How American Shoppers Broke the Supply Chain – By Alana Semuels (TIME) / Nov 2 2021
Gina Martinez, 54, has watched the vociferous U.S. appetite for stuff drive by her door every day. She lives in the house where she grew up in Wilmington, a working-class neighborhood of Los Angeles. When she was young, neighbors would chase trucks out of the neighborhood, she says, yelling at them for rumbling through on their way to and from the nearby twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
Today, her neighborhood is, essentially, a truck stop. Huffing diesel engines rattle down quiet residential streets, despite the signs prohibiting vehicles weighing more than 6,000 pounds. Trucks idle on streets where the pink of bougainvilleas is muted, covered in dust. They roll over sidewalks and chip the mirrors of parked cars and spew pollution into the already-smoggy air.
As Americans went on a spending spree this year and the ports filled with imports, clogging the supply chain, trucks started dumping shipping containers in Wilmington so they could go back to the ports and pick up more to relieve the backlog. The 40-foot containers, which can weigh four tons, are hulking feet from residents’ kitchen windows and blocking the driveways where their children ride bicycles. They’re piled six or seven high in storage yards where they dwarf small churches and homes.
“This wasn’t here six months ago,” Martinez tells me as we pull past a lot where white containers are stacked six tall, towering to the sky; a sign outside identifies it as an auto shop. “It was just a yard.”
CONTINUE > https://time.com/6112491/supply-chain-shopping/
