Debating waiting for the sale next month or stocking up now

The supply chain is more fucked than I have ever seen in my entire life. I know I have said it before, and I was hoping it would slowly get back to normal, but things are accelerating to even worse than I expected. China is rationing power now, so factories have to shut down at a certain time of day. This means they can't make as much volume as they normally can, and they were already behind demand to start with. Now things are just going to get worse. Word from our people there is that China built a TON of coal fired power plants over the past few years to meet energy demands, but now the price of coal has TRIPLED just since May of this year. So they are scrambling to react, and that means rationing power to regions. They completely shut down factories all over the country last week, and there is talk that they will do up to 10 more days of total shutdowns in October. This is going to exacerbate the supply shock we are already seeing. Pretty much ever supplier has significantly increased prices this year, and are regularly increasing them every couple months. The word almost universally is that prices are going to go up even more now. So that's nice.

Then you have shipping. That's more fucked than you can even imagine, which is royally fucking the price of cheaper ingredients. Let's say you have an ingredient that costs $15/kg in bulk normally. Well maybe it is now $25/kg with the cost increases. Normally you could get a large shipment via sea to keep the cost per kg down. However, sea shipping is in chaos. 40 foot shipping containers that would normally cost $4,000 to get from China to here are now costing $18,000. Add in clearance fees, and you are looking at more like $23K for the 40 foot shipping container. So instead of shipping taking $1-$2 per kilogram, you are looking more like $5-$8. So now you are at $30/kg, for something that would normally be $16-$17/kg.

Then you have tariffs. Biden didn't remove the tariffs Trump put into place like I hoped he would. In fact, he has increased enforcement. The HS codes that apply to most of our raw materials are being hit with a 30.5% tariff. This means that's another $7.62 on top of the $25/kg. Pair that with the shipping costs, and you are looking at $36.62/kg for something that cost $15/kg before the pandemic started. Now not everything is that stark, and things that are usually $2,000/kg can weather increases in shipping costs a lot easier. However, most things are significantly up in price over the past year. The shipping rises are just disproportionately affecting things that are usually less per kg.

Is it any real mystery why inflation has been higher than they expect? Now they are talking about raising interest rates to try and slow it, but did anyone think of REMOVING THE TARIFFS THAT ARE CHOKING US?!? You have a simple solution to slow inflation, and you can do it with an executive order tomorrow if you want. The larger supply chain and shipping issues will take longer to fix, but the tariffs can be solved overnight. Anyway, we have been absorbing the bulk of these cost increases ourselves to try and keep things stable. However, it just keeps getting worse. Now domestic shipping is going up again, for the second time this year. Our domestic shipping was raised 25% this month. This means that we are paying 25% more than we were on all our free shipping we give. That's being completely absorbed by us. There is only so much we can absorb, though.

So I can't really give you good news. Things are not getting better. They are getting worse. We are not planning on across the board pricing changes, but certain individual products might go up. We are trying as hard as we can to keep pricing the same and keep things in stock. It's been a tough year.