Supply chain issues challenge Birmingham businesses

During the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses in Birmingham and elsewhere have scrambled to cope with supply chain problems.

Local businesses like Revelator Coffee, TruSpin, Iniquities, Magic City Conjure and Our Place face uncertainty and frustration as vital items fail to arrive.

“Some [industries] are experiencing really important shortages where a key component is missing because of supply chain disruption, and that’s a profitable item for them,” said Tom DeCarlo, a UAB professor of marketing and industrial distribution. “Some businesses are not going to survive, in my opinion.”

DeCarlo said some businesses are losing customers who find alternative suppliers.

Supply chain issues vary for different industries, he said.

“For example, some manufacturers are having a lot of difficulty getting supplies from, let’s say, China or other Asian countries because of corona and limitations in their production processes,” DeCarlo said. “They have demands from other customers that they’re fulfilling and other customers that they’re having to put on hold.”

He said businesses that get supplies through California ports are in trouble.

“Those supplies are sitting on a boat somewhere out in the ocean waiting to be docked and offloaded,” DeCarlo said.

Luis Delatorre, general manager of Revelator Coffee downtown, started noticing late shipments in September.

Revelator normally receives coffee on Thursdays but, when Delatorre spoke to Iron City Ink in early January, he hadn’t received a shipment in over a week.

“After we run out of coffee, I don’t know what to do,” Delatorre said.

“What’s a coffee shop with no coffee?” he said.

Delatorre said late deliveries have not been common, and he has typically met his regional manager from Atlanta to refill his supply.

Revelator has been forced to raise its retail coffee prices because of late deliveries, he said.

Yancy Benson, owner of Southside bar Our Place, normally buys items like cups, straws and pineapple juice at Homewood’s Restaurant Depot.

But since March, he’s sometimes had to buy them from Publix or Amazon at double the price.

Benson said he’s had to buy cases of supplies ahead of time to avoid shortages.

He’s had the same problem with alcohol, though alcohol isn’t as accessible as other items.

“Everything is going up because of the shortage,” Benson said. “There would be weeks that I didn’t have Budweiser but I had Bud Light. There would be a month where I couldn’t get Corona.”

Prices have gone up for alcohol per case, Benson said. Popular liquors such as Grey Goose, Jack Daniel’s, Absolut and Fireball are more inaccessible now, he said.

“I keep ordering it and these are my top sellers,” Benson said. “Like Fireball. I can go through a case a week and if I can’t get it, I can’t get it.”

In Alabama, all alcohol sold in bars must come from ABC Board warehouses.

Bars that buy alcohol at an ABC Store and bring it back to their bar to sell are subject to fines, Benson said.

Bars are also subject to fines if they borrow alcohol from other bars, he said.

Benson is also a manager of Iniquities, a Birmingham fetish boutique that shares a storefront with witchcraft shop Magic City Conjure.

He said he ordered shoes to sell at Iniquities that took a month to arrive when it normally takes a week.

“With packages, sometimes you can get it and sometimes you can’t,” Benson said. “I’m not mad about it, I just make do with what I’ve got, but the customers are getting mad at us because they think it’s our fault.”

Benson said certain items sold at Iniquities have a two-case order limit. He said he and his sister, MeMe Armstrong, owner of Iniquities and Magic City Conjure, do whatever they can to keep products in the store.

“We’re fighting to stay open,” Benson said. “We don’t know what the outcome is going to be. Bills have to be paid. If bills can’t be paid, what do you do?”

In July, Robert Agnew, co-founder of TruSpin, a tech startup specializing in nanofibers, couldn’t get the materials he needed for the company’s alternating current electrospinning machine, one of only two such machines in the world.

TruSpin uses alternating current electrospinning to produce nanofibers with numerous applications, including as an alternative to carbon in batteries and insulation, Agnew said.

TruSpin got the chemicals it uses to make nanofibers, such as ethanol, from Europe but was unable to get them due to supply chain issues.

“We make precursor solutions, and we make them from chemicals,” Agnew said. “Sometimes the chemicals we want to use are harder to get, so we have to get creative and make them from other chemicals.”

He said sometimes the alternatives work as effectively as the actual chemical they need but sometimes they don’t, and this has led to optimization efforts for new formulations.

In some cases, TruSpin also had to make its own parts for the alternating current electrospinning machine.

Despite these supply chain issues, Agnew sees an upside for TruSpin.

“Challenges make you stronger,” he said. “I don’t think it’s an existential threat to the company by any means. We’ve simply learned to adapt at every possible stage. It’s a foregone conclusion everytime we set out to do something, we’re going to face challenges that would not ordinarily exist, and we’ll just have to deal with them.”