华盛顿(美联社)——游戏制作人Eric pose去年创造了“最坏情况”纸牌游戏, making a wry reference to the way the coronavirus had upended normal life.

He had no idea.

In a twist that Poses never could have predicted, 他的游戏本身也受到了这场健康危机的最新影响:全球供应链积压，导致全球发货延迟，运费飙升.

Worst-Case Scenario, produced in China, was supposed to reach U.S. retailer Target’s distribution centers in early June. 然而，奥运会却在西雅图港滞留了数周，直到7月中旬才抵达.

“It’s consuming my life,’’ said Poses, who started his Miami Beach, Florida-based toy company All Things Equal in 1997, selling games from the trunk of his car. “You do everything right. You produce on time. You’re psyched about your product.’’

And then ... unforeseeable disaster.

Like other importers, Poses is contending with a perfect storm of supply trouble — rising prices, overwhelmed ports, a shortage of ships, trains, trucks — that is expected to last into 2022. 这次经历让他非常不安，他正在重新考虑五年前做出的一个节省成本的决定:把他的游戏和玩具的生产从美国转移到中国. Now, he thinks, it might make sense to bring production back — at least to Mexico, 如果不是美国的话——以保护他免受依赖大洋彼岸中国工厂的风险.

“I’m willing to make smaller margins," he said, “if it means less anxiety.”

Other American companies are making similar calculations: 52% of the U.S. 咨询公司科尔尼(Kearney)调查的制造业高管表示，他们已开始在美国购买更多物资，以应对与新冠肺炎相关的供应中断. Forty-seven percent said they plan to reduce reliance on supplies or factories from a single country; 41% specifically said they wanted to cut their dependence on China.

And not just because of the virus-related bottlenecks in shipping, severe as they are. Companies are worried, too, about becoming caught in the crossfire of a trade war between the United States and China, the world’s two biggest economies.

这场冲突始于唐纳德·特朗普总统对价值3600亿美元的中国进口商品征税，以抗议北京超越美国技术主导地位的积极努力.

But neither Chinese leader Xi Jinping nor Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, appears to be in a hurry to seek peace.

“The whole relationship is in bad shape,’’ said Rosemary Coates, a longtime consultant to companies wanting to establish factories in China.

In America, there is bipartisan frustration over China’s sharp-elbowed trade practices — which, critics say, includes cybertheft — as well as its crackdown on civil liberties in Hong Kong, repression of Muslims in Xinjiang and bullying of neighbors in South and Southeast Asia.

“Are we in a 21st century version of the Cold War? Yes,’’ said trade lawyer Michael Taylor, a partner at King & Spalding. “The endgame is not nuclear annihilation. The endgame now is economic dominance.’’

For decades, 企业通过将制造业转移到中国和其他低工资国家来积累利润, then exporting their products back to the United States. They have also held down costs by keeping inventories to a minimum. 在“准时制”模式下，工厂只购买满足订单所需的材料.

But relying on distant factories and keeping inventories threadbare is risky. In March 2011, an earthquake and tsunami damaged auto parts plants in northwestern Japan. The resulting parts shortages temporarily idled car plants around the world, 这是一个清醒的提醒，冗长的供应链很容易受到破坏.

Then came Trump’s trade war. 在特朗普对来自中国的商品征收高额关税后，进口商争相重新配置供应链，寻找中国工厂的替代品.

But they’d never seen anything like what COVID-19 inflicted on global commerce.

去年2月和3月，随着各国封锁和家庭避难, companies sold off inventories and canceled orders from suppliers. And the economy did, in fact, collapse: In the United States, gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic output, fell at a 31.从2020年4月到6月，年增长率为2%，这是自1947年以来最糟糕的一个季度.

Then something unexpected happened.

“What nobody knew was that when you send everybody home, the first thing we all do is shop’’ online, said Lewis Black, CEO of Almonty Industries, which mines the rare metal tungsten. “You had, on one hand, inventories being run down and manufacturing ground to a halt, and on the other, people were spending like crazy.’’

Fueled by pent-up consumer demand, 特别是当疫苗使经济重新开放，家庭再次回到外面时, growth roared back. The U.S. economy expanded at a stunning clip — a record annual rate of 33.从2020年7月到9月，这一比例为8%，并一直保持下去，最近达到了健康的6%.5% annual growth rate from April through June this year.

Suddenly, companies were overwhelmed with orders they couldn’t meet.

“They had an oops moment,’’ Black said.

“It’s a classic case of overreacting on the front end and having to play catchup,’’ said Tom Derry, CEO of the Institute for Supply Management, an association of purchasing managers. “No one really foresaw the strength in the surge of demand .... Supply just can’t keep up.’’

As companies hurried to meet surging demand, the cost of raw materials soared: The price of oil is up more than 70% over the past year, aluminum 55%. Tin prices have doubled. The price of high density polyethylene blow-molded plastic — common in bottles, fuel tanks, industrial drums and other products — has surged 157%, according to the Plastics Exchange spot market.

