this is nuts. Zvi’s summary of the situation:

1. The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach together are responsible for a huge percentage of shipping into the Western United States.
2. There was a rule in the Port saying you could only stack shipping containers two containers high.
3. This is despite the whole point of shipping containers being to stack them on top of each other so you can have a container ship.
4. This rule was created, and I am not making this up, because it was decided that higher stacks were not sufficiently aesthetically pleasing.
5. If you violated this rule, you lost your right to operate at the port.
6. In normal times, this was annoying but not a huge deal.
7. Thanks to Covid-19, there was increased demand to ship containers, creating more empty containers, and less throughput to remove those containers.
8. Normally one would settle this by changing prices, but for various reasons we won’t get into price mechanisms aren’t working properly to fix supply shortages.
9. Trucking companies started accumulating empty containers.
10. The companies ran out of room to store the containers, because they could only stack them in stacks of two, and there was no practical way to move the containers off-site.
11. Trucks were forced to sit there with empty containers rather than hauling freight.
12. This made all the problems worse, in a downward spiral, resulting in a standstill throughout the port.
13. This was big enough to threaten the entire supply chain, and with it the economy, at least of the Western United States and potentially of the whole world via cascading problems. And similar problems are likely happening elsewhere.
14. Everyone in the port, or at least a lot of them, knew this was happening.
15. None of those people managed to do anything about the rule, or even get word out about the rule. No reporters wrote up news reports. No one was calling for a fix. The supply chain problems kept getting worse and mostly everyone agreed not to talk about it much and hope it would go away