Back in 2008, high winds caused a crane to collapse on top of a Hapag-Lloyd boxship in Southampton, crunching several containers full of pristine Japanese automotive components in the process. The following day, the Honda car plant in Swindon announced it was shutting down for two weeks. That, in microcosm, illustrates what can happen when things go wrong with finely calibrated just-in-time delivery systems. Multiply the fallout from that incident by a factor of who knows how many thousand, and you have a metaphor for the pain the supply chain crisis is now inflicting on the world economy, exactly as seasonal consumer demand hits holiday season peak.

Shipping — which usually moves more than 200m teu from A to B each year without anybody paying a blind bit of notice — is suddenly in the news, basically because people aren’t getting their stuff. Worse still, parents may not be able to make good on little Johnny’s missive to Father Christmas. They’ll live. A generation has grown up in the expectation that it can click on the Amazon website and order a pack of gym socks, or a luminous garden gnome, or a multi-function food processor, and expect the goodies at their door in a matter of hours. Few will have given much thought to how these things make their way from the factories of Asia to their home. The thought of having to wait for delivery will come as a shock for many.

JIT is a relatively recent innovation. The fuddy-duddies of the 1980s pointed out the dangers that inevitably lurk when things are not done the way they always have been done, and the problems that would arise when things went awry. Inevitably, there have been glitches for individual companies now and then, and occasionally this or that import has been in short supply. But with hindsight, it is astonishing how rarely over the past four decades this has been the case. It is testimony to the supreme efficiency of shipping that upsets have been exceedingly uncommon. Well, until now, anyway.

The depredations of coronavirus, marginally assisted by the Suez Canal shutdown, have provided the naysayers with a modicum of retrospective vindication. There are now bottlenecks across the global supply chain, and no obvious silver bullet solution, especially where the constraints are physical. Clearly priority should be accorded to essential goods. Basic foodstuffs, medicines and medical equipment are simply more important than stocking filler, as are raw materials and components that support continued employment. In the abstract, it would be good if there were some slack built into port capacity, precisely to handle contingencies such as those we are witnessing now.

Indeed, Joe Biden has arm-twisted the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles into 24/7 operation. The only surprise here is that they were not working 24/7 already, because that is standard practice almost everywhere else. For virtually everywhere else, hard standing just sitting there and straddle carriers gathering dust doesn’t make much sense; countering the once-in-40-years drawbacks of just-in-time with elaborate just-in-case measures is a commercial non-starter. What is imperative is that shipping is not singled out for political attack because things are temporarily going pear-shaped. Most of all, it is in no way the fault of the 200,000 seafarers currently working beyond their contracted tour of duty. If politicians want to do something more constructive than griping, they could start by classifying crews as key workers and giving them priority for coronavirus jabs.

Honda’s Swindon plant has recently closed. But in 2008, the JIT disruption it temporarily experienced passed soon enough. Eventually that will be true for the world economy as well. That won’t happen overnight, and the best guess of many pundits is that it could take 18 months or even two years to restore normality. But normality will be back. If it takes slightly longer to procure new gym socks in the interim, what of it?