re: Lumber prices are through the roof!!!

I work in the lumber business. Lumber costs starting skyrocketing as soon as COVID broke out. Plain and simple the mills started to manipulate the market. Normal dimensional lumber is sky high. The business I’m in, we’ve completely quit buying S4S lumber. We’ve switched to rough lumber that is dirt cheap and we can plane it to the thickness we need for our production. There needs to be more regulation in the lumber market which I’m totally against. The fact of the matter is that lumber mills can set the price in the market to whatever they want. The buying price of lumber is ridiculous yet they’ve kept the price the same to cut lumber per ton in the field. It’s basically a scam and they’re getting away with murder. If you don’t pay more to cut it but can sell it for 5 times the price there is something seriously wrong with the industry. I’ve complained till I’m blue in the face. I’m sticking with green lumber and getting it dried at a price that dimensional lumber can’t compete with. They will eventually go bankrupt trying to sell dimensional lumber at the prices they’re at now. It will eventually drop when demand comes to a halt cause of the price. We saw it happen about a month ago. Prices dropped back to normal then all of a sudden it skyrocketed again. The mills are digging there own graves.