re: Half of Lumber Dealers Now Sit on Excess Inventory in the U.S.

lead times are crazy across the board. I am in electrical distribution and here is a list of items that I should never be out of that I am having trouble sourcing in a timely manner:

plastic nail on boxes - vendors are allocating to distributors, and demand is far exceeding what they give me. 2 gang and round nail ons are the hardest to get right now

PVC conduit - if backordered, 12-14 week lead times

receptacles and GFI's- even when my vendors have them in stock, they are coming from either Dallas, Charlotte or Memphis, none of which can get trucks to pick things up. I am getting tracking numbers for things that have "shipped" that don't go live for 7-10 days

meter power panels- have had some on order since February, still waiting. Seems to be a component issue, because Milbank, Eaton, Square D and Siemens are all having troubles getting these out of the door

320a and underground meter pans- same as above, have had on order since March

add on top of that, anything with steel in it is being sold priced at the time of shipment and not the time of order, so I can't even take special orders on a lot of things without artificially inflating the price just to cover my arse if they don't have it in stock. Prices on everything have been going up at a rate I have never seen before. I have had to raise PVC fittings prices every month for the last year at a clip of 10-20% EVERY MONTH. They used to go up once a year.