Well that’s going to mess up the supply chain!

It can’t have escaped your notice that there’s a huge great container ship plugging up the Suez Canal. There’s a “traffic jam” of 422 ships waiting to get through and no one knows how long it’s going to take to unstick the Ever Given from where it has dug itself into the soft bank of the canal.

This has been the most costly delay in the Canal’s over 150 year history and will, no doubt, affect supplies for goods and services all around the world and in every industry and market. Even if you are buying goods from close to home, you may find that packaging or some little part that completes the item is in a container at the wrong end of a huge queue. The knock on effect of this may be felt for many months, as ships will be in the wrong part of the world at the wrong time.

This is another nail in the coffin of our delivery dates with raw materials stuck in a mass of other ships. And of course it doesn’t end there. Docks will not be able to unload everything at one time. In normal times there will be a steady stream of ships going thorough the canal and heading to the different docks. They will be scheduled in to be unloaded and the lorries that take the containers will be programmed to be there on time. When the boat jam is ‘unplugged’ there will be a mad scramble to get to the docks and unload onto an already diminished ( by Brexit) driver work force.

We are sure that this will have a knock on effect on delivery dates, and possibly on future prices as supply chains are broken and commodities become scarce. We hope that this is a temporary glitch.

We will always be as accurate as possible with our projected delivery dates, but, as I’m sure you can appreciate, this is beyond our control.