A freight train passes through Birmingham, Alabama. With the supply chain tightening, some of its chassis are empty.

The great American supply chain is in trouble. Once a logistics miracle buzzing with strict scheduling and pricing predictability, the source of goods has slowed down with the disruption of the critical supply chain in recent months.

Cargo ships lie idle on the coast of Southern California, freight trains are carrying empty cars, and freight companies are struggling with labor shortages.

In late October, I had the opportunity to witness the economic chaos with my own eyes. I recently accepted a reporting position in the Los Angeles Times, which requires timely international travel. I left Birmingham, Alabama, where I lived for six years, and took a 16-foot-long mobile truck filled with family belongings, bypassing large and small communities along the way.

I found a series of surprising examples of the fragility of the supply chain and the many ways in which businesses in the southern United States were affected when the flow of goods at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach was blocked.

During my 2,668-mile journey, I interviewed nearly three dozen people in total—from Main Street retailers to hypermarket clerks, manufacturing executives to working artists—most of them have a question about the supply chain. Tragic story.

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Erick Forsyth lights a fire in the melting pot of The Three Graces Studio in Birmingham, Alabama. (Connor Sheets / Los Angeles Times)

After industrialists began digging for iron ore, coal, and lime from the low mountains of north-central Alabama in the 1870s, Birmingham was a city of steel, with fiery furnaces emitting thick smoke and darkening the sky.

Blacksmith artist Erick Forsyth (Erick Forsyth) is a return to that bygone era. He is a single-man metal processing factory in the forging plant of The Three Graces Studio, his studio located in the city center.

He repaired damaged statues, built railings for house flippers, and traveled to Europe to participate in competitions to create metal sculptures inspired by great philosophers and ancient myths. On October 21, the day before I left for California, I watched Forsyth shape a large piece of molten iron into a snake shape, creating art with the most primitive materials.

That morning, Forsyth held a cast iron rosette in his hand and said that he had waited five months before deciding to make the rose-shaped decoration himself. He would receive a batch of decorations earlier this year. This requires many hours of extra labor, and each rosette costs an extra $13, but he says he has no choice.

"I can't pass on all of this to consumers, so I lost money on this job," he said, adding that this is not a one-time problem. "This spring, I put a three-month container on the dock in California."

Before lunch, Forsyth and I went to the local metal dealer Lawler Foundry east of Birmingham. He often picks up goods there, so much so that warehouse workers and office workers know his name. But recently, even basic items like satin black lacquer have been difficult for the company to buy. Lawler's sales representative Melissa Hancock (Melissa Hancock) said that customers like Forsyth usually have to wait two months to receive orders that previously took one to two weeks to complete.

"We have multiple containers in Los Angeles," she said. "It has greatly affected our business."

The most famous is one of the longest and most brutal siege of the Civil War. Today Vicksburg is mainly a tourist destination. Tourist buses and cruise ships take war lovers and gamblers to the national battlefields and casinos along the Mississippi River. But the town is still home to more than 20,000 people, and when they die, they are often buried in the 67-year-old Greenlawn Garden Cemetery.

Located on the outskirts of Vicksburg, this cemetery covers more than ten acres and has been owned by the Sharp family since 2011, when David Sharp's father bought it from its former owner. In the next nine years, the company encountered no difficulties in sourcing materials, but Sharp said that in recent months, the supply chain crisis has even spread to the rest of the small town.

"I placed this big granite order in June and she said it would take two to three months. I said,'OK, I get it. It usually takes about 1.5 months, but she said she was in trouble and they didn't Inventory," he said. "But, at the end of September and early October, I called her again and said,'Look, where are we?' She said,'We have about five to eight months now.'"

At the same time, the funeral is still going on, but for the first time since Sharps acquired the ownership of the property, the cemetery had to install cement tombstones as location markers, and the granite was still out of stock.

Sharp, a former high school history teacher, said he was told that the ongoing labor shortage in the trucking industry was a key driver of his prolonged delay in purchasing granite and bronze. When I talked to him on October 22, he said that he had to inform a local family earlier that day that the bronze scrolls scheduled to be installed on relatives’ tombstones had been delayed and he did not know when they would arrive.

"You have these families grieving for the loss of their loved ones, and I have to give them more bad news, that is, we can't fully install the monument because we can't get the materials," he said. "This is our burden."

Like many small communities in Texas, life in Carthage is centered on the town square, and locally owned businesses still occupy most of the storefronts. Truck drivers transporting wood and feed pass through the plaza to nearby Marshall or Nacogdoches, stopping for a burger at the Texas tearoom, or making a quick trim at the barber shop called "Jesus Shaves."

Kelly and Scott Reeves own an old-fashioned soda fountain in the square of Carthage, named Sunflower Commercial. Most of their business is Blue Bell ice cream and sandwiches for locals and passersby, but recently their gift shop has encountered more trouble.

On October 23rd, Scott Reeves said to me: "We ordered a lot of things for Christmas. This is one of our important seasons, but it has never arrived. I called, Sales representatives can’t tell you when they will arrive either. All are in transit, many are from Asia-China, Vietnam-so we have to cancel many orders."

Scott Reeves said the most worrying thing is that "the situation does not seem to be getting better." A Vietnamese manufacturer told him on October 22 that he did not know when the toys he ordered a few months ago could be delivered. Another company that has provided free shipping in the past few years recently charged this store with a fee of US$500 to deliver goods under US$2,000.

"Shipping is killing us, we don't want to increase prices, but unfortunately, we may have to do this," said Scott Reeves.

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Not far on foot, Jeremy Cain described a similar shortage. He manages the family business Cain True Value Hardware, and said that from HardiBacker cement board to certain types of paint, he can hardly buy everything.

