Tag: supply chain

Burning Rubber

It’s no secret that buying a car right now is a complete nightmare. You have dealerships marking up cars by $5, $10, $15k because of the increased demand. On the used side, there’s never been a better time to sell your car. Even Carvana is buying cars from people for more than their original sticker price. If you’re in the market for a VW or Porche, get ready to add another headache to your list because this news by Jonathan Franklin over on NPR hits hard. A ship carrying cars from Germany to the United States caught fire in the…

Chip Shortage Forces Canon to Call BS on Themselves

Canon makes printers. Printers suck. They have been awful for so long, as I’ve mentioned before. Every company who makes them tries to pull some nonsense regarding price, lock-in and ink levels. For years, ink and toner cartridges have shipped with chips in them. It was a form of security that forced customers to only buy their ink or toner. If a printer doesn’t see the chip (because you’ve chosen to buy 3rd party ink), it gives you a hard time or will stop printing. That’s worked fine and dandy… until we’ve hit a global chip shortage. Canon can’t source…

Pocketing the Games

Console manufacturer Analogue is a well-known player in the retro-gaming scene. They make high-end gaming consoles that can play retro games. The machines emulate original hardware via fancy chips called FPGAs and they are pixel-perfect recreations of what Nintendo and Sega put out in the 80’s & 90’s. Hot on the heels of their TurboGrafx system comes the long-awaited release of their portable console, the Analogue Pocket. At a glance, the Pocket looks like production on the Game Boy never stopped and Nintendo kept revising it over the past three decades. It has basically the same form factor as the…

NYT Breaks Down the Supply Chain Breakdown

Leave it to The NY Times to come up with a simple and informative interactive flowchart as to why there is an insane problem with manufacturing everything right now. The genius in the feature is how it starts simple. The pandemic hit. Companies, seeing a small dip as the tip of the iceberg, decided to go into crisis mode. They slowed production of the goods they manufacture and also laid off tons of their workforce. These turned out to be critical mistakes. The supply chain is still screwed up from these moves. Instead of conserving their businesses thinking commerce would…

I’ve never been out of cream cheese for 30 years

“I’ve never been out of cream cheese for 30 years,” said Joseph Yemma, the owner of F&H Dairies in Brooklyn, a dairy product distributor for many of the city’s bagel shops. “There’s no end in sight.” In interviews with owners and workers at about 20 bagel shops and delis across the city, many said they were frazzled, frustrated and rushing to find cream cheese after learning about the shortage in the past few days. Absolute Bagels has enough cream cheese to last until Thursday, Mr. Patta said. But employees at his typical supplier told him they could not confirm when…

Thieves Steal Truckload of Graphics Cards

Something I never thought would be reality in 2021: graphics cards being so desirable that people are stealing them. That is exactly what happened last week though. Thieves made off with a whole truckload of EVGA RTX 30-Series graphics cards. The graphic cards were in transit from San Francisco to EVGA’s southern California distribution center at the time of the theft, and it remains unclear how many cards were affected. The Verge There is the chip shortage affecting everything lately. Another constraint are the groups mining crypto with these cards. However, it is crazy to think that people are resorting…

The Real Reason the Supply Chain is Broken

Recently there was a fantastic segment by David Pogue for CBS Sunday Morning wherein he goes over the current supply chain problems. It’s been a royal pain in the ass to find certain products and yet we hear reports of container ships waiting outside ports for days to unload all their cargo. It all comes down to one thing: trucks. With all the technology and efficiency implemented over the years there’s a single fact that holds true: we are overly-dependent on trucks and truckers to move all these goods to and fro. The oxygen the supply chain requires is a…