Wednesday, October 06, 2021
The New Normal: How Shipping and Supply Chains Are Going to Affect Your Job
Technicians for Change: If you’re like many people who are excited to get back to work, you may not be fully aware of the extent that supply chain issues have affected the industry. After all, last time you needed to buy supplies, these issues simply didn’t exist. And while we were all probably aware of the Ever Given’s infamous Suez Canal blockage, you may not know that even that was a result of trying to put too many shipping containers onto a single ship to meet the demands of backlogged trade.
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While shipping used to be for convenience and we actually had to go out and get all of the materials we needed for our lives, that's just not our reality now. When we can't actually get materials or it's more accessible to be shipped and delivered to us, making things and working with what we have is proving to be more difficult but also makes us think more before we buy things. I get that, I just wish that everything wasn't so interconnected with each other. Like, because there was a global pandemic, people had to stay home and buy things to keep themselves busy, and then things are in high demand, and it ends up no one gets anything. It just all compounds on each other and while I appreciate the dank memes the Suez Canal provided me for a month, it negatively impacted a lot of local businesses and their sales. Now it affects us with the ridiculously high cost of lumber and steel. So yeah. this sucks.
I agree with Monica that the suez canal memes were dank as hell which is what really matters.
It's definitely been frustrating having to deal with higher prices for materials. I was building some extra greenhouses for my father's place before moving out this way and materials costs were easily triple what they were pre-pandemic. It's been really interesting seeing the prices snowball into each other. First lumber then steel and now aluminum as people try and move from one material to the next to keep one step ahead. It makes sense that it's taking so long for prices to come back down because the demand is so insanely high and no mills want to ramp up production when they know they will eventually be stuck with a greater production capacity than the demand needs once prices do stabilize. I've been hating the term "the new normal" but I think all we can really do is rise to the challenge and work to solve material issues in more creative ways. I do think maintaining some semblance of a stock inventory and upcycling our materials from one show to the next will have a bit of an impact in the longrun.
The supply chain issues we are currently facing are having a much larger impact on the economy and the world in general than I think a lot of people anticipated. Prices have sky rocketed, and many items are becoming hard to find, impossible to find, or are taking a much longer time than normal to obtain. While it is a small and non-theater related example, I have a perfect story to show this. A little less than two years ago, I purchased and ordered a rescue style helmet for work and for a handful of classes I was taking. I received the helmet in somewhere between two and three weeks. Fast forward to about 7 months ago, someone who works with me ordered the same exact helmet from the same exact website. He received his just about 4 weeks ago. Sam product, same website, ordered about 16 months apart, and a difference of about 5 months to obtain. We are seeing this in every industry and with products from all over the world.
It has been crazy to see how all of the things happening in the world are compounding together into one of the biggest production, shipping, and distribution backlogs the world has ever seen. The world relies on its ability to facilitate trade – no one country does it all. Show anyone in the world a picture of a standard container or container ship and they will likely recognize it. It’s just a box that things are put in then delivered to new locations. What a lot of people do not consider is everything that is shipped in those boxes. There is high probability that a majority of the items, furniture, and clothes within your house travelled in one of these boxes at some point. As we all well know at this point, Covid has royally screwed up our day to day lives. Covid has also had a major impact on shipping, and while this did not present itself immediately, as time continues to pass, this issue is becoming more and more evident. Just a few weeks ago, there was an article about the ill-fated journey of a rented set for a production of Il Trovatore that was stuck off the coast of Los Angeles, mere miles from its final destination, but Center Theatre Group had to make an additional $300,000 investment to build the set from scratch in six weeks. These sorts of shipping delays are very prevalent right now, and there is not really an end in sight.
Also yeah, the Suez Canal memes really gave me life.
It's very interesting to see a full breakdown of where the chokepoints are in the supply chain and what specific things are being most affected by it. As a gamer I knew about the chip shortage (especially in regards to graphics cards and the EXPLOSIVE rise of cryptocurrency mining in the past year), and of course everyone loves to joke about the price of lumber nowadays (except the people buying it of course), but some of these things really shocked me. No LED PARs available in the US right now? That one was very interesting. The article mentioned that the days of "I need it now" are basically gone for the near future, and I wonder how the industry will cope in those times. Adapt or die, I guess.
Also, a bullet point that I found interesting is that "repair instead of replace" appears to be the way to go. I wonder how feasible that is for some high-tier digital equipment? I can only imagine that some equipment needs to be serviced by licensed technicians (support the right to repair movement!) and also, finding skilled labor to be able to repair equipment may be even more difficult than finding parts to repair with!
I actually have some first hand knowledge on this subject! A friend of mine works in the paint industry, and that first early freeze that came over this part of the coast damaged a lot of paints that would have been used in the entertainment industry, causing a big impact on shipping and prices. It is crazy how no matter how planned people can be, simple favors such as the weather can affect such a big industry. Further I wanted to comment on the existence of the blog itself. I thought it was so cool how communities such as these exist to build better relay information and communication throughout the industry. For someone who does not know anyone who is connected to this career, I find it a little comforting how accessible these communities and this type of information are. I liked how organized and easy to understand this was as well, even for someone like me who knew nothing about this. This kind of information and community feels vital to the industry and I like that it doesn’t feel like a competition between theatres.
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