Just over a year ago, business at Gizmo Cycling was booming. Families were buying any bike they could get their hands on — a common refrain when the coronavirus pandemic spurred interest in outdoor hobbies.
The North Las Vegas road bike shop and Italian cycling product distributor had about 200 bikes in stock and easily sold nearly all of them by the summer 2020, owner Bill Corey said.
But 2021 is a different story. Supply chain disruptions and their ripple effects have left many retailers, including small bike shops, struggling to get enough products to meet high demand.
“Last year was the best year for many of us (bike retailers),” Corey said. “This year may be the worst.”
The pandemic’s dramatic effect on manufacturing, sales and shipping has led to disruptions all along the global supply chain, and few businesses are spared. A National Federation of Small Businesses survey showed that 90 percent of respondents had seen some level of impact from the disruptions.
The result is delayed products, less variety for customers and increasing prices in nearly every market. Las Vegas business owners say disruptions often leave them in the dark.
Low supply, high demand
The massive backlog began when manufacturers, closed across the globe from early lockdowns in 2020, couldn’t keep up with the pent-up demand for goods and services, economists say.
“As we got closer to January 2021, people suddenly started to wake up and say, ‘We’ve had enough. We’re going back into the store,’” said Brittain Ladd, a global supply chain consultant. “What happened is more people globally decided to do this than anticipated. Suddenly, you have millions of people globally going into stores and buying things. The problem is shutting down the supply chain is much easier than restarting the supply chain.”
Disruptions manifested in multiple stages in the global supply chain: shortages of warehouse workers in Asia, dock workers at ports, cranes to unload containers from the ships, truck drivers to move the products and more. Shortages then led to backlogs at key ports such as the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach, leading to some major retailers leasing cargo ships or turning to shipping by air, a more expensive alternative.
The bottleneck became such a concern that the Biden Administration encouraged ports to operate 24/7 earlier this month. But such a move won’t clear things up quickly, Ladd said. The supply chain needs time to gain more workers in key fields and work through the backlog before returning to a frictionless flow of goods.
“When you’re on a freeway and you have start-and-stop traffic, then you have a traffic jam,” he said. “When that traffic jam starts moving again, it just takes forever. Now, imagine a traffic jam that circumvents the globe.”
Changing business decisions
Such rapid increases in demand,…
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