It is the third week of March as I write this and the yard looks different than it did a month ago. Rows that were four deep are two deep. The food-grade area, which is the smallest and tightest part of our inventory, has eleven containers in it.
This happens every year and it is worth describing, because customers experience it as us being unhelpful in April and it is genuinely a physical constraint rather than a commercial posture.
The shape of it
| Month | In | Out | Net | Stock at month end |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | 1,340 | 1,190 | +150 | 2,480 |
| February | 1,280 | 1,510 | −230 | 2,250 |
| March | 1,190 | 2,090 | −900 | 1,350 + inbound |
| April | 1,120 | 2,140 | −1,020 | 1,290 |
| May | 1,310 | 2,010 | −700 | 1,580 |
| June | 1,480 | 1,620 | −140 | 1,740 |
| September | 1,910 | 1,510 | +400 | 2,090 |
| October | 2,240 | 1,480 | +760 | 2,410 |
The supply side barely moves. Industrial container turnover is driven by production cycles and contract ends, not by whether it is spring. What moves is demand: Lancaster, Berks and Chester counties buying for the spray and fertigation season, in a six-week block, against a regional supply that is what it is.
What changes operationally
The wash line becomes the constraint
In January we wash containers as they arrive and stage them. In April we wash against orders, and the line is the bottleneck rather than the yard. A container that arrives Tuesday can be on a truck Thursday, which sounds impressive and actually means we have no buffer.
Grading gets harder to hold
This is the honest part. When stock is thin and a customer needs eight containers on Friday, the pressure to let a borderline unit through as Grade B rather than Grade C is real. It is a pressure we feel every spring.
The defence is that graders do not know what the orders are. Renée's team grades at intake against the written standard, before anybody knows who is buying. It is a deliberately inefficient arrangement and it exists precisely for April.
Food grade effectively runs out
Eleven containers, as of this morning. Food-grade supply comes from food manufacturers finishing contracts, which happens on their calendar and not ours. If you need food-grade stock for spring, order it in January. We say this every year and every year somebody discovers it in April.
The part that is good
September and October, when it reverses. Site clearances, harvest empties, contract ends and plant closures all arrive at once, and the yard fills back up. Buy-back rates soften because everybody in the region is selling at the same time, which is bad for sellers and precisely why we tell sellers to hold until February if they have covered storage.
Publishing that is mildly against our interest twice over — it costs us margin in spring and it costs us cheap stock in autumn. But a customer who feels squeezed in April does not come back in January, and this business runs on people coming back.
What April actually looks like
Two graders starting at half six. The wash line running a double shift on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Priya rebuilding the corridor schedule twice a week because a Lancaster run filled up. Somebody, usually Tom, being pulled off the fabrication bench to load trucks.
And a lot of email explaining, politely, that we cannot conjure a Grade A food-grade container out of a yard that does not contain one. It is the busiest and least satisfying part of the year, and it is over by the first week of June.