How the World Ran Out of Everything
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This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. There's an image that stuck with me from the early pandemic that I'll never forget. It's the image of dozens of cargo ships stacked high with hundreds of thousands of containers anchored off the coast of Southern California. They were all just sitting there. I remember passing them in my car and the containers were stacked almost as high as the bridge I was driving over.

And then, of course, there were the grocery store shelves empty of flour and olive oil and yeast. I remember I really wanted baker's yeast for the first time in my life, but no dice. There are also big delays for online orders on everything from furniture and bicycles and car parts to PPE and medical supplies.

Before the pandemic, you rarely heard people use the phrase global supply chain, the incredibly complex network of corporations and factories and transportation companies that we depend on to make and move goods around the world. We just ordered our stuff that was often made on the other side of the planet, and it came right to our front doors, sometimes within hours.

The system seemed to be just humming along smoothly in the background. But Peter Goodman, who covers economics for The New York Times, says that for decades there had been signs that the global supply chain was actually on the brink of a meltdown.

There's a guy at Oxford named Ian Golden who predicted that a pandemic would hit the global supply chain, cause financial shocks, bring the global economy to its knees. Peter says most of the warnings were ignored by corporate leaders. And then COVID hit.

The pandemic was more of a reveal than a source of distress. It was the moment where it was just inescapable that we are dependent upon these jury-rigged supply chains with inadequate supervision without enough regulation such that there are now some gaping vulnerabilities arising.

For many of us, the pandemic was the first time we saw these gaping vulnerabilities in our global supply chain system. Peter's been reporting on how longstanding problems like corporate greed, overseas manufacturing, and our appetite for cheap stuff are what made this system buckle in 2021.

In his new book called How the World Ran Out of Everything Inside the Global Supply Chain, Peter's written about his findings, including one invention that really shaped the supply chain system we know and don't exactly love today. So the key innovation that allows companies to draw on suppliers around the globe is the advent of something we now take for granted, the shipping container. You know, before that...

Loading goods was the primary impediment to moving them around the globe. It was extremely dangerous work. It was extremely expensive. You had these dock workers who would spend days and days just staring at piles of stuff. You know, how am I going to get this side of beef in?

into the available space on this cargo ship alongside a drum full of chemicals and a bunch of shoes and bales of hay. You know, it's like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. People would be crushed by falling crate. Stuff would shift around and be damaged. Stuff would get stolen because it just wasn't a standardized process. And then in the early 1950s, along comes a guy named Malcolm McLean.

And he figures out by eventually standardizing steel boxes that you can load at the factory with goods and then use cranes to lift them onto the backs of trucks, onto trains, and onto ships. He can make it much easier to move cargo around. So what Malcolm McLean's invention allows is

is this seamless movement of goods from factories. And now the container ship becomes an extension of the factory itself. And there's a couple of knock-on effects of this. There used to be people standing on the dock, working the dock, figuring out how to load everything efficiently. This was all done by a group of people called dock workers or longshoremen.

Could you talk about that? Like, what impact did the rise of shipping container have on those workers? Sure. So the shipping industry from inception has been looking to squeeze dock workers out of the equation because dock workers are a natural source of labor mobilization. They hold a gun to the head of the global economy, right? If we don't satisfy them,

and pay them enough that they're willing to go do this dangerous, physically demanding work, then they can withhold their labor and ships don't move and trade doesn't happen. And so, as a result, they have kind of built in pricing power and have tended to get very good deals. And so, a lot of the technology that's arisen, and today it's, you know, robotics and

automated shipping terminals, in the beginning was the shipping container, is about diminishing the dependence on those human beings and squeezing them out of the cost equation and have there be less friction in the system.

Yeah, yeah. So I want to ask about another innovation that you write about that drives the global supply chain. And it's not an invention like the shipping container. It's a concept created at the end of World War II called just in time. And it was thought up as a way to help companies be more efficient. So could you sort of lay out where just in time came from and what it was meant to do?

