Having worked in the auto industry I can say this is the sort of thing was never, ever expected from a supply shortage. The frailty of the global supply chain network has been brutally exposed these last 14 months.
> The frailty of the global supply chain network has been brutally exposed these last 14 months.
I think it’s the exact opposite, supply chains have held up remarkably well. If I had believed some people here we would have been eating each other by now but apart from a shortfall in toilet paper things have been fine.
There were some shortages in Belgium that I didn’t expect. Like frozen broccoli missing everywhere for a week or two. Flour went missing for a month, probably due to panic buying. But otherwise, I enjoy fresh fruits, vegetables, and nuts which are definitely imported from somewhere.
There are odd disappearances from the grocery shelves from time to time. For example, one thing I’ve noticed is that outside of the trinity of Cola/Diet-Cola/Lemon-Lime soda, the availability of other sodas has been hit or miss for the last year. There have been others, less memorable because they’re more transient, but it’s more often the case that I’m likely to not be able to find product X at the grocery store in the last year than previously.
The reason for the soda thing is that there's been an ongoing aluminum can shortage for over a year (apparently it's still a problem), so they've had to focus more on the more popular core sodas and other varieties have been a lot more sporadic.
Here in Japan, There are now very little shortage for daily items but I found that Nestle Dolce Gusto is in shortage since April. That's imported from Europe and delayed by the canal accident.
EDIT: not trolling, i'm really curious. Fresh broccoli is available all year round everywhere and it is so much better than the frozen stuff. Why would anyone buy it frozen?
You can store it in a deep freezer without losing much nutritional value, which means it’s available on a whim without having to make a trip to the store. In many places that means you have it if you have a hankering without spending 1+ hr tracking it down first (typical if you’re not in an urban center or next door to a grocery store). I usually have some fresh broccoli stocked, but sometimes I already ate it. If you have kids, or are more remote (so it’s 2 hrs round trip or more), that is huge because you just can’t make that trip many times - too many other demands on your attention.
Definitely not. My local markets only sell fresh produce (that you can freeze yourself). You can only buy frozen food on freeze-specialized small shops or on large supermarkets.
I prefer the frozen stuff almost always. I can microwave it for 3 minutes, drain off a little bit of water, add in salt, pepper, and a tablespoon of butter, shake until emulsified and violá.
The only time I go for fresh broccoli is when making a stirfry or salads.
can you share what makes you think fresh broccoli is better than frozen broccoli?
I can see why fresh would be better if you were planning on eating the broccoli raw or perhaps steamed, but since I mostly use broccoli in soup or stir fries, it ends up fairly thoroughly cooked. In which case I don't believe I would notice a difference.
I purchase frozen vegetables (stuff like brocc, cauliflower, peas, carrots) because they come pre-chopped, last near indefinitely so I don't have to worry about finishing them before they rot, and whatever amount I want at that moment can just be poured out of the bag, pre-chopped, into whatever (usually single pot) meal I am making.
i only eat steamed broccoli (15min for the stalks and 4min for the greens), and the frozen variety never has the familiar "crunch". Maybe I tried only bad quality frozen stock.
Freezing breaks down cell walls (ice crystals form and puncture cell walls, faster freezer leads to smaller ice crystals leads to less breakdown). I'm not an expert but I suspect you may never get the crunch from frozen broccoli.
I think that I agree. I think the frailty of people, not supply chains, have been exposed. Oh man, you might have to keep your three year old car or two year old phone an extra year. Oh the humanity!
Probably there is no semiconductor shortage. You can still order promptly many advanced electronics that use similar parts quickly, GPUs notwithstanding.
Something happened to the people in China who take 10-100 electronic parts manufactured there and turn them into 1, to deliver to assembly in the auto’s destination for the purposes of tariffs (by reducing the count of imported parts from 100 to 1). Because of the weird mechanics of manufacturing origin, which definitely affects how cars and networking equipment have to be made, this is my hypothesis for why we’re only hearing about these issues from a very narrow set of industries and not others.
In terms of what could have happened my bet is it’s going to be pretty horrible.
When you expect your materials to arrive daily for that days production and keep almost zero inventory and relying on "Just in Time Delivery", then cancel all your orders overnight and then expect them to start again on whim, on the day you decide without any heads up to your suppliers...what could possibly go wrong? Can you imagine if Apple behaved this way? If iPhone sales drop one quarter, cancelling all their chip production until sales picked up again?
