Consider the following:
a. What are some other vulnerabilities within the supply chain?
b. How can companies or countries mitigate or avoid future incidents such as these (besides not getting stuck in a canal in the first place) in the future?
c. How do incidents like these impact the average consumer or yourself?
4 comments:
Luckily, incidents like these are uncommon, and unlikely to occur again in the future. This particular incident will luckily have no effect on us, and a minimal effect perhaps on consumers in Europe who amazon primed a package from Asia. (It might arrive a few days late). Luckily the high tides caused by the full moon were effective in helping to dislodge the ship from the side of the canal. The funny thing is that people on the internet were so quick to make jokes and games about this incident. One of such games can be found here: https://eric-c-wilder.itch.io/suez-canal-bulldozer
There was also another game my dad was playing where you could stick the Ever Given any where on earth. He got it stuck in the foster city lagoon which it barely fit into. Overall, there have been many friendly/ funny responses to this incident online.
I think with this particular situation we weren't personally affected but I think Europe and Asia were definitely affected. Though a couple days doesn't seem like a lot for one ship, it wasn't just one ship that it affected, it was over 180 all which either had to wait out the block or go around and take extra days, costs and dangerous routes to get back on track. Though we might not have been personally affected yet, the blockage could potentially rise gas prices since shipping companies had to spend extra thousands of dollars to either wait or take a longer route, shipping prices could do up and that could inflate prices on our end. Luckily this doesn't happen very often and the ship was freed fairly quickly so these instances might not occur, but we still don't know what could come of this and how this might affect us for future container shipping methods.
I think a blockage like this created a sort of domino effect because when one ship got blocked, every other shipped was back up as well. I think companies can try to prevent this problem from occurring again (which is unlikely since this was a very rare circumstance) by maybe trying different routes out, and maybe having a better schedule so not all the ships are going through the same route all at once. I think situations like this affect us because we do not get the items we ordered on times, which causes people to look to the company to complain, which may lead to their sales to decrease.
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