When it's all working the way it's supposed to, the somewhat abstract entity we call the supply chain is pretty much invisible to us as consumers.

We want beef for dinner. We need a new car. Our kids want a hot new toy for Christmas.

And we just expect all that to be available to us at the store or possibly delivered straight to our doorstep within a matter of days, if not hours.

But during the pandemic, the supply chain did not work the way it was supposed to.

From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd.

Factory slowdowns or closures, limited supplies, not only of items we wanted but needed.

Remember how hard it was for a while to get N95 masks?

Or still, millions of tons of ready-to-go commodities were stalled on ships or in ports

with not enough workers to offload them onto trucks or rail cars to get them where they

needed to go. Suddenly, the entire global system of just-in-time manufacturing showed itself to be a

kind of mirage that seemed to work perfectly until it really wasn't working at all.

So what exactly went wrong and what needs to happen to protect the world's economy and the world's people from future snags?

Peter S. Goodman is Global Economics Correspondent for the New York Times.

He writes about this in his book, How the World Ran Out of Everything, Inside the Global Supply Chain. Peter, welcome to think. Thanks so much for having me. You open this book describing something like a blockade in

the waters off Long Beach in Los Angeles, California in October of 2021. It was this weird time of people

stuck at home by the pandemic, yet ordering huge amounts of stuff, but also this massive struggle to get the items on container ships offloaded and delivered to where they needed to go?

Yeah, it was a very strange thing. I mean, there were lots of different places around the globe where you could see evidence that the supply chain had buckled.

But I think the one that's probably most familiar to people in the United States is these cues of ships, 50, 60, 70 long off the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

I mean, these two ports together are the gateway to 40% of imported goods arriving in the United

States by container ship.

A lot of this stuff is factory-made products coming in from Asia.

And yes, we so overwhelmed the works that there just wasn't sufficient space for these ships

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