if either can cause more severe lung damage then they do. The worst case end scenarios of both are your lungs being so damaged that it kills you. Hard to make it worse than that.
Though one manages it in a few weeks while the other takes decades.
There are multiple reports of extremely damaged post-COVID lungs already, see my edit. Of course, the amount of these cases is low - but even if it turns out to be one in a million cases, I'd never gamble on these odds.
Generally the rules are that if you have COVID you stay home to avoid transmitting it to other people (who may be more vulnerable or who may themselves transmit it)
A bike is like a car. It has wheels and you ride it from point A to B.
> While the true mortality of COVID-19 will take some time to fully understand, the data we have so far indicate that the crude mortality ratio (the number of reported deaths divided by the reported cases) is between 3-4%, the infection mortality rate (the number of reported deaths divided by the number of infections) will be lower. For seasonal influenza, mortality is usually well below 0.1%. However, mortality is to a large extent determined by access to and quality of health care.
> While the range of symptoms for the two viruses is similar, the fraction with severe disease appears to be different. For COVID-19, data to date suggest that 80% of infections are mild or asymptomatic, 15% are severe infection, requiring oxygen and 5% are critical infections, requiring ventilation. These fractions of severe and critical infection would be higher than what is observed for influenza infection.
And aside from that, a large problem with covid-19 is the DDoS on the health care system stemming from the severe infection rates, which can create large second order effects.
Almost 0.1% of the US population has died from COVID so far, coupled with changes in total capacity due to COVID restrictions and changes to how workplaces operate, it's a lot more impactful than a flu wave to business operations.
I feel you are being willfully ignorant, and I have to suggest you look into the severity of COVID and the statistics so far. It's been going on for over a year now, the information is out there.
Check excess mortality for 2020: ourworldindata.org doesn't have the figures for Dec yet, but we'll end up with something close to 440k additional deaths compared to the average 2015-19.
So 0.1% probably is the correct order of magnitude.
If anything, it’s an underestimate. Regular flu deaths are way down for 2020 (masks and social distancing work!), but are included at their normal rate in the baseline for excess mortality.
Same applies at smaller scale for other factors in baseline mortality, like traffic deaths and industrial accidents, that have also been suppressed by policy and behavior changes due to the pandemic.
Massive spike doesn't mean anything. Most importantly, how many are actually sick.
The solution are obvious, do not test people with asymptomatic/mild symptoms. A lot of people are forced to stay at home simply because positive test, even though they are not sick or already recovered from sick.
Sure, some may say they can still infect other but the chance a low and even if they infected other, doesn't mean that the other people become sick too.
Sure, if it compared to other diseases like influenza it maybe higher but in general both are still low number and then you still have to multiply that probability of getting positive on test with probability of becoming actually stick, which is another low number.
A similar logistics logjam took place last month with the US Postal Service amidst a 30%+ YOY increase in holiday shipping and thousands of workers unable to work because of COVID:
Keep in mind that this came on the heels of the Postmaster-initiated slowdown of most postal services in advance of U.S. elections in early November. DeJoy's staff eliminated overtime and made other changes which, along with the ongoing COVID crisis, led to sharp increases in delays in specific regions.
The situation in December was exacerbated by UPS and Fedex limiting parcels from commercial shippers, which added even more volume to the shipper of last resort ... the post office.
At one point the Post Office stopped scanning parcels (for us, in mid-December) and huge backlogs built up across the system. We heard from our USPS business rep in Boston that 200 workers were out sick at the processing facility in Nashua NH, leading to trucks arriving at the parking lot that couldn't be unloaded. They switched to processing Priority Mail at the facility in South Boston and everything else in Stamford CT, but they weren't able to work through the Nashua backlog until January. one Priority Mail parcel we shipped on Nov 30 that was supposed to be "3-day delivery" arrived at its destination in Kentucky 45 days later, on Jan. 13.
Nashua is usually the last stop for packages before our local post office, and it was pretty much a black hole for November and December. Packages got arrival scanned there and then ... eventually they showed up at our post office up the Connecticut River.
Thanks for shedding some light on what was going on and what the USPS was doing to adapt!
The article states a huge spike in imports are causing a traffic jam worse than when the port of LA workers went on strike a few years ago. I went searching for the "why" behind imports spiking and came across this:
>U.S. consumers dramatically increase spending on goods as their ability to spend on services was constrained [by COVID] and that their lost income from unemployment would be counterbalanced by stimulus.
I wonder how many Americans will be spending their stimulus on a new television or a new phone, and how many will be using it for housing and food. Seems like the former, which is great news for the Chinese economy.
China’s economy is definitely doing well, about the only major economy that actually grew in 2020 while everyone else shrank. So economically they definitely came out on top from this pandemic.
