Page 9 - BusinessWest May 26, 2020
P. 9

 Peter Picknelly says fuel prices affect more than the transportation sector he works in, impacting everything from manufactured goods to the processing and delivery of food.
should be.”
Margeaux MacDonald knows that well. As
imports manager for East Coast Tile, which sup- plies Best Tile in Springfield, she is dealing with significant delays in bringing material in from Europe and Asia.
“There are huge delays right now,” she said. “We could have a booking on an actual boat and might not have a container to put the material in. Or, we’ve been bumped from boats because the vessel is overbooked. It’s frustrating — it’s taking four weeks, depending on where the stuff is. In Portugal, the booking is awful; it’s taking forever to get on the boat.”
The backups are affecting shipping costs —
significantly. As one example, she cited a con- tainer from Turkey that currently costs four times as much to book as it did only a few months ago. “That’s just to pay for the container to get on the ocean carrier.”
Not all locations have gone up as dramatically, MacDonald added, noting that rates from Italy have more or less doubled — not as bad as the Turkey situation, but not ideal. “And we’re not the only ones seeing delays,” she said, citing a com- pany she works with that’s trying to get a con- tainer of material from Brazil to New York, and has been delayed more than a month.
“I’m relatively new in this position, but I’ve definitely picked the brains of veterans across the
industry, and a lot of people have said to me, ‘I’ve never seen this — I’ve been in the industry for 25 years, and I’ve never seen the volume and delays coming right now.’”
The problem doesn’t end when the product is shipped, she added. With huge backups in ports, truckers are sometimes waiting hours to load,
“I’m relatively new in this
position, but I’ve definitely picked
the brains of veterans across the
industry, and a lot of people have
said to me, ‘I’ve never seen this
— I’ve been in the industry for
25 years, and I’ve never seen the
volume and delays coming right
”
and instead of hauling two or three loads a day, they might get only one. And returning empty containers to port has become more difficult as well. All these factors raise prices down the sup- ply line. “There are a lot of moving pieces.”
It’s helpful to think about supply chains holis- tically to convey what’s going on, Nagurney said,
Prices
Continued on page 54
         now.’
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