The late-pandemic supply chain crisis never smelled quite as good as it did on Wednesday morning in Searsmont, Maine. The air on the 80-acre campus of Robbins Lumber was thick with the scent of eastern white pine—the tallest trees in the Maine forest—being sliced into boards. Yet the warehouse, a cavernous hangar designed to store pallets of finished lumber for shipment, was virtually empty. The company cannot keep wood on the shelves.
“Traditionally, these tiers are about four deep with lumber on both sides—you can hardly get a unit of lumber down the middle,” said Alden Robbins, the company’s vice president. “Look at it now. We’re running at about a quarter of our inventory, and we’re running at full speed, that’s how much demand there is. And if we produced 10 times as much as we produce, we could sell it all right now.”
Read Full Article »