A prolonged outage is expected to result in increased prices and shortages in the United States, as well as delivery delays and other impacts globally.
“Now we can’t wait to see ships start docking outside ports waiting to see what will happen,” said Anne-Sophie Friborg, vice president of freight forwarding company Zencargo, which organizes shipments for exporters and importers. “I’m watching,” he said.
“If the strike continues, there will be enormous disruption,” she said.
Hamid Moghadam, CEO of Prologis, one of the world’s largest warehouse companies and a landlord to companies including Amazon, said the strike was not a shock but would “nonetheless” harm the economy.
“It will disrupt the proper functioning of the flow of goods,” he told the BBC.
Already, 100,000 containers are waiting to be unloaded in the New York area, and 35 more ships are expected to arrive this week, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said.
Danny Reynolds, owner of Stevenson’s, a 93-year-old clothing store in Elkhart, Indiana, said he paid extra to have sweaters and coats shipped quickly across the country ahead of the strike.
But about 25% of his inventory had yet to arrive and he was crossing his fingers that it was unloaded. He said he was most concerned about the delivery dates for special-order bridal gowns for weddings in November and December.