"The most common introductory book, we won't see it until December," Kane said. "We finally got some PVC pipes. A 24-foot pipe cost $130. It used to be about $40."

Although many of the economic problems that cause today's supply chain tightening first appeared during Donald Trump’s presidency and were exacerbated by the pandemic, the current government bears most of the responsibility in highly conservative areas of the country, such as Panola County, Texas -The seat of Carthage-Trump won more than four times the votes of Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

Nick John, a coder and delivery driver for Cain Hardware, attributed price increases and shipping delays to "inflation and politics," while Cain interjected to add that "there is also the current president." But sales at his store have increased in recent months, and Cain attributed it to concerns about runaway inflation and general concerns about the direction of the economy under Biden in eastern Texas.

"People stock up because people think things will get worse before they get better," he said.

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Santa Teresa (Santa Teresa) is located at the foot of Franklin Mountain in the northwest of the junction of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, Texas. Neighboring countries have close ties.

Miriam Baca Kotkowski grew up in Juarez and she said that she remembered that moment, she knew that she wanted to own a real tractor trailer and play Tonka truck with her brother.​​

When she founded Omega Trucking in Santa Teresa in 1998 with five trucks and a friend's loan, her childhood dream came true. By January 2021, when the company was acquired by the El Paso-based TECMA Group, Omega had 24 tractor trailers and 26 drivers, transporting materials and goods within and between the United States and Mexico.

Kotkowski, the current president of Santa Teresa TECMA Transportation Services, said that she had survived difficult times in the trucking industry before, but no one like the price fluctuations caused by the current supply chain crisis. For example, last month, a customer encountered difficulties in picking up goods from the Port of Los Angeles and asked TECMA to use its trucks to transport goods. Kotkowski drafted a quotation and pointed out that the cost may change within a month.

"I can't imagine how these (costs) will be passed on to customers," she said. "For example,'Oh, these dolls will sell for $20 this week and $30 next week?'"

Porfirio Waters, president of TECMA Customs Solutions, said that the supply chain tightening has had a wide-ranging impact on the manufacturing and transportation business of the TECMA Group. Waters said that recently, truck drivers often arrive at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach at scheduled pickup times, only to find that the containers are not ready.

"This increases the cost of labor, diesel, and time," Waters said. "All of this will be passed on to customers who are screaming in need of their goods. But it is not available."

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Although Route 66 no longer extends from Chicago to Santa Monica, the long section of this historic highway, its roadside attractions and mom-and-pop shops remain alongside the I-40 Interstate. But many changes have also taken place along Route 66. Today, near the intersection of Flagstaff and Route 89, there is a shopping mall and Old Navy store.

Maritza Ramirez, assistant general manager of the store, told me that shipments of products and supplies that used to take a week to arrive are now usually delayed by two months or more. Items in short supply include clothing, accessories and latex gloves.

"We no longer buy certain items in stores. Like, we stopped buying men's shoes completely in August," Ramirez told me when he folded his clothes on October 28. "Our toilet paper, our cleaning supplies, all these take a long time. We have to go to the grocery store to buy toilet paper."

Tim Hale, the operations manager of a Maverik gas station on Highway 89 in Flagstaff, said the supply chain crisis left him with a constantly changing unavailability just one mile to NATO. List of items. He took a break from his work as a cashier and said that one of his biggest headaches was the cup. He has a lot of Coke and Pepsi, but he can't sell fountain drinks without a cup.

"Cups are one of the biggest problems. This is a new thing, and they are really hard to get," Hale said. "When they came in, they were just blank, because [the manufacturer] just got them out and didn't have time to print anything on them."

The circular space normally used to place the XXL cup has been sealed with scotch tape for several months.

David Jauregui was unemployed in 2016 when he decided to sell some property in exchange for quick cash. Among them are several wooden patio furniture that he built by himself. When they sold for hundreds of dollars, he realized that he had the qualities to do business.

So he started to build tables and shelves, first in his backyard, then in his garage, and finally brought his cousin Fabian Guzman, another partner and two employees. Last year, the company called Ocean Beach Pallet Co. moved into a workshop near the Port of San Diego, where Jauregui and his staff made special shelves for vinyl albums and sold them through their website and Etsy page.

This space full of sawdust is just a few brightly lit rooms, buzzing with the sound of power tools, but business is booming during the pandemic because people want to beautify their living spaces.

Then the supply chain contraction struck. Guzman said that this year, transportation and timber costs have soared, and many sealant and stain inventories at Home Depot and other nearby retailers have dried up.

"We drove 50 to 80 miles, or we turned to eBay or Amazon to find colors. Or, as a last resort, we tried to mix a color ourselves, which is not an exact science at all," Guzman said, and Added that he will snap up when it is in stock. "Now that we are aware of these restrictions, we will maintain a large inventory."

After 9 days on the road, I arrived at my new apartment in Torrance on October 30, unloaded the truck, and soon encountered my own supply chain problems. Back in Alabama, we had to leave our beloved gray-blue sofa. Getting a new one becomes a frustrating exercise.

We tested dozens of two-seater sofas and sofas in the furniture showroom in South Bay, from Carson IKEA to living spaces in Redondo Beach. A few meet the requirements, but whenever we check the label or talk to a sales representative, the answer is always the same: "Not currently available."

We ended up doing something we vowed never to do: we ordered a sofa online, couldn't see it, didn't sit down. These days, the children are watching "Frozen 2" on the folding chairs, and my wife and I are squinting at "Inheritance" on the laptop on the bed.

But at least the new sofa is already on the way. It will arrive on December 2nd, the supply chain is willing.

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Connor Sheets is an investigative and corporate reporter for the Los Angeles Times.

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