Freight costs shot up, too, as companies tried to book shipping containers. 自2020年5月中旬以来，衡量航运成本的波罗的海干散货运价指数飙升了700%以上.

Getting products onto container ships was hard. But that wasn’t the end of the trouble. Ports were overwhelmed when the cargo arrived.

“They couldn’t get the ships in and out,’’ said Richard Gottlieb, CEO of the consultancy Global Toy Experts. “They were backed up. You know that horrible experience where your airplane lands and there’s no open gate? That’s what happened to containers.’’

The result is that the supply chain breakdown is paralyzing many businesses.

Consider Elmer Schultz Services, 这是一家费城公司，为餐馆和其他客户维修和维护厨房设备. It is facing maddening delays in getting parts. It used to take seven to 10 days to get backordered parts. Now, it takes three or four weeks.

“It’s very frustrating to tell a customer we can’t fix their oven for three or four weeks,’’ said Kirby Mallon, 埃尔默·舒尔茨主席和商业食品设备服务协会主席.

Glitches made things worse. The huge container ship Ever Given got stuck in the Suez canal for a week in March, cutting off shipping between Asia and Europe. 世界第四繁忙的港口——中国制造业中心深圳附近的盐田港——在5月底因新冠肺炎病例的再次出现而关闭了一个月.

“当你放弃自己的制造，让别人为你制造——如果一切顺利的话, you can make more money. 但你能赚更多钱的原因是风险更大，”贸易律师泰勒表示. “And that risk is supply disruptions, labor issues, quality control, theft of your" intellectual property.

进口商试图计算出他们能把多少更高的成本转嫁给消费者. At Mindscope Products near Los Angeles, 老板乔治·巴兰奇希望避免提高他向零售商收取的玩具价格, including remote-controlled cars and the Jabberin’ Jack talking pumpkin.

“It’s tough,’’ he said.

Raising prices, he said, is easier online. He has upped the online price of Mindscope’s radio-control stunt car to $22.99 from $19.99 and plans another price hike to $24.99 next year.

Companies that resisted moving production overseas now enjoy an advantage. 他们不必等待自己的产品漂洋过海，也不必考虑是否能把在美国受到打击的进口税转嫁给消费者.S. border.

“那些在竞争对手利润丰厚的情况下挺过艰难时期的人，现在看起来比大家想象的要聪明,’’ Taylor said.

Make-A-Fort in Wichita, Kansas, is one of the fortunate — or visionary — ones. 联合创始人肯特·约翰逊决定在美国生产他公司的产品——易于组装的纸板堡垒. He didn’t like the long lead times required for manufacturing overseas. 他希望对产品的质量有更多的控制，并希望能够定期参观装配线.

And he wanted to keep jobs in America.

“We started out doing it at a disadvantage,’’ he said. “We just got a little bit lucky. We don’t have a lot of supply chains.’’

Freight charges are way up in the United States, he said, but that’s still nothing like the exploding cost of shipping containers.

Mursix Corp., which makes precision metal components for the auto and healthcare industries, has been pounded by higher steel costs and shipping bottlenecks.

“We used to be able to put something on a boat and get it in five to seven weeks,’’ said Andy Dieringer, director of supply chain for the Yorktown, Indiana, company. Now, it takes nine to 11 weeks for shipments to arrive from China.

As a result, the company is looking for new suppliers in Mexico, said company co-owner Susan Murray Carlock, also vice president of business development. “我可以看到我们能够在明年实现这一目标”——也许是在2022年第二季度, she said.

But leaving China isn’t easy. Costs there remain low. And specialized suppliers cluster in Chinese manufacturing centers, making it easy for factories to get parts when they need them.

At All Things Equal, for example, pose哀叹道:“我还没有幸运地找到一家北美工厂以具有竞争力的价格生产我的游戏. But, I’m still trying!''

“There are zillions of parts that are not made in the U.S. and probably won’t be made in the U.S. because they’re low-cost parts and because the industry is so vertically integrated,’’ said Coates, the consultant, who is executive director of the Reshoring Institute, a nonprofit that helps companies manufacture in the United States.

It can also be risky. Companies might be forced to leave equipment behind, 这提高了他们培训的中国工人将废弃的模具和机床投入生产竞争产品的可能性.

科茨说:“把自己从中国拉出来很复杂，而且往往代价很高.’’

但是，越来越多的人意识到依赖必须跨越浩瀚海洋的供应的风险，尤其是在美国陷入危机的时候.S.-China tensions — is making U.S. companies look for alternatives closer to home. After all, major supply chain disruptions are becoming more common, the consulting firm McKinsey has found

“尽管新冠肺炎感觉就像一只黑天鹅——确实如此——但供应链中断的严重程度和频率一直在增加,’’ said Katy George, a McKinsey partner.

Once rare, supply chain breakdowns that last a month or more are now occurring every 3.7 years, McKinsey found, 在一份报告中指出，“一次严重的事件(平均每5到7年发生一次)导致生产中断100天，可能会抹掉一些行业近一年的收入。.’’