I just spoke to a buddy if mine who owns a company that trucks the containers from the ships to the destinations. He told me that what we are hearing from Ricoh about the back orders is 150% true. He said there are ships anchored off shore who are having to wait 15-25 days to unload cargo because of some dispute with the labor union that has everything at a standstill until arbitration works it all out. He did tell me you won't find much in the news about it and that it has not been covered much. He gave me a website to check but I haven't been able to get it loaded yet....once I do I will check and see what all I can get from it.
Unfortunately he said he didn't think it was going to get better soon and that some ships were now being routed through panama canal to the east coast and railed out to the destinations but he said the east coast ports don't have the space to take on a lot of the west coast excess containers. Some of his largest customers in the fortune 100 arena couldn't even get their containers off loaded in port so It Is quite a problem apparently.
I ordered more Ricoh equipment today and it all came back as backordered for 20 days or so.