China is now forecasted to outpace US economy by 2028, 5 years earlier than previous forecasts, due to changes this past year.
As far as you know. News about China and it’s economy must be taken with a grain of salt because it comes from the government which is notoriously unreliable.
China in the last 20-30 years has taken 700+ million people out of poverty so they must have done something right. As someone that is not Chinese nor from a western country apart from filtering news from Chinese media I also filter stuff from the western media as it is not any better. Chinese media is censored and manipulated by threats western media is censored and manipulated by money and self interest.
Western media being independent is a myth has been for the last 20-30 years specially when it comes to foreign relations. Most of the independent western media is sidelined which results in little or no spread of real news most of it is just propaganda of different political and financial interests. Go thorough this website is shows how much misinfo is spread by corporate media and different countries. But no main stream media picks up the stories or talk about it. https://www.disinfo.eu/
There is no such thing as independent western media.
Western media censors by omission. And when they report on China, they only report on news that casts China negatively, in order to make the western world appear morally superior.
>China in the last 20-30 years has taken 700+ million people out of poverty so they must have done something right.
Their neighbors (taiwan, japan, korea) were lifted out of poverty even sooner, so I'm not sure whether this is indicative of anything. Your whole analogy reminds me of the how in a bull market it's pretty easy for any trader to make money, even though they might perform worse than an index fund or a monkey and a dartboard.
You’ve made this same comment before in other posts and comments about China, but there’s absolutely zero proof to back up your claim. If it comes from Chinese state media, it absolutely cannot be trusted, and since there is no way to independently verify it, we cannot assume that it is correct. Not even in the general direction of being correct.
So? Even if bad metrics push the inevitable a few years down the road it's still inevitable. China will become the dominant world power some time in the next decade or so and there's not a whole lot we can do about it.
In my uneducated opinion, theres lots of factors. However, economy/wealth is by and far the largest one, because almost everything else seems to have a price tag.
And even if they weren't more out less directly equitable, how long would it take for one to pull up the other.
China has 4x the population the US does. The US won the cold war because it had a larger economy, partly because it had a larger population. That's not how any future conflict is going to shake out
The decision to lockdown Wuhan internally, while at the same time allow international flights was a spark of brilliance. Why should we suffer alone, lets spread the love!
Here are the experiences of three people I know, with pronouns changed to "they" so as to not reveal their preference.
Person #1 is an adjunct instructor in the midwest, and is struggling with the low # of courses and the # high of students in each course, in addition to the additional workload that comes from doing everything online. Their income level is not as high in 2020 as before. They are an artist, and so try to take time (and buy materials) for their art, as they need some form of release.
Person #2 lives on the west coast (not a good part of the west coast), works in retail, doesn't have a car (in an area that requires one), and isn't in the best living situation. They have a full-time job they're doing well in, but it's not a high wage (it's below $15/hour, though more when they gets bonuses), so it's difficult to save up. They're smart, but it's difficult to maintain 150% motivation every. single. minute. of. the. day.
Person #3 lives in the midwest and is unemployed. After being furloughed, they left the food service job they were in: they were transferred to a remote location, likely because they were asking about why health insurance hadn't been resumed. The next job they found was a job selling insurance to businesses, a job that only pays when you make a "sale". Until then, your wages are zero. And it's a workplace that doesn't wear masks. A license to sell insurance is required, but the workplace (who is supposed to facilitate that) didn't lead them through the correct paperwork, so their ability to lean (and to sell) is limited. They are actively looking for a new job, ideally something that matches their degree.
There are three examples of the latter, just from me.
Buying a TV manufactured in China still stimulates the US economy, doesn't it? It's 2021, supply chains are global for a lot of products.
You could just as easily disparage paying rent by saying "it's great news for my landlord". Personally, I think Chinese industrialists and workers do more to earn the money.
The stimulating effect comes from spending it, no? I'm not worried about what my neighbors are spending the money on. We citizens and dollar-savers pay the bill through taxation/inflation, in a progressive manner. I don't see a moral hazard.
I would be shocked if any component of consumer TVs was manufactured or assembled in the US.
But if it was sold in a US store, from a US wholesaler, transported across the US, designed by US engineers, etc, it still seems like it would stimulate the economy.
I was under the impression not much is truly manufactured here in the US any more. What are you going to buy, thousands of dollars worth of My Pillows?
I'm no economist, but my understanding is that paying down debt (universally considered a responsible use of money, as opposed to TV purchasing) is actually one of the least stimulating ways to spend money. You're effectively just hoping that the lender is going to spend the money on something stimulating instead of yourself.