Just in time is this sensible idea pioneered by Toyota that instead of operating the way Ford did, where it's just, you know,

know, all-on mass assembly. Make as many cars as possible. Just shove them down the throats of the sales channels and let them figure out how to sell the product. Make as much product as possible. Well, Toyota, post-Second World War, is dealing with the devastation of the war. They got limited capital. They have limited developable land in Japan because Japan tends to be a

very mountainous, and they say, "That's not gonna work for us. We need to operate more the way a supermarket manages milk." In fact, Toyota executives went to the United States and not only visited Ford factories, they visited supermarkets, and they said, "Yeah, think like milk.

The grocer needs enough milk that no customer leaves unhappy that they can't buy milk, but you don't want so much milk that some of it goes bad and you're spilling it. We need it to be delivered just in time. So Toyota takes this approach to making cars, and they have their suppliers clustered close at hand.

And they say, just bring us the parts and components that we need in real time. Right. And this approach makes Toyota wildly successful, one of the most successful car companies on the planet. And then Toyota starts openly sharing its method with other automakers and then other companies that don't make cars. They also study and use this just-in-time system. Could you talk about this moment when just-in-time sort of

beyond Toyota. Sure. So, you know, you go back to the 1980s when there's a lot of fear-mongering in the United States about the rise of Japanese industry. There's also a lot of admiration, and Toyota's at the center of it. And suddenly every business conference you go to or you look at the, you know, the cover of glossy magazines like Fortune or Forbes, you know, there are these –

celebrations of the Toyota production system or lean manufacturing, it becomes known as. And everyone in the business consulting world, and especially McKinsey, is pushing the idea that lean is synonymous with efficiency, with the right kind of capitalism, and lean is good. Okay. So then in the 1980s, Justin Time makes this leap and

as a kind of dominant managerial philosophy out in the larger business world, where it becomes almost a pathology. Like there's this aversion to having anything in-house other than what is making money right now. And that idea becomes supercharged. Could you talk a little bit more about how the consulting class and corporate executives push this to its limit? So

By the dawning of what we can call financialization, which is the paramountcy of shareholder interests above all, combined with the rise of business consulting outfits like McKinsey – I spent a lot of time in the book talking about McKinsey's role –

This sensible idea of just-in-time becomes this very crude imperative to just kill inventory. Inventory is bad. You don't want parts in warehouses. You don't want extra product. And let's face it, the business consultants, their boss is the shareholder. And so everything is about making the share price go up. And in this vein, McKinsey pushes this idea that, you know, the template for corporate success is

You fire lots of people. You turn full-time workers into part-time workers so that you can employ them when you need them and you're not stuck paying them and dealing with their hassles like their family problems and sick children and their commutes. You just pay for when they're actually needed. People are inventory in the McKinsey transformation.

And at the same time, you empty out your warehouses, you go just in time, you look for cheaper suppliers around the globe, which increasingly means greater distance between the place you're selling your good and the place you're making your good. And everybody pretends that the oceans don't really exist anymore because container shipping is so cheap and it's so reliable. And so, you know, it's a nexus of interests. The business consultants have come up with a perfect way for the corporate executives to

to lower their costs and increase their profits and make their share prices go up. And that means relying on container ships and supply chains that are spanning oceans. And this relying on someone else is one of the other key parts of this global supply chain, namely offshoring and the role of China. Can you talk about that ascendancy and how China fits into the global supply chain? Yeah. I mean, it's a confluence of

events that play out right at the same time. I mean, basically, China comes out of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1970s, this time of extraordinary upheaval, ferment, violence. People are poor. They're beleaguered.

And Deng Xiaoping consolidates power in China. And Deng Xiaoping reacts to the ideological upheaval of the Cultural Revolution by essentially concluding that ideology doesn't matter. What matters is national development.

And he institutes a bunch of market-embracing reforms that brings this industrial boom to China. And at the same time, the Chinese government manages to get China into the World Trade Organization, which will crack open export markets for Chinese goods, because China has become the ultimate place to make products cheaply and at scale. And this serves the interests of China.

publicly traded corporations in the United States who spent a lot of money lobbying the Clinton administration. I mean, Clinton comes into office and not even a decade later, he's leading the charge to get China into the WTO because he's vacuuming up campaign contributions from American retailers and manufacturers who are eager to make use of Chinese labor to drop the costs of production.

