Thx. Might have to make a call soon.Originally Posted by UNK
Interesting from WSJ today:
Likes pretty much everything in every caliber.
Nice find! That’s the data I think a lot of us were interested in, the hard-fudge or explain away number in prime working ages…Interesting from WSJ today:
Curious as to where that 2% went….dual income families going down to a single income, and post-college kids mooching off their parents are 2 possibilities, but who knows?
Wonder if the latest trend of ‘Shipping District’ communities springing up and commercial spaces built out of shipping containers is a factor in any of the log-train shortages.
Here is a doozie from a Fed Reserve gov that I saw in the WSJ today. He might want to leave his office and look around.
Likes pretty much everything in every caliber.
I work in landscaping/maintenance, we do mostly commercial stuff but I’ve got one truck/crew that runs a residential route.
This week a dude randomly stopped me and tried to give our company some of his residential accounts in the wealthiest city in the state due to his inability to find workers. I had to decline because we recently had to sub out a couple of smaller accounts due to labor shortages.
I would never could have imagined that a few years ago.
im strong, i can run faster than train
I was thinking the opposite. We have all these shipping containers here and nobody wants to take them back.
[Interjecting, it just occurred to me: Getting the containers back onto a ship to go back to China and get reloaded requires the ship to sit at the dock, when that ship could get out of the way and let another ship come in to get unloaded. So that may be part of what's driving the container shortage. I don't know this, I literally just made it up.]
So if we have a lot more of something than there's demand for, the price should go down. So this would in theory be a fantastic time to acquire a handful of shipping containers, if you were interested in doing so, for whatever purpose you might have for them. But you'd need to find someone to load them on a truck and bring them to you, which could be difficult, because all the people who are willing and able to do that are probably getting paid a lot to move containers that are full of goods to be sold.
Or maybe it's a strategy to get a lot of steel into the U.S. without paying tariffs on it directly. Are they getting recycled at steel mills?
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Not another dime.
Seacans that are past their useful sea life are often sold used to the people wanting them for cheap storage buildings, etc. Their doors might be sprung, the floor might be soft, the locking lugs might be shot, etc. There's a guy I used to know down at one of the ports in our state who had a business doing nothing but repairing them for re-use, and another couple places I know selling them used. I've done enough work on them to know I'd rather work on trash dumpsters.
A container would have to be REALLY shot for it to go to a shredder. Like totalled on the interstate shot. It's value as scrap isn't much; they're not that heavy comparatively speaking and steel is a relatively low-dollar scrap material. The nonferrous materials are where the money is.
I have a customer who runs a metal shredder; I was the one who erected it and I work there at least a portion of nearly every week. Right now we're working on getting the nonferrous metals separation plants going. Anyhow, this customer can't get seacans for shipping his nonferrous stuff out. He's probably got over $1M worth of shredded aluminum sitting on the ground waiting for trucks and containers. If he could get containers ahead of time, he could load them ahead of time and have them waiting to be put on the trucks when they arrive...rather than the truck having to wait an hour or two to get loaded.
Some of the issue locally is getting trucks that are qualified to actually go into the ports themselves. Those guys can pretty much name their price.
I don't know all the details, but I do recall Long Beach being pretty proud of the pollution controls on trucks that went into the port. Even working on getting an electric fleet in place.
Always seemed a little silly to me, because any time you'd drive past a certain spot on I-710 south toward the harbor, if the wind was from the west, you'd smell natural gas pretty strongly. For dang near a decade. Never got fixed.
Kind of a small version of, "Let's all fix global warming" instead of controlling smaller environmental problems that actually can be addressed effectively.
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Not another dime.
I recall hearing last year of someone realizing this was going to happen and tried to pay shipping companies to take empties back but they didn’t go for it for the reason you stated.I assume at some point it makes sense to take some back and has normalized somewhat but I’m sure it would add to the bottleneck and also add to shipping costs.
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