Year-end will be tough for direct-to-consumer businesses:
- Cardboard lead times are getting much longer
- Delivery (UPS/FedEx/etc.) is projecting capacity constraints despite adding 99K people since February)
- Staffing in warehouses is under pressure (they added 28K jobs in October – but there is some relief in the form of small, highly automated “neighborhood” warehouses in places like Brooklyn NY
Some B to-B businesses are seeing challenges too:
- Finding an export container is increasingly hard as they are needed back in China for high-value goods. Low-value exports like soybeans have to wait
- In the metals area (e.g., Steel, Aluminum, Nickel), transaction Insurance, normally held by Banks and suppliers, is much more expensive as worries about default rise.