White House: Walmart, FedEx, UPS to go 24/7 to address supply bottlenecks

Well, the long answer ends with "junk bonds".

It's theater, play acting as-if the government has a magic wand to yield against the shit storm they've been brewing with poor fiscal and monetary policy.

Actually no one had ever thought of moving goods 24/7, until the White House suggested it in 2021. So we should expect everything to return to normal very soon

Actually if you think about it, there are always legs along the supply chain that are not 24/7. Your AT&T Store isn't open 24/7, but they have to be there to accept an order of phone chargers (they're not gonna let FedEx just drop it in front of the store at 2am). So various segments of supply transport are probably timed to coincide with business hours. If they can run that delivery 24/7, that unburdens delivery so that even with a lower number of drivers, they can deliver more packages within a "working day", because the working day has gone from 12 to 24 hours per day.

But of course.... that means the AT&T store now needs to accept packages at 2AM. You might solve that a couple different ways: a low-paid overnight employee to accept shipments, or some new lock-box delivered around back with packages. Whatever it is, it won't work unless the courier is delivering at those hours. And based on my personal experience receiving ground packages from UPS/FedEx, those packages only seem to move between facilities during the day.

So like the PR says, this is a "signal" to other parts of the chain to figure out their own overnight hours. They specifically call out trucking, freight, ports, and retail. So there are probably opportunities in all segments for expanding operating hours.

They might also be getting "creative" around pay. Even if they can't find more workers, they're probably offering double or triple for overtime and letting people work themselves to death, hoping that they can hire more before their employees burn out. But I might be cynical....

Maybe they can mint 350 million trillion dollar coins and give one to every citizen... then we'd all be trillionaires, and all our problems will go away! /s

> We have unprecedented numbers of ships parked off California, and the 2 main ports there do not operate 24/7. This has been known for months and not much progress has been made on it.

Long Beach started 24/7 operation weeks ago, and while its not in the headline, this agreement includes 24/7 port operations at the port of Los Angeles as well. (Which the article text does mention.)