For nearly 60 years, Paine’s Christmas Trees in Morrisville has been letting people cut their own Fraser firs or choose from pre-cut trees, all from the Paine family farm.
For about 20 years, Tom Paine has also been supplementing trees from his farm with trees from a wholesaler to meet demand and give the trees on the farm time to grow.
This year, Paine said, customers will be able to buy trees from his farm, but he has been unable to secure any other trees.
“People are still looking to buy trees wholesale, and they cannot be found,” Paine said. “Everyone’s sold out.”
The wholesaler Paine has been working with recently told him that he won’t be able to provide any trees. Paine said his wholesaler has big buyers willing to pay more because of predicted shortages in major cities.
“They don’t care,” Paine said. “So these buyers are messing everything up.”
Paine said he hears wholesale prices are going up anywhere from $8 to $10 a tree. A 6- to 8-foot tree would go up to about $65 wholesale. He predicts that will translate to $90 or more retail in Burlington.
Christmas trees are not the only place where Vermont is experiencing shortages — and as a result, Vermonters are spending more.
From tree ornaments to refrigerators, Vermont — like the rest of the country — is facing supply-chain problems caused by outbreaks of Covid-19 in Asian factories, bottlenecks in West Coast ports, and shortages of containers and workers.
Shortages are driving prices up for consumers. In October, the national Consumer Price Index rose 6.2% over the previous October.
The prices of meats, poultry, fish and eggs increased by 10.5% from September 2020 to September 2021.
Of particular concern to Vermont businesses is the shortage of workers.
“I’m definitely hearing about the worker shortage, which I would say is a greater concern right now,” said Christopher Carrigan, vice president for business development at the Vermont Chamber of Commerce.
According to payroll statistics from the Vermont Department of Labor, workers not employed on farms dropped from 312,400 in March 2020 to 295,800 in September 2021, representing a 5.3% drop from pre-pandemic numbers.
And as of August, 23,000 nonfarm jobs were unfilled in Vermont. A total of 8,000 people quit their jobs that month, on top of the 9,000 who quit in July and the 7,000 who quit in June, according to the U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Jobs go unfilled even though Vermont stands out for its rate of layoffs and discharges. In August, 1.3% of Vermont’s nonfarm workers were laid off, one of the highest rates in the country, behind only Colorado, Alaska, Wyoming, Nevada and North Dakota.
Carrigan said the shortage of labor, combined with a rebound in demand for commodities and goods, has led to the supply bottlenecks and rising prices.
Some shortages on the shelves
Uncertainty roams the aisles at Mehuron’s Supermarket in Waitsfield.
“We’re not really sure what’s going to come in on any given delivery day,” said the store’s owner, Bruce Hyde.
The customers may not notice because there’s not one particular thing missing from the shelves. But Hyde notices. One of his national distributors is delivering only 70% of orders from its customers in the Northeast. He said that’s because of a labor shortage in the distributor’s warehouse in New Hampshire.
Hyde said so far, distributors have largely absorbed the increasing costs of staples before they get to his grocery store.
There are exceptions, such as Nabisco products and commodity beef from the Midwest. Fortunately for Hyde, his store specializes in local meat.
“I don’t think we’re running into issues where we’re not going to be able to have specific items, but I do think we’re looking at, in the short term to medium term, limitations on the variety of goods,” Hyde said. “So instead of having 15 different options for canned black beans on the shelf, we might only have four.”
Appliances and cars
The national supply chain on appliances is not so good either.
Michael Monte has noticed because his organization, the Champlain Housing Trust, has been having trouble securing them.
“The notion of getting refrigerators for apartments, even that becomes something that we have to pay attention to,” said Monte, the organization’s chief executive officer.
The Champlain Housing Trust builds housing in three counties in northwestern Vermont. The membership-based nonprofit organization rents out 2,600 apartments. It also shares equity in about 650 homes. It builds between 150 and 200 apartments or homes a year.
Monte said shortages of supplies, materials and labor are driving housing costs higher.
“We just don’t want to spend so much money in the development of anything because our goal is to create affordable housing, and the more it costs, the more difficult it gets to be to get the grant sources or the credit sources,” he said.