And China becomes like super specialized, become the factory of the world. I mean, you write that in 2021, Chinese companies are making something like 80% of the world's air conditioners, two thirds of our mobile phones. And this work gets spread across various regions in China so that different provinces have their own specialties. So how did that happen? Like, how did China go from having all these different regional niches here and there to where the whole country is eventually dominating world markets?

Yeah, so I was actually based in China from 2001 to 2006. And so I saw, you know, up close what unfolded after China enters the WTO. And what happens is all this foreign investment pours in and individual towns become, you know, oh, that's the microwave town.

where suddenly 40% of all the microwave ovens are made in this pair of factories in Guangdong province. Oh, over here in Zhejiang province, all the neckties are made here. Suddenly Italian necktie plants are going out of business as China takes, you know, 60, 70% of the world's share of making neckties. And so it goes, you know, blue jeans, T-shirts. It starts small and eventually turns into electronics. And of course, now we know, you know,

computing elements. And so eventually China emerges as the so-called factory floor to the world. I mean, if all the production is over there and you want to make something in the 21st century and you want to be remotely competitive with other people who are making stuff, you either go to China or you're out of business.

Coming up, as the global supply chain buckled during COVID, one U.S. toy maker went on a nail-biting mission to get his products on shelves in time for Christmas. What that story teaches us about how the whole system broke and how to fix it after the break.

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Starting in the early 2000s, China began to emerge as the center of international manufacturing. But when COVID hit, China also became the epicenter of a global supply chain crisis. In his book, Peter Goodman traces the chaos that meltdown created, particularly for a toy company called GLOW. That's G-L-O, no W, GLOW. One of the countless businesses that was stuck in supply chain hell.

At the start of the pandemic, Glow was a relatively young company created just six years earlier by an entrepreneur named Hagen Walker. Yeah, Hagen Walker's an interesting character. He's a guy who graduated from Mississippi State University in Starkville, Mississippi, graduates with this degree in engineering, has an internship at Tesla, turns down a full-time job because he wants to go back to his college town and start his own business.

Hagen started out making small novelty plastic cubes that lit up when you dropped them in water. His first customers were bartenders who used the cubes to add a little flair to their cocktails. He developed that idea into light-up bath toys. In 2019, that innovation landed him an incredible opportunity.

This turns into a deal to make floating bath toys for Sesame Street, themed for Elmo and Julia, a new character Sesame Street introduced around 2020 who has autism. This Sesame Street contract was the most important deal Hagen Walker startup had ever had. The goal was to have the bath toys on shelves in time for the 2021 holiday shopping season.

At first, Hagen planned to get all the parts he needed made domestically. But he quickly learned that it was going to be incredibly expensive, if not impossible, to manufacture his toys in the U.S. And finally, somebody in Georgia says, you know, this is too complicated. You got to make this in China. When production has moved to China, you either go there or you have a hard time making stuff. And so he follows the path of least resistance.

In late 2020, Hagen decided to get his toys made in China, where he learned that some parts of the process would be 12 times cheaper than in the U.S. But as the pandemic spread, Hagen soon found out how fragile the global supply chain really was.

China is struggling to turn itself back on. There are still COVID lockdowns, the worst ones in Wuhan, which is where COVID first emerges in early 2020 or actually late 2019. And there are shortages of all sorts of components. And

China is not unwilling to exercise state power. And so he needs plastic to make these dolls. He's told by his factory in the city of Ningbo, China, you better make the biggest order you can in one shot because you're going to have a hard time finding plastic. The government's having us prioritize use of plastic for things like medical devices. Kind of hard to argue with the logic of that. Like, you know, what do we need more, ventilators or, you know, light-up Elmo dolls? People are afraid of the pandemic.

