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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>And it seems that root cause is ships bring more containers than they take with them.

No, that's not the root cause. The root cause seems to be a combination of cascading events that causes a deathspiral: https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_p...

"ships bring more containers than they take with them" is a symptom, not a cause. Mandating "ships to take an amount of empties" doesn't really fix the problem because shipping companies already want the ships to fill with empties, but can't because of other factors (see chart). Forcing ships to fill ships with even more empties presumably also makes things worse, by causing ships to occupy dock space.

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The last (upward) arrow in the chart does not make sense. Why would people buy more goods: as prices go up, they can buy less and less goods.

My guess would be to hoard goods while they can since the prices continue going up.

You might be right. In that case you might be able to cut the loop short by changing "line of ships grows..." to point to "trucks can't pick up containers...". In that case it's still a death spiral situation, but it's more similar to something like traffic jams, where throughput drops when there's bumper to bumper traffic.

So you buy less and less gas for your car as you hear CNN loop on gas price rising due to supply issue ?

Abd what about toys when everyone is talking about saving Christmas ? You'll make triple sure you have one, maybe even buy several from several sources.

I've seen myself do that with difficult to import goods, and price is always a lower factor than need. Price would eventually push me out, but there s a twilight zone when it's just right to panic buy stuff that werent supposed to be rare.

I agree, also most people have finite and limited disposable income, no matter want/need most people can only consume so many items especially when prices are increasing.

The ports only care about inbound cargo, not outbound empties. So they have no incentive to have enough space for empties.

The surge demand has suddenly depleted the free spots is removed until its a trickle. Then you get this result. The ships are stuck because the ports had no incentive to reserve space for empties.

Or, something like bufferbloat.

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