U.S. Retail Sales Slide Sharply as Inflation Weighs on Consumers

[GB_RN]

14. Probably Ships Still Stuck Off The San Diego Port...

Last edited Fri Jan 14, 2022, 01:01 PM - Edit history (1)

Waiting to unload due to a shortage of truck drivers (COVID, etc). Corporations laid people off in 2020 and took the bailout money, but didn’t hire people back. Now they complain about a worker shortage and are using the port backlog and “worker shortage” as justification to raise prices. In the meantime, corporate profits are at record highs. But the news media aren’t reporting this.

Wonder why?

As my maternal grandmother, a product of the Great Depression used to say, “Never trust a Republican, they’re only for big business.”

Edit to add:
I'd originally had a hard number of 100 ships, and I'd gotten it from a Dan Price tweet. I just googled and the latest I can find is from December. The number then was 46, down from a high of around 100 in November. There was a back logged high of 132 container ships in the Los Angeles/Long Beach port in September, also (per USA Today Fact Check) The administration and the port took some steps to force companies to get their crap moving, by charging a daily storage fee for containers in the port (companies were using the port as a free storage site, basically), and that helped move things along.

So the number that remains in backlog in San Diego is probably somewhat less than that 46, but I can't find a current figure. I wouldn't put it past companies to artificially store stuff to keep things in short supply to justify on the going price hikes, though.