Strange.
To be sure, bona-fide shortages can occur transiently. For example when a natural disaster happens, it will take time for the local tradesmen to work through the backlog. But at a relatively steady state, it seems silly to talk about a shortage of construction workers. Pay a bit more than the next guy, and my guess is, your shortage will quickly disappear.
But you can do this too: call up the elite contractors who you can't schedule because they're "too busy" and give them a big number upfront. "I need my carpets replaced, I figure this will be $30k, does that sound right?". They'll be there.
But you have to do the work to know what the right wages are. Employers already know this stuff, obviously.
However, there's quite a lot of friction hiring unknown software developers (so I guess that's why I don't get those offers - I'm not actively hunting for them).
I always found that there is some "market price" where people are decent and paying less gets you less quality and paying more tends to get you better quality.
Specific example: we needed security guards for an event in Las Vegas circa 2006.
* $150/day got us off duty professional guards who were fantastic
* $125/day got us college kids/retired folks who were pretty good
* <$100/day high school kids or people with questionable backgrounds who were usually terrible
One could argue that, while you think you’re experiencing a shortage, reality is that you’re simply not willing to pay enough.
But I will happily bake you a loaf of bread for $10,000 each. In fact, I’d quit my day job to do that. That shortage wouldn’t last long.
Yes, exactly. The demand curve shifts right and the markets find a new equilibrium (most likely at a higher wage than the old equilibrium), but there’s no “shortage”. It’s just markets clearing at a different price level than what people are used to.
Calling it a “shortage” is like saying every time Starbucks raises their prices there is a shortage of coffee — at the old price, sure, but not in absolute terms. That’s not how equilibriums work.
A. Takes time for new workers to be adequately trained.
B. Takes even longer to get people that have been raised to look down on the trades to change their worldview and all of a sudden consider working with their hands, no matter how much money is involved.
There are real cases of shortages in the labour market. Where I live, the law defines a fixed rate for doctors. Even if I had all the money in the world, I could not legally pay more than my neighbour to employ the services of the doctor in town. Here, a shortage is a real possibility as there is no monetary way to decide who gets the appointment with the doctor. But these tend to be exceptional cases.
Without that legal requirement, I could simply offer more than my neighbour to get the appointment and the neighbour would have to choose to go without seeing the doctor. There is not a shortage in that scenario as the neighbour was not in the market to begin with. This is the same reason we don't say there is a shortage of Ferraris, even though the vast majority of people will never be able to get their hands on one, no matter how much they wish they could have one. They are simply unaffordable to most people.
It really doesn't matter how long it takes to train someone. As long as the price is able to rise, the business who really need the existing people will pay more, taking them from the businesses that cannot afford them, until everyone who still needs that service is fulfilled.
In what society?
But you've added the qualifiers 'in a store' and 'basically the same kind', and it's still not really describing fungibility, is it?
What if nobody trains to become a construction worker (for whatever reason) and then over the next 5-10 years demand goes down because people get used to making do with the buildings that already exist? Is it also not a shortage then?
Labor availability + skill + time + market awareness = it takes a helluva lot longer than months or 2-3 years to meaningfully boost a skill trade.
Labor availabity means: how many people - heavily influenced by the unemployment rate - are interested in putting in the time to go retrain themselves to do a new job. Many people will not kill themselves to do so, if they're making $45/hour and you tell them the upside is $60/hour. A deep level of comfort sets in for a large percentage of the population once you get to $30-$45 per hour.
Skill means: it takes years to train someone to an appropriate level at being a professional anything, whether we're talking roofing or plumbing.
Time means: well, it simply takes time to rotate large numbers of people into blue collar jobs. The whole process takes a lot of time, from start to finish. There's only so much that can be done to speed that process up.
Market awareness: it can take years for people to believe that blue collar work demand is going to be sustained (history say otherwise, and people know that such work is often inconsistent; and they know that the downturns are brutal). It can take years to get the word out in just a mid-size city like San Diego, that there is high demand. It requires new entrants to take risk, which most people do not like doing. To be convinced to take a life change risk if someone is even remotely comfortable, the reward has to be extreme in most cases.
That means you're not paying enough.
Suppose that we train x+y construction workers a year, x work in the industry until retirement, y - retrain to different profession. This means that there are y*years dormant specialists that can be brought back to industry.