Christmas Shopping in October

Procrastination is the name; Christmas shopping is the game. Who doesn’t love a time crunch getting presents for your family and friends every year?

With online shopping becoming one of the most popular ways for people to shop, especially amid the lingering pandemic, most of us will have to start shopping…. Well, yesterday to be exact.

So, what’s going on?

Supply chain disruptions across the country have caused record shortages of many products people are used to having readily available. Common things like household goods to more refined items like cars are being held up by the supply chain bottleneck. If you go further downstream, beyond just what’s happening at the shipping port, there are labor shortages that resonate throughout the rest of the supply chain, like trucking and warehousing. As we continue to start the road to recovery from this global pandemic, problems will likely get worse before they get better. We are struggling to return to pre-pandemic levels of production which is causing an imbalance between supply and demand with many products. The labor department had a record 490,000 job openings in the warehouse industry. Companies such as Walmart, Target, and Amazon are going to great lengths to attract workers with attractive benefits such as free college tuition.

Will benefits like this be enough to attract enough talent to get things back to normal? Probably not. Get ahead and plan your shopping early, you will thank yourself.

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