I've certainly noticed this and so have people I know. It took one neighbour the best part of a year to get parts for his car which was a year old.
Another bloke has had trouble getting tractor parts, I've had trouble with ride-on parts. It seems it's just the same in the US.
"You might have noticed that it is increasingly difficult to get replacement parts for any machine, most particularly cars. That’s a symptom of failure in several integrated systems that are breaking down now: the manufacture of products in distant lands, price disorder in the container-ship business, the collapse of the US trucking system (and with it, the just-in-time inventory model), and the inability of auto dealers to find competent mechanics (while the sinking middle class can no longer afford to buy the cars they sell under the most liberal financing schemes). Expect all that to intensify.
You’ll see similar dysfunction in the system that delivers food to the people of our country. Even as currently operating, with the supermarkets amply stocked, the triumph of poor decision-making has led to 80-percent of the products sold being some form of processed corn syrup and GMO grains marketed as “fun” snack-foods that have destroyed the health of a great many citizens (and overwhelmed the medical system with chronic illness). The breakdown of the US food system is now proceeding with idiotic policy from our government (actually every government in Western Civ is doing it) undermining farm operations, and most especially small farms, with egregious regulation. The pretext for this is the delusional hysteria over “climate change.” It gives the managers something to manage badly. The large-scale farmers are also affected, of course, but their business model is already broken in other ways, mainly the gigantic cost of their “inputs” — fuel, fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides, and borrowed money to get the crop in. Political and economic management has arranged matters so that, in theory, the failed small farmers will be consolidated into the giant farms (which are also failing), but you can see how that’s going to work out. Before long, all farms will be unable to produce and, after a period of food shortage, perhaps famine, you will see the emergent reorganization of farming at the small scale minus the dead-weight of government regulation."
:Jim Rickards
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