Monte predicted that rising construction costs would affect other projects in which his organization is not involved — such as building a new Burlington High School. The Burlington School Board expects an estimate for the cost of the new school by August.
Automobile manufacturing has also been hit hard.
The Federal Reserve reported that production of motor vehicles and parts fell 7.2% in September because of a shortage of semiconductors.
Jeff Goss, who sells Audis in South Burlington, told VTDigger that there are only two new cars on the lot.
As a result of shortages, people are increasingly opting for fixing their vehicles.
John Duprey, the gregarious mechanic who owns a shop in his barn in Sharon, said he was so busy he did not have time for even a brief interview. By 3:45 p.m. on a recent Monday, he had received 54 calls and had to take another while he was talking to VTDigger.
‘An extra 4 months’
Brendan O’Reilly, founder of Waterbury Center’s Gristmill Builders, is also encountering problems getting supplies and materials.
“Either they have no workers or there’s a lag time from all the shutdowns and lack of product distributed everywhere,” he said. “We’re waiting an extra four months for windows and appliances.”
Most finished wood products, including plywood, mainly come from the Pacific Northwest, O’Reilly said. Typically, he said, prices rise after the annual hurricane season in the southeastern U.S.
“Right now, it’s coming out of the post-Covid years,” he said. “Or hopefully post-Covid years?”
O’Reilly said the cost of everything is going up.
“Lumber went crazy, and nobody could make any sense of that because we actually do a lot of our own logging and selling of it,” he said. “That price never changed — 400% increase in pricing, but we weren’t getting paid it clearing land there off our own properties.”
The pandemic is not the only cause of inflation in construction.
“You’ve got certain protectionist legislation, protective tariffs that the government has imposed that makes the price of raw materials more expensive or (creates) shortages,” said Joseph Barra, a Boston-based construction attorney with clients in Vermont. “Lack of supply to U.S. markets would be one illustration of that.”
O’Reilly said the construction industry also still struggles with lack of labor.
O’Reilly employs a multinational band of carpenters.
As a result of the labor shortage, labor costs more, too.
“Everybody’s more money,” O’Reilly said. “The subs cost more. The plumbers are more. The electricians are more.”
He said a new house that cost $700,000 two years ago now costs $800,000 to $850,000.
“The bottom line is things are taking a lot longer to get, and things cost a lot more money,” O’Reilly said.
In search of jars
In food, too, not all price increases are due to the pandemic.
“Our specialty is maple syrup, and that was going to go up because of the bad season,” said Burr Morse, owner of Morse Farm in Montpelier.
But the bad season does not explain his problem selling maple cream, which he also makes. For maple cream, he needs glass jars — and caps.
“They’re probably sitting on a boat in a container someplace,” he said.
Morse also has been facing a shortage of containers for maple syrup. He said it started last year, when the Massachusetts company that makes most maple syrup containers could not keep up with demand because of a labor shortage.
As a result, Morse has not been able to obtain the little quarter-pint jugs for maple syrup popular with tourists. So instead, tourists this foliage season bought maple-leaf-shaped glass containers of syrup or half-pints.
“In one way, it’s actually helped with the sales because they bought a pricier item in lieu of what they really wanted,” Morse said.
‘Any day now’
Paine, the Christmas tree seller, was scheduled to have his first weekend of the season this weekend. He said the farm is near Stowe, where businesses and homeowners like to decorate for Christmas by Thanksgiving to appeal to tourists and to plant flower boxes and whiskey barrels before the dirt in them freezes.
Over the summer, he ordered ornaments for the gift shop. Forty percent of those items had yet to arrive when Paine first spoke to VTDigger in late October.
“The supply chain on that is failing at this point,” Paine said.
The shortage of Christmas trees is compounded by reasons beyond the supply-chain problems caused by the pandemic. Eight to 10 years ago, the market for trees was not as good, so growers planted fewer trees, Paine said.
Paine is also having trouble getting wreaths, which he has been buying from the same supplier in New Hampshire for nearly 20 years.
The little red berries and the painted pine cones Paine puts on the wreaths are in short supply, too.
“Unfortunately, a lot of that stuff comes from China, and some we couldn’t even get last year,” Paine said. “They just keep telling me they’re going to be here any day now.”
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