State of the Salt
State of the Salt Address – Pre-Season 2011-2012
I’m a follower of the book Super Freakonomics (the sequel to Freakonomics) which is a book about economic trends based on common sense observations. This installment of my State of the Salt Newsletter contains my view of common sense observations as they relate to the deicing market and deicer supply lines. As always, I try [...]
Continue Reading →State of the Salt: Jan 2009
In this month’s newsletter, we will update some of that information. Like previous newsletters, we provide dozens of links to the data and we openly share with you how we interpret this information. You can look at the same tea leaves as we do and decide if you see it the same way or not.
Continue Reading →State of the Salt: November 2008
Things have not changed in a positive way and deicer inventories are not sufficient to meet demand on a National scale. The US market is still well over 2MM tons short on highway salt. Packaged deicers seem to be in deeper trouble and shortages in premium deicers are now reality as we predicted.
Continue Reading →State of the Salt: October 2008
In a nutshell, we still read the information pretty much the same as we did in September; deicer inventories are not sufficient to meet demand on a National scale. The US market is still well over 2MM tons short on highway salt. OK, so that’s the bad news. The good news is that those of us who are located along the Atlantic seaboard are not anywhere nearly as hard hit by this as those customers in the Midwest and Central United States.
Continue Reading →State of the Salt: September 2008
As we began the 2008/2009 deicer season, early signs of trouble began to emerge: state bids and contracts were getting across-the-board “no bid” on deicer requirements; the private and contractor markets were told there was no deicer available for them for the coming season and that they needed to make alternate arrangements – even in places where long term relationships were in place; and the largest and most significant factor being that bid prices on salt bids were doubling, then tripling, and then even going higher.
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