Remember when grocery shelves went bare and cargo ships clogged the California coast? That chaos wasn’t just a pandemic hiccup—it was a symptom of a supply chain stretched to its limits.
This is 99% invisible.
I'm Roman Mars.
There's an image that stuck with me from the early pandemic that I'll never forget.
It's the image of dozens of cargo ships stacked high with hundreds of thousands of containers anchored off the coast of Southern California.
They were all just sitting there.
I remember passing them in my car.
And the containers were stacked almost as high as the bridge I was driving over.
And then of course, there were the grocery store shelves empty of flour and olive oil and yeast.
I remember I really wanted baker's yeast for the first time in my life, but no dice.
There were also big delays for online orders on everything from furniture, bicycles and car parts to PPE and medical supplies.
Before the pandemic, you rarely heard people use the phrase global supply chain.
The incredibly complex network of corporations and factories and transportation companies that we depend on to make and move goods around the world.
We just ordered our stuff that was often made on the other side of the planet, and it came right to our front doors.
Sometimes within hours, the system seemed to be just humming along smoothly in the background.
But Peter Goodman, who covers economics for the New York Times, says that for decades there had been signs that the global supply chain was actually on the brink of a meltdown.
There's a guy at Oxford named Ian golden who predicted that a pandemic would hit the global supply chain, cause financial shocks, bring the global economy to a its knees.
Peter says most of the warnings were ignored by corporate leaders.
And then Covid hit.
The pandemic was more of a reveal than a source of distress.
It was the moment where it was just inescapable that we are dependent upon these jury rigged supply chains with inadequate supervision, without enough regulation, such that there are now some gaping vulnerabilities.