Headlines moved on. Lead times didn’t. You can tell by the way small delays still echo through ordinary errands: a part “available next week” that becomes three, the backordered filter that shows up the day after you improvise a workaround, the price that only falls halfway back to where it started.
A supply chain is just other people’s calendars stacked on top of each other. When one slips, the whole tower leans. We learned that in 2021 and then pretended the lesson was over. It wasn’t. Freight is better, shelves look normal, but the buffer—the slack that made small mistakes survivable—hasn’t grown back. Shops pad their orders and households pad their closets because they remember what it felt like to need a thing that wasn’t there.
The arguments about what to onshore and what to leave to the ocean are larger than a receipt can carry. What a receipt can carry is proof that friction still taxes the day. A gasket costs time as well as money. A missed delivery costs a second trip and an hour of patience you were saving for something else.
The fix is not heroic. It’s boring redundancy: a spare on the shelf, a list of substitutes, a habit of checking earlier than you used to. Systems forget fast. People remember longer, and they’re the ones who pay when the tower leans again.