Thread by @JohnNephew

I received an email from Grizzly Industrial about how they were raising prices on various woodworking tools and why they needed to, and it got me thinking about the same with respect to board games and RPGs.

The main driver is shipping costs. In late 2019 we were quoted a port-to-door price of about $3000 for a 40-foot shipping container from China to Duluth. When we first booked the shipping container for Dice Miner -- in December -- the price to our door was something like $7,200.

After four months of losing our spots on ships (mainly due to cancelled sailings), we found that we could only get a space by having a container delivered to and unloaded at the US west coast. Given how containers were sometimes earlier this year waiting three weeks to get a rail

chassis for the further inland journey, that makes sense. But it means we are spending thousands of dollars more to have the shipment unloaded in Tacoma, reloaded into a 53-foot semi, and driven across the continent to our door. In the end this means that not only is the game

arriving four months after it should have in normal shipping times; the bill is also going to be something like $12,000 total in the end. I know we are not alone in this...industry friends report paying similar rates for this container size, and $8kish for a 20-foot container.

And again, that is for actual deliveries, as opposed to bookings that are lost to cancelled sailings and whatnot. Paying extra to actually get on a ship is now the norm, and carriers continue to hike the underlying official shipping rates as well: archive.dpiusa.com/signals/210504…

TL;DR on that article -- May 15th was the TENTH general rate increase of 2021, with all the transpacific carriers charging an additional $1000 per 40-foot container; and June 1st brings another $1000 hike. I expect by this summer it will be the norm to pay $15,000 for a 40' from

China to the US Midwest, and it is not physically possible (in terms of shipbuilding and new container manufaturing) for it to drop back soon...certainly not with the Christmas stock-up season on the horizon.

(I will add more to this thread later, but need to refresh my coffee.)

There are also issues with driver shortages within the US. I ordered something like 9 pallets of flattened boxes from a Chicago warehouse - I literally bought everything they had in stock of the sizes we need for oath, and then less optimal sizes, so it could ship IMMEDIATELY --

and it took TEN DAYS for the to get delivered, instead of the usual one. In the end, even that took repeated phone calls and eventually had the order split into two separate shipments sent on different days, since I guess they could never get all the space needed at one time.

Anyway, none of this will get better in 2021. We have a lot of goods in our warehouse, but as things sell out we will face much greater expense in replenishing the inventory, not even considering the increasing costs and delays related to raw materials that our suppliers need.

It's fair to ask why we don't switch to domestic production, so I want to quote-tweet this reply and response into this main thread.

https://twitter.com/jeffkahrs/status/1395706064776187906

We have been looking at domestic production options, both in cases where we have produced in the US before and in new cases. For example, we sought a domestic quote for the reprint of Magical Kitties Save the Day a couple months ago. So far the total cost to manufacture and ship

from overseas, while bounding upwards, is still less than domestic production costs for many of our products (especially board game type formats in the kind of modest volumes we usually print).

For other products and formats, we are planning domestic production (for example, the new Fantastica hometown in the current Magical Kitties Level Up kickstarter: kickstarter.com/projects/atlas…

we plan to print in the USA for a number of reasons including turnaround time, though it will probably cost more than if we printed it in China or Lithuania).

Upshot for all of this is that I am expecting significant consumer game price increases and supply interruptions later this year. Exactly how that shakes out, I'm not sure. But unless the world's shipping capacity doubles by magic, it's just a question of timing.

I am still pondering the strategic implications of this for @atlasgames. We are in a strong position right now, but the past year has given us all kinds of new and exciting lessons in how quickly things can change, so this is the right time for pondering and then planning.

(I'm glad we had started phasing out pre-printed MSRPs a few years ago already.)

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