There are restrictions on movement. So this factory says, we're having a hard time employing enough people. We're not sure about the raw materials. Place the biggest order you can possibly afford. So that's what Hagen does. Right. And then the toys get made. And then what happens to them? So when it's time to get the order shipped—

That's when things get really alarming. That's when Hagen goes on a website called Freightos. Think of this as like Expedia for people who need to book shipping containers. And he discovers that a journey that used to cost $2,000 is now going to cost him $20,000 plus. And even as he's agreeing to these astronomical prices, he's saying to himself, I cannot disappoint Sesame Street. Elmo cannot be late for Christmas. I will pay whatever it costs.

He's being told by shipping agents in Hong Kong, in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, in Queens, in Los Angeles, hey, sorry, there's no room on the ship.

And it turns out, you know, as I discover in the book, this is happening throughout the importing world. I mean, even large companies like Columbia Sportswear that have contracts to move certain number of containers per month are being told, oh, sorry, no room on the ship. But actually, there is room on the same ship if you're willing to pay expedited handling fees, special pandemic surcharges, you know, all sorts of made-up names for things that amount to paying a lot more for the thing that you thought you had contracted.

I mean, this really is as if, you know, we showed up as consumers at, you know, LAX thinking we're going to get on a plane for JFK. That's what it says on the ticket. We bought the ticket. And they say to us, no, no, we don't have space. But if you'll pay 10 times as much, well, we got space right now. And otherwise, you're going to keep waiting. And this is what's happening to Hagen and to importers in general. Yeah. Okay. So, you write that one of the big problems manufacturers were facing with the global supply chain was –

a gross miscalculation of how COVID would affect demand. Could you explain what everyone got wrong? One of the things that has happened is the people running global businesses have wildly flubbed the forecasting of what's supposed to happen in the pandemic.

economists look at the fact that factories can't produce, not just in China, but in Europe, eventually in North America, and people are getting thrown out of work, unemployment rates are going up, and they say, okay, we get it. This is going to be a nasty recession. There is spending power being taken out of the economy because people are losing their jobs, and as a result of that, there will be less demand for all sorts of things that

And transportation companies say, well, if we're running a shipping carrier, we're not going to need as many ships. So we'll park some in warm waters in Greece and just wait till the economy comes back. Computer chip manufacturers get –

reductions in orders for computer chips, and so their own suppliers get reductions, and so on, so on it goes. Well, what actually happens, as we now learn, is that it's true, we're not going to offices anymore, so the local sandwich shop doesn't have any business, and those people are laid off, but we're now stuck at home, you know, cooking 27 meals a day for cooped-up schoolchildren.

And we now actually need more kitchen appliances. We're not going to the office, but now the bedroom is the office. We need desk chairs. We need more computer monitors. We need iPads for the kids, trampolines for the backyard. We need all of this stuff. And a lot of that stuff is made in China specifically. So there's this surge of demand. This is what Hagen is leaning into. At the same time, he's trying to make his cubes bigger.

Everybody's trying to make stuff. And then when stuff eventually gets made, the shipping industry gets overwhelmed because they've effectively mothballed some of their fleet. And then they discover that makes prices skyrocket. We can charge whatever we want. And people are so desperate to get their products to home markets in time for Christmas. They'll pay whatever it takes. Oh, that's actually really good. Yeah. And this is another place where Hagen gets snagged because once his toys are sold,

and ready to go, he can't find a shipping container in China that he can use to bring them to his warehouse in Mississippi. And that's because these shipping companies, they're just making a killing

killing moving factory goods from China to the West Coast of the U.S. and then sending the empty container back to China to refill as fast as possible to make the trip again. And so that's all they want to do. But Hagen was desperate to get his toys to the U.S., so he just went crazy, working the phones, calling every agent he knew between New York and China. He fired off emails. He talked to factory owners until finally he gets his bath toys in a container and onto a ship bound for Southern California.

where there were even more supply chain issues. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Take the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. This is the gateway for roughly 40% of all imported goods reaching the United States by container. We got dock workers sick.

We don't have as many working people. We've got a shortage of truck drivers because truck drivers are sick. And also, people are stuck in these long queues, the ships themselves, 50, 60, 70 ships floating, waiting for their chance to pull up at the docks because there's so much volume, fewer people to move this stuff at the other end. So the whole system just kind of buckles at once.

