Construction material shortage triggers delays, soaring prices. How long will it last?
But the demand is straining a supply chain that is trying to reboot after it was nearly shut down at the start of the pandemic. "It's not just one thing," said Rudi Leuschner, a professor of supply chain management at Rutgers Business School in Newark. "When you think about any product that will end up in a retail store or at a contractor, that product until it gets there changes through a number of hands," he said. "And at each point in that process there's a chance that it gets delayed, or there's a chance that it just gets stuck somewhere. And then all of these little things add up to bigger delays and bigger outages and so on."