CHARLOTTE Local Charlotte News — Shipping companies in Charlotte are feeling the affects of the supply chain delays happening at ports throughout the country.
Charlotte receives many of its goods from the Port of Charleston and Port of Savannah. Congestion at the Port of Savannah is among the worst on the East Coast. Reports say around 80,000 shipping containers are stacked on top of each other, still awaiting their destination.
Shipping distribution companies in Charlotte are waiting on tons of imports but employees say there isn’t a light at the end of the tunnel yet.
“They keep getting worse. Basically, there’s a bottleneck. There’s a shortage of truck drivers. It’s hard to get shipping containers. A lot of goods that we use here in the US, they come from Asia and whatnot. And because of COVID, those factories shut down, which delayed things, so it’s just becoming a huge bottle neck,” said Caleb Bucher, Sales Manager for Craters and Freighters of Charlotte.
Bucher said it used to take them a day to ship something to Charlotte, but now it takes a week.
“Even if you corrected the problem today, it would still be months before you would actually see a lot of results,” Bucher said.
Bucher said their company has seen a ton of price increases. Those price increases are trickling down to the consumers. September’s inflation report shows a 5.4 percent increase since last year.
Paul Hoben, who has worked in different areas of the supply chain, isn’t optimistic it will get better anytime soon.
“What you’re seeing at Savannah is loaded containers. And then what you’re seeing inland is empty containers and the volume of them is so huge that it’s kind of created gridlock,” Hoben said.
So how will this get fixed?
“I don’t know what we’re going to do. You know, there’s just no space, there’s no space to put an empty, there’s no space to put a load. And they’re just they’re just sitting there you know, and it’s kind of it’s just a crazy situation.”
