It’s sort of a long story, but bear with me because it goes somewhere interesting.
Our home-based construction company was having a hard time because of some shortages on supplies.
This started because of a strike from the local trucker’s union. Local laws were negatively impacting truckers, so they stopped making shipments to our area. That in turn caused massive shortages on everything from bottled water to building supplies, and all things in between. The moral to this story is “don’t enrage the truckers, or your entire economy will be crippled.” My brothers and I run a small business making chicken coops and animal enclosures, and as you might imagine we require a lot of rebar, rod wire, bar wire, and forming wire. Without all of these things, our business cannot exist. Using online message boards I found a distributor who had a full inventory of all the rod wire and forming wire we could ever need. The problem was that the warehouse of rebar wire ties was about two thousand miles away, so we decided to rent a big truck and make a trek out of it. We could load up on rebar and forming wire and have enough for the next year or two, but it would take a lot of time, effort, and money to make it happen. On the other hand, if we sold it all off piecemeal to other local builders, we could double or even triple our investment in this rebar and the forming wire. Should we take the money, or keep the rebar rods?