And so in mid-October, we're talking just like barely over a month before the holiday shopping season starts. The ships with Hagen's toys approach the port on Long Beach. Right. And the first thing that happens is this ship –

gets stuck in a queue for several weeks where it's just floating around off the coast of Southern California with, I got an estimate, roughly a billion dollars worth of stuff just floating there. We're talking like enough Heineken to satisfy the city of San Francisco for a year, enough cornhole game equipment to satisfy the whole country for months.

And this stuff is just floating, you know, in the ships surrounding Hagen-Walker's vessel, which pulls up at the docks. And a shipping agent he talks to in Queens, New York, says, give up on rail. Rail is a fiasco. Let me see if I can get you a long-haul truck. Now, long-haul trucking is besieged by delays. There's supposedly truck driver shortages, which is really the industry's way of describing the fact that they've downgraded this job.

to such a hellish state that they can't find enough people to do this job. And the minute unemployment goes down, people go do something else. Well, Hagen-Walker gets lucky. They find a truck driver, and the truck driver brings his container full of these Elmo dolls from Southern California to his warehouse in Mississippi in time for Christmas. It ends happily for Hagen-Walker, but not for everybody else. So despite all these obstacles, by the skin of his teeth...

This works out for Hagen-Walker. But in your book, he and others have discovered that maybe it's time to stop relying so heavily on China as the place where everything gets made. And they look at other countries around Asia and beyond in order to give themselves some more resiliency. But leaving China is much easier said than done. So what are the obstacles with this?

So, you know, if you're a giant company like Walmart, then sure, okay, we'll move a little bit of production to India or Mexico or wherever. If you're a small business like Hagen Walker, you know, he actually comes out of the pandemic experience wanting to move some of his production out of China. He's concerned about the trade war. He's concerned about being vulnerable to increased shipping costs.

So he takes a trip to Vietnam. He explores moving production there. He thinks about Cambodia. And in the end, he stays in China. And he shows me an app that he uses to order raw materials. It's part of Alibaba. You know, it's like the Amazon of raw materials.

China. And he says, look, you know, if I need some electronic component, I can put out a request for proposal in 15 minutes. I can have a dozen bids. I've got reviews of the factories that reply. I can chat with people there pretty much 24-7. English is no problem at all. He said, if I tried to build that in Vietnam...

It would take me years just to find a handful of suppliers, whereas China is set up to do this business. So in the end, he's decided that even though the risks are now evident, the rewards are too great, and it's risky to actually move the business somewhere else. It will be very difficult for global manufacturing to break up with China.

You have this story where the kicker to that is even if you do business with Vietnam, one of their components that they need to do the thing that they're doing, they also outsource that to China. Vietnam is heavily dependent upon the Chinese supply chain. That is reality. Okay. But still, it seems like for U.S. companies who want to build resiliency—

One of the lessons is what they call nearshoring. Could you talk about how some companies are pushing to move manufacturing nearer to the U.S.? Yeah. Well, companies like Walmart. So take Walmart, for example. So 15 years ago, if you were a manufacturer of a retail product, you're hoping to get on the shelves of a Walmart superstore and you fly into Bentonville, Arkansas. You have to go to them, by the way. It's like going to see the Pope.

They don't come to you. You go in, you wait for your appointment with the buyer's representative at Walmart, and they would ask you, where are you making this product? And 15 years ago, if you said anywhere other than China, you had a problem because the assumption was you couldn't possibly be getting the lowest possible price, could be making it most efficiently at scale. Well, today, if you go to Bentonville and you have that same conversation with Walmart, where are you making the product? And the answer is only China, you have a problem. The

They want a backup plan. And I've been writing stories about how Walmart's been moving production to Mexico, to Central America, to India. And this is all a reflection of the reality that they've discovered that you actually are leaving money on the table if you can't keep your products in stock. Okay. So besides nearshoring, what are some of the lessons learned to avoid another meltdown like the one we saw during COVID? Like,

