ORLANDO, Fla. — Christmas is now just weeks away and anyone who has been shopping in stores has probably noticed some tough to find items absent from the shelves.
What You Need To Know
- Supply chain problems in the U.S. are causing shortages on the shelves of local stores
- At Colonial Photo & Hobby in downtown Orlando, train sets ordered six months ago for Christmas have not yet arrived
- One expert says that even if there were enough truck drivers to deliver the backlog, there isn’t enough warehouse space in the U.S. to hold it all
Colonial Photo & Hobby has items for kids from age 1 to 92, but some Christmas staples that go around a tree, and others that capture those morning memories like a new camera, would take a Christmas miracle to find.
As a toy train goes round and round inside the Colonial Photo & Hobby in downtown Orlando, Steve Rausch and his Brother Mike can be seen doing it all. Stocking shelves, talking to customers and even playing with the trains.
When it comes to train sets the problem isn’t keeping products on the shelves, It’s getting them on the shelves, they say.
“Normally I would have that full down below,” Steve Rausch said, looking at his train set aisle. “It’s just lacking this time of year this year.”
Bill Thayer is the CEO of a logistic providing company, Fillogic, and has spent more than 30 years in retail logistics for different major retail companies. He said boats waiting to dock and the country’s truck driving shortage are only parts of the current supply chain problem.
“It’s a capacity shortage,” Thayer said. “If you think right now, just industrial warehouse space, currently right now you need anywhere from a billion to a billion and a half square feet of additional warehouse square footage just to meet up with demand in the next three years.”
Mike Rausch works the other side of Colonial Photo & Hobby, in the camera department.
“My back orders are three, four times what they used to be,” he said from behind the counter.
This year he expects used camera gear to outsell new.
“Used is very much driving the market in camera gear right now,” Mike Rausch said. “Mostly because of the savings between the new item and the used item. And if you can’t get the new one, a lot of people will go to the used.”
For seasonal products like electronics and toys, which primarily come from the Pacific Rim, delays on arrivals to U.S. stores have now gone from weeks to months.
“We spoke to a customer today that has containers that are sitting in the Port of LA that are over 100 days old,” Thayer said.
The Rausch brothers say they also have items in those containers, but have come to the realization that some of what’s in them won’t make it to their store in time for the holidays.
“We already ordered what we needed,” Steve Rausch said. “There’s no ordering more because they aren’t going to ship everything you ask for.”
The Rausch brothers said the train sets they ordered for Christmas this year were ordered six months ago. There’s also a waiting list on several of the new camera models, some with dates they said they honestly don’t know will arrive.
