Turns our shutting down the economy for 2-3 months then "haha" work from home(anywhere), great resignation, give people a bunch of government money to spend on products and home projects, quarantine after every sneeze, and force parents to home school for a year and a half has consequences. Couldn't have seen that one coming. Supply chain is no better today than it was 2 years ago with estimates of 15+ months before they can ease the issues.
Oh, it's going to get fixed before that... How you may ask?
Extreme pricing increases on retail products that dont mirror what people are making. I know in our business, the average price increases on new products have been close to 18% in the past 12 months alone. This is already slowing demand in our industry although it may be different in the HVAC side because people need their heat and AC.
Soaring interest rates, slowly killing the 0% financing that moves the needle for many in the retail industry.
Freight costs continuing to climb at a rapid pace, adding additional cost to products.
A major recession that many financial experts I listen to were predicting 3rd/4th Quarter of next year or 1st quarter of 2024 are now saying it will probably hit us 4th Quarter of this year depending on what the fed does.
All of that together will slow consumer spending down quite a bit, allowing manufactures to get caught back up. Once that happens, pricing will hopefully drop some (will never be back where it was), and hopefully some pricing competition will drive manufactures to be competitive with programs and financing options.
But the worst is still ahead of us and I agree with you ANTH, with as long as this pandemic / supply chain issue has been going on, nothing is getting better. Every month the news we get continue to get from our manufactures is worse and worse on product availability, at least in our industry.