Do you have a prescription for how things could be better? Yeah. Well, I think first of all, we got to have serious antitrust enforcement. And we've seen some of that from the Biden administration, but there needs to be follow through. I mean, the fact that we have entrusted much of our productive capacity to these industries, rail in particular, shipping, another, where we have de facto monopoly power over

able to dictate prices and manipulating the supply of their services so that we're constantly in a state of agitation about our ability to move goods. That's just simply got to be looked at by government antitrust and enforcement authorities. And then to realize that it was absurd to treat a factory in Southern Ohio as the functional equivalent of a factory in China. That's not to demonize the factory in China, and it's not to demonize globalization, but

but to recalibrate it so that it makes common sense. We need backup supplies. And by the way, just-in-time works better if more of our productive capacity is closer to the consumer.

And I think, you know, our own experience in the last few years when we've heard so much about these supposed labor shortages, well, most of the time when we dig into labor shortages, what we find are that workers have been getting a bad deal for years. They've lost the ability to balance their family lives and their own interests with their work.

In many instances, people are working very, very hard and are still at poverty. They require government supports like food stamps just to keep themselves fed. And people are fed up. And when there's a shock and unemployment drops and people have bargaining power, they're going to demand a better deal. And I think that—

I guess the thing I would prescribe is the realization that we've optimized the supply chain for big box retailers. And we've done that in the name of, you know, anything that drops prices is good for consumers and anything that's good for consumers is good for society. Well, find me the person who's only a consumer. We are consumers. We are workers. We are parents. We are children.

And the whole thing will work in much more stable fashion, whether that's the capacity to make a ventilator in the middle of a pandemic or amuse ourselves with, you know, light up cubes, whatever it is. People have to get paid enough that they feel a real incentive to keep doing the thing that we would like them to do. And how do you get people involved?

to internalize the human cost of an efficient global supply chain. Like your book is a very humanist book. Like you can sense your outrage of the Union Pacific Railroad worker who has to like camp on the side of the road now or something like that. Like if part of making this resilient for all of our sake is

And making the world a better place is putting yourself in the mind or recognizing what has been happening to the working class. How do you do that? Like, how do you build that into the values of your system? I think you have to find a way at a regulatory level.

to diminish the incentives to just do whatever it takes to make your share prices go up. And some of that's antitrust, you know, and some of it is labor safety regulations, workplace safety regulations, food safety regulations. But

You know, one of the things that I think it's most important for consumers to ask to the extent to which consumers are going to be thinking about these things is, where's my money going exactly? I mean, we like to think of ourselves as the swashbuckling capitalist society. We've got

a lot of corporate welfare in our society. And a lot of it comes, you know, at the expense. I mean, the subsidy is often the safety or ability to spend time with your family or enjoy your life or go see a doctor when you need to. That's a subsidy that, you know, as Barbara Ehrenreich once put it, and I quote her at the end of the book, you know, the working poor, they're like the ultimate philanthropist. They are giving us...

their safety, their security, their time, so that the rest of us can get stuff that's cheap. Well, if there's one thing I hope my book will bring home for people, it's that there are a lot of costs to that kind of cheapness. And we all bear them. Because when you're a medical device manufacturer and you can't make a ventilator in the middle of a pandemic because you've gone so lean with your inventory or you haven't gotten enough people on hand in your factories, you don't get to say, well, at least our share price is high. Nobody's buying that.

Peter, the book is so nicely put together and entertaining and tells such a complete story. I really appreciate it. I've loved reading it. So thank you so much for talking with us. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. Peter Goodman's book is called How the World Ran Out of Everything Inside the Global Supply Chain. It is a fascinating read. So go check it out. We talked about a ton of stuff that didn't make it into the story. It's all in the book. It's fantastic.

99% Invisible was produced this week by Christopher Johnson, edited by Nina Potok, mixed by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Rial. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kolstad is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. Taylor Cedric is our intern. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Gabriela Gladney, Vivian Leigh, Lasha Madon, Jacob Maldonado-Medina, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stephan Lawrence.

We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California.

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