MC: Lauren, have you started your holiday shopping yet?
LG: No, absolutely not. I’m giving people hugs this year, provided they are vaccinated. No supply chain issues there, just free hugs.
MC: Well, that will be delightful.
LG: Oh, all right. Good to know. I’m glad you approve.
MC: You might want to start hugging now.
LG: Why is that?
MC: We’re going to get into that on this week’s show.
LG: Okay.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays.]
MC: Hi everyone, welcome to Gadget Lab. I am Michael Calore, a senior editor at WIRED.
LG: And I’m Lauren Goode, senior hug giver at WIRED. I’m a writer.
MC: We’re also joined this week by WIRED senior associate reviews editor Adrienne So. Hello, Adrienne. Welcome back.
Adrienne So: Hi guys.
MC: Great to have you here as always and happy holidays. Okay sure, it’s probably a little early to be saying that, but that’s kind of the point. You have no doubt been hearing a lot about problems with the global supply chain for computers, new cars, e-bikes, televisions. The whole consumer products industry seems to be stalling out. You may have even encountered this. You go to order something, it gets delayed during shipping or it just isn’t available to begin with. Later on in the show, we are going to go over some advice about how to get your shopping needs taken care of during all of this weirdness. But first we want to talk about the supply chain mess itself. First, maybe we should define what is the supply chain. It’s becoming something of a meme, where people often joke that they can’t find a date right now because of supply chain problems or they can’t show up at work because of the supply chain. But it’s actually a very complex system. Adrienne, you recently wrote a story about the supply chain and all its problems. Can you talk us through what’s going on here?
AS: Well, I want to start off by saying that it is absolutely insane that for the past couple of years, we’ve all been conditioned to believe that literally anything we want from anywhere in the world is going to appear at our doorsteps within like 24 hours, that is literally insane. As someone who used to get packages of underwear shipped for three weeks from the Philippines, let’s start off by saying that we had unrealistic expectations to begin with. But in the world that we live in now, things get manufactured in other parts of the globe. First they have to get made, and then they have to get packaged, and then they have to get put on a boat or a plane or a truck. And they have to make their way all shepherded by hundreds of people from where they’re going to where they’re supposed to arrive at, which is at your door.
And I don’t know if you guys have heard that saying, “For want of a nail, the war was lost” or something. It’s such a huge problem, and there have just been steps failing at every single point of this. And as gear testers, we have been experiencing this personally for months from the entire end, from not having enough supplies of computer chips for the gadgets that we need to test all the way to packages that are in Portland, where I live just doing an endless show pony circuit around my house. I can literally see packages arriving in Portland, going up to Alaska and then coming back. So they’re just taking my stuff with them for the grand Western tour. The whole thing is just, it’s madness I tell you, it’s madness.