bigrich wrote:Numerous gun shops tell me there’s lots of containers sitting on docks in California full of projectiles and gear to come to Australia. The cost to get a container shipped to Australia has at least tripled or more. It’s not as profitable for shipping companies to transport to Australia supposedly, I reckon we’re getting price gouged by these shipping companies. The shortage in Australia at the moment is due to these shipping problems from what I’ve been told.
Used to be the federal government actually owned a couple of container ships back in the day to guard against this sort of thing. The ships got old and decommissioned, now we’re at the mercy of gouging from private companies.
Wondering if they are Chinese owned.......
Before Covid, there were ships and aircraft crossing all the wet bits of the planet, all day, every day. If you had something that needed to be somewhere else you just got it to a depot and it would very soon be en-route, at minimal cost. Now, a huge number of those ships and aircraft are sitting idle, so stuff sits in warehouses until there happens to be some space available on something. Additionally, lots of countries, and companies, have implemented quarantine measures, so even if you get your stuff to a depot, nobody will touch it until it's been inspected and decontaminated. The international transport industry has slowed to a crawl. This means less product being moved, thus the cost of moving that product has increased significantly. Ships and aircraft not being used are still costing money to own, money that needs to be earned by the ships still in service.
I'm sure lots of people are gouging, but I think most are just trying to restructure their businesses to stay in business in a new environment.
The long-haul routes have always had higher costs of shipping. A ship crossing the Mediterranean, the English Channel, or the China Sea is bringing in money very regularly, making several easy trips per day. Take one of those ships and send it to Australia instead, and in one voyage lasting weeks, it has to make as much as it could make in one day of short-haul trips, with far lower risks.