News story on shipping companies price gouging, featuring Brian Flynn and Todd McFarlane. This is one of the major causes of price increases happening with the toy industry. The shipping companies are deliberately trying to take advantage of the Covid situation in order to ass rape and extort everyone.
https://toybook.com/toy-industry-supply-chain-saga/> Over the past year, container prices have increased from as little as $2,500 to as much as $26,000. In the meantime, some container shipping companies, such as Hapag-Lloyd AG, began adding a Value Added Surcharge fee to trans-Pacific trade, including shipments from China to the U.S. and Canada. In a widely circulated LinkedIn post this summer, ZURU’s Co-Founder and Director Nick Mowbray flat-out called these increases “price gouging” just as the first lawsuits on the matter began hitting U.S. courts.>On Aug. 1, Loadstar reported that MCS Industries — a family-owned home furnishings company — filed a complaint with the Federal Maritime Commission alleging that shipping lines, including Cosco and MSC, violated the 1984 U.S. Shipping Act by colluding with one another to “unjustly and unreasonably exploit customers” while “vastly increasing their profitability at the expense of shippers and the U.S. public generally, which bears increased freight cost in the form of inflation.”>A week later, MSRP increases began hitting retail en masse, making good on the warnings from toymakers that had been dominating headlines all summer.>“Right now, it is a two-fold issue of actually getting product to leave the factory on time, and then the immense delays and expense on shipping the product to the States,’’ says Brian Flynn, founder and owner of Super7. “Every time a product slips two weeks, it has a cascading effect on every product behind it, and there is no way to make up for the lost time.”https://toybook.com/toy-industry-supply-chain-saga/ 