Auto manufactures are spoiled, they get anything they want whenever they want from the Government every time they start crying. Whether it's multi billion dollar tax breaks (Ford, Oakville, GM Oshawa, etc), multi billion dollar Gov programs (cash for clunkers) at the tax payers expense or being allowed to screw their suppliers for billions through bankruptcy (GM).
Don't excuse their poor management, forecasting, greed for frailty of the global supply chain. It's not like a asteroid hit Taiwan.
>being allowed to screw their suppliers for billions through bankruptcy (GM).
This is 100% of the issue. Those other two are issues with large business in general (tax breaks) or car dealerships (who pushed c4c).
The Big Three have been able to run their suppliers ragged through collusion because, for many suppliers, all they produce are car parts sold to The Big Three. Which means their production figures, profit margins, and general growth are completely at the whims of automakers. The few critical suppliers with a chance to get out of the industry are acquired.
The Big Three are learning the hard way that they don't have the kind of influence over chip makers that they do over their other suppliers.
It's convenient to blame automakers for what's happening in the semiconductor market right now, but I think it's an oversimplification. They're not the only ones affected by shortages, and about a year has passed since the rebound in new auto sales. The reality is that we need more semiconductor fabs because the shape of the market has changed. It's not just a perturbation from the auto sector. It's demand creation.
Those are separate issues. It is convenient to blame automakers for the chip shortages because they are 100% at fault here for their stupidity with the automotive rated semiconductor segment.
Additionally, their lack of planning and foresight contributed to the larger semiconductor industry going into a panic, causing a purchasing frenzy that dried up all the channels.
People in the larger industry saw what happened with the automotive semiconductor segment and went, well... maybe I should just keep 1 year of all my critical ICs on hand just to be safe.
I agree with you that we need more fabs, but they need to be thought of as (from a US centric viewpoint) national security assets. The reality is that if we want significant infrastructure, we need to do major investment from the US Government to ensure they are built here in the US. There are either production minimum guarantees, subsidies on the construction or operational costs to basically cover the costs of having excess capacity.
I think it's also disingenuous to continue to refer to increased demand as shortages because the implication is that there was a shortfall in production. The reality is that there was an increase in demand and limited capacity.
I think "shortage" means "scarcity," while "shortfall" means "deficit." Just because you have a shortage doesn't mean you have a shortfall whereby suppliers somehow failed. Of course, there have also been shortfalls....when a plant catches fire or production gets delayed due to power outages, that results in a shortfall.
Overall I'd say you're right. Capacity has so much inertia that it lags beyond the created demand. That isn't the fault of the foundries, it's just an artifact of unpredictable market behavior.
> Having worked in the auto industry I can say this is the sort of thing was never, ever expected from a supply shortage.
Having not worked in the auto industry, but having worked in the logistics industry, I and many many others like me have consistently warned about global catastrophes like pandemics causing unforeseen consequences of the kind we're currently experiencing.
To say that it's "frustrating" that nothing has been done before now, and nothing will likely be done - when I've literally written detailed reports complete with advanced statistical analysis for my upper management - is a massive understatement.
Hopefully the next pandemic will be severe enough that society itself is disrupted to the point where "rich" people suffer, perhaps even die. For many readers, this comment will come off as "morbid" or perhaps even be misinterpreted as a "call to violence", but in reality, this is simply "logical" behavior (survival instinct) that would result in a truly massive supply chain breakdown, and humanity as a whole doesn't learn a lesson unless there's unbearable suffering involved. I imagine a pandemic that kills 10% of the people it infects instead of 1% would cause sufficient pain for "elites" who very wrongly believe themselves to be above such inconveniences to seriously rethink their desire for "profits"... especially when a bunch of poor people who can't hoard food all raid their little compounds and the resulting unpleasantness that will result from such an outcome. It's unfortunate that I have to wish for such a thing to make people reconsider something as simple as warehousing additional supplies for unforeseen circumstances, but clearly we're there.
Glad I already got my 2021 F-150. There are lots in MI full of completed trucks awaiting chips. And looks like they're already planning temporary layoffs[1]:
