People seem to think, including very disturbingly our secretary of the Treasury, the companies maintain huge warehouses of back stock.
That hasn't been the case since the mid-90s when the PC revolution started pushing out supply chain management software. If I recall correctly, Walmart was the innovator in this space in one of their key ways to gain economic advantage over other retailers was low back stock demand tracking
On top of that the '90s was when free trade agreements came into Vogue and the supply lines and outsourcing of manufacturing cranked up into high gear.
So as we saw with covid, any disruption to this a highly extended optimized supply chain results in massive disruption.
I can't see how any massive new tariffs isn't going to essentially be a covid level or worse disruption to this entire supply chain
> That hasn't been the case since the mid-90s when the PC revolution started pushing out supply chain management software.
I worked on PC software for optimizing warehouse inventory in the mid-1980s. The system was designed by an applied mathematician and used by large national companies. Customers made substantial savings - double digit percentages of inventory cost.
When you trim to the bone it's not entirely dissimilar to the kind of savings that can be achieved in other ways.
In the 1970's, when Nixon launched his recession after an equivalent lead-up, I worked at the University for one semester in a work-study job. They only paid minimum wage, and these were easy jobs like library assistants where you were expected to be able to study about half the time.
But you were working for the State just like all other State employees.
You know, the maintenance people, the professors, highway patrol, capitol admin staff, etc. Career employees.
Like everyone else, you had to wait two weeks after starting work before you would receive your first paycheck.
About halfway through the semester it got so bad they decided to hold paychecks for two more weeks.
:\
You mean everybody who worked for the State just didn't get anything for two weeks until it picked back up again?
Yup.
At the end of the semester I was made whole because my checks still kept coming in for a couple more weeks after I was no longer employed there.
"Just like" the career employees who would be collecting for a couple extra weeks themselves decades later after they retire.
Well, it was a recession, what do you want, prosperity? That ship sailed a long time ago :\
Yeah, it goes back to at least the 1950s. Different companies adopted it at different times, but by the 1980s most already had. Note that Just in time is not a single metric, with one correct level of inventory. Adopting it in 1950 doesn't mean the company isn't still finding more places to adopt it.
That hasn't been the case since the mid-90s when the PC revolution started pushing out supply chain management software. If I recall correctly, Walmart was the innovator in this space in one of their key ways to gain economic advantage over other retailers was low back stock demand tracking
On top of that the '90s was when free trade agreements came into Vogue and the supply lines and outsourcing of manufacturing cranked up into high gear.
So as we saw with covid, any disruption to this a highly extended optimized supply chain results in massive disruption.
I can't see how any massive new tariffs isn't going to essentially be a covid level or worse disruption to this entire supply chain