Whether you’re an importer, retailer or just someone who likes to get organised before the silly season, one of Australia’s leading freight forwarding companies is warning you to get on top of your Christmas plans now to avoid the pain and frustration experienced in 2020.
I can’t quite believe I’m having to warn businesses and shoppers about Christmas this early in the year, but the issues that impacted Australian shelves at Christmas 2020 are very much still present in 2021.
With international travel still in limbo, locals are still spending record amounts on retail goods, and that isn’t likely to change anytime soon.
Even with the problems the COVID vaccines roll out has experienced, at some point people will swing toward spending their money on holidays, rather than the astronomical amount Aussies are currently spending on retail goods.
The problem is, we don’t know when that will be so in the short term the pressure on the international shipping industry is still massive.
Retailers like JB HiFi are already highlighting the issue- their profits are through the roof, but Richard Murray is still warning shoppers that shortages are inevitable.
There’s no point waiting until the second half of the year to chance it come Christmas time – and that’s for both business owners and shoppers.
Remember last year when you couldn’t get a Christmas tree or PlayStation 5 in December? That is where we’re headed again this year. You need to be on top of this before the next round of shortages present themselves.
The consensus in the international shipping industry was that the freak occurrences in 2020 including container shortages and extremely high freight rates were not perhaps the outliers they appeared to be, but instead a new reality for the industry.
There had been a lot of hope within the industry that we’d arrive at some point of normalcy in the first half of 2021, but it’s getting to the point where we probably have to accept that we’re actually in the new normal now.
There’s just going to be a rolling issue of space and equipment. Chinese New Year did free up some boxes, but they’ve already all been used so we’re back to the same grind we’ve seen since mid-2020.
There’s a very real sense in the industry that this is how it’s going to be now, and we have to adapt and grow and not keep thinking it’s going to go back to normal, because this is normal.”
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