The US is in second place behind China for manufacturing output. US manufacturing often goes unnoticed as we tend to produce expensive things - like jet engines, spacecraft, processors, and medical devices.
And it is also goes usually unnoticed how funny is the accounting of US manufacturing output.
From accounting the whole value of the widget, and not just added value from manufacturing processes if inputs are imported, effectively, already pre-assembled (this is how I believe all "Made in USA" TVs are made.)
Factoring in obscene IP value as a "material" component along with some bs called "goodwill."
The "realisation" of revenue across borders, and so on, and on, and on.
I think his point is that there are lots of American brands that are produced in China. Maybe not for TVs but for other gadgets. The factory in China gets a pittance while the American company gets most of the profits.
I'm sure some people financially unaffected by the pandemic are using their stimulus for gadgets, but most recipients are using stimulus money for bills, savings and essentials.[1][2][3]
As perspective, only 39% of Americans could pay for an unexpected $1,000 expense.
Spending money on a phone or tv helps keep people employed in the US too - unless of course consumer spending bypasses brick and mortar and goes AliExpress et al.
For most people, the stimulus is just a bonus. Even if 30 percent of people lost jobs, they're the minority. I think the money would have been better used as a weekly stipend for those on unemployment, or those who lost income at least. I certainly don't need the 1800 bucks I got for my family of 3 on new year's, for me it's just money in the bank. I wish it could have gone to someone more needing, so maybe I'll donate it, but it shouldn't have even gone to me, is what I'm saying.
Since repayment will be a burden borne by the fortunate through taxation and inflation, isn't "checks for everyone" in a sense equivalent to "checks for the needy"? Except we all save the trouble of means testing, or the sting of missing out on a windfall.
My girlfriend is in the business and it is a combination of a lot of things.
There's a lack of empty containers in China, there's a lack of ships/capacity as the traffic has spiked while companies have put shipping routes on hold for a while last year, there's Brexit which delays things as lots of ships which usually go to Europe also stop in the UK, there's Chinese New Year approaching and everyone is trying to get their orders in before China effectively closes for a while (even though that might be different this year), there has also been overcapacity in the shipping industry for years and companies have worked to consolidate and reduce that which kinda seems to have worked but now comes at a bad time for everyone who wants to ship but obviously good for the shipping industry and all of this on top of a much swifter recovery than expected....
There are probably more reasons still.
At least here in Europe more stuff is transported by train from China now but they're expensive as well and only account for a tiny amount of the totals.
If memory serves well, the lockdowns in China in early 2020 meant they lost a couple 100k TEUs of export volume. These containers are bow missing elsewhere. Lockdowns in Europe and the US and so on didn't help neither.
And we have to remember that container rates have been quite low for quite a while. So any "excuse" to increase rates is welcome. What I saw since last year is, that carriers and shipping lines are offering much shorter demurrage free periods than, say, two years ago. There was a time two weeks without demurrage fees, now that is a day or so. Containers turned into a rare commodity it seems.
My guess is that there was no slack sea cargo capacity between Shanghai and LA, so once air cargo disappeared, more cargo went by sea.
Rotterdam-Shanghai, I have no idea, timeline doesn’t fit with COVID. This article suggests collusion between shipping companies, and some train engineers testing positive de-stabilizing rail cargo:
The problem is not only the ships being stuck there, it’s also the containers.
There’s a shortage of containers in Asia atm. r/supplychain has some nice articles about this and discussions about this mess go back months
On a related note, the shipping costs have spiked around the world (approximately it is thrice as expensive to have an item shipped from China, today, than it was in May 2020).
> “Additional checks will reach consumers at a time when unemployment is lower [than during the 2020 stimulus round], mobility has significantly improved, the overall willingness to spend of the general public is up significantly, confidence levels are higher, housing is strong and the savings rate is still extremely high. That is a set-up for a consumer boom.”
I doubt it. The article observes that Americans are buying a lot of stuff, but it's just redirected purchasing. We're buying more tech, and less clothes and cars and travel. Overall the savings rate is still very high, so spending is down.
There's a risk of (temporary) inflation when the economy opens back up. There is major pent-up demand for travel, but nobody will build more airports, or buy more airplanes, because it's clearly temporary. So expect some crazy prices then.
Please see my other post in the same thread, which refers to an article from Barron's, which posits a few reasons why higher shipping costs may not signal rising inflation.
> “Terminals are working with limited labor and split shifts,” it said, asserting that this is related to COVID. “This labor shortage affects all terminals’ TAT [turnaround time] for truckers, inter-terminal transfers and the number of daily appointments available for gate transactions and delays our vessel operations.”
Sounds like this isn't going to improve until we can vaccinate more people, especially essential workers (and I would include these dock workers in that).
Will this have any impact on medicine supply? I know that drug supply chain issues are pretty well tracked so I wonder if we will see a spike in shortages for different types of drugs.
a) the comments on this are unhinged
b) why can't the ships go to Oakland or Seattle? There's probably a reason, but it seems like an obvious alternative.
As others say, it's about the size of the port. But it's not only that those ports can't handle more ships - it's also that many of the ships in operation are so big they can't fit in smaller ports. I know that Oakland, for example, is always going to be second tier because it's just not possible to send the largest container ships into the San Francisco Bay without rebuilding a lot of the port to handle much bigger ships - dredging, larger cranes, larger docks.
This phenomenon is because larger ships are more efficient, and ocean shipping is a super competitive, low-margin business (during normal times) like the airline industry, so in order to eek out a tiny profit, ocean lines consolidate and build bigger and bigger ships, which further drops prices. These ships can only actually go to a handful of megaports around the world, though.
Another factor is the infrastructure that exists at the ports - you need to do something with the cargo once it gets on shore. LA/Long Beach has invested in big, efficient terminals for trucks and trains to get loaded quickly and move cargo out of the port in big volumes.
Source: I used to work at Flexport on ocean shipping, so I have a general understanding of the industry
The really interesting changes will be in the ports
on the US Eastern seaboard which planned to take
advantage of the super-panamax cargo ships
dimensioned for the new channel at Panama.
Why can't larger ships be unloaded onto smaller ships at sea? Then those smaller ships would have access to a wider net of ports. Like a river flooding out across a delta before it reaches the ocean, but in reverse.
only the very tiniest of container ships have their own cranes onboard, anything above the tiniest size is entirely dependent on shore handling cranes.
also moving cargo between two ships floating around at sea is dangerous and difficult, giant ships are not meant to hold position parallel to each other in the open ocean (or indeed closely parallel to anything) without the assist of many tugs.
a "geared" (with crane) container ship looks like this, and even so it would be a very risky move to use the crane to do anything other than load a container to/from a wharf while the ship was firmly moored to it.
The closest thing to this which has been tried was the LASH (Lighter Aboard Ship) system, where cargo was loaded onto unpowered barges that were in turn loaded on board a specially designed ocean-going ship. The barges could be unloaded more quickly than break-bulk cargo, and could be towed on inland waterways.
This proved not to be able to compete with container ships when they were introduced. The last LASH ships in regular commercial service AFAIK were the Baco-Liners, which served small ports in West Africa and were scrapped in the early 2010s.
They actually still do this in Hong Kong, but not much, and it's unheard-of elsewhere due to the size of the cranes needed, most ships not having their own cranes, and safety concerns.
There was a similar system, which got more or less replaced by standardised containers - the LASH carrier fleet took freight in standardised barges called “lighters” which could be floated out at ports, but couldn’t really compete with the multi-modal train-to-ship-to-truck container platform.
Oakland, Seattle, and Tacoma (the only other west coast options) are tiny by comparison. LA/Long Beach handles 25% of all imports to the US. Based on some quick research it looks like some shippers are even routing containers from Asia as far away as Houston.
In reality, I'm almost 100% sure that the real reason for the congestion is referred to in the one sentence from Hapag-Lloyd - which is that port workers in SoCal have been decimated by COVID. The massive spike of COVID cases in Los Angeles County that started ~11/1 and really hit hard by 12/1 (discussed many places), which has disproportionally impacted both POCs and workers in heavy-labor industries, is certainly impacting the supply of workers to offload and process. I've heard this anecdotally from two friends who run freight forwarding companies in SoCal.
It's also worth noting that the logic around shipping ahead to predict a generic increase in consumer spending doesn't play out. Planning for a single date (Halloween costumes, Christmas toys) - of course, ship it as close to the deadline as you can, but don't f'ing miss it. But for a rolling, undated, potential increase in spending? In a world of relatively fast manufacturing, ~4 weeks to get your items from the Shenzhen terminal to offloaded in Long Beach, and with storage costs being exponentially higher in the US than in China - it makes zero sense for what will be a diffuse wave (optimistically!) of consumer spending. No major manufacturer/retailer produces that far ahead of unproven demand, and no smaller one can afford to do it (and it's not like you can get money for this).
This is a staffing shortage, pure and simple. It's not going to get better for a while.
[Added 30min later]
BTW, I didn't see this before I posted, but Ryan Petersen (CEO of Flexport) shared on Twitter today
"Yesterday there were 800 COVID-19 cases amongst the 9,000 ILWU employees who run the port of LA / Long Beach. And there was already a backlog of 29 container ships waiting to unload in the port."
https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1351942493907034112