Hello and welcome to my first blog about Wheelie Good Firewood with information to help you, my customers, to keep up to date and answer any questions you may have.
It's been fairly turbulent the the world of firewood since 2020 covid, with lockdowns, shipping prices Ukraine war to mention just a few, all of these things have been in the headlines at some point, but not everyone understands the knock-on effects that aren't always reported in the news.
As we know, Covid and lockdowns are an obvious constraint on the production of anything, but then there was the knock-on effect that crippled the free flow of cargo around the world.
To put it simply, China is the biggest exporter of goods using shipping containers to America, America would then normally send these empty shipping containers back, but as the cost of shipping rose it wasn't viable to send them back to China empty so a stockpile of containers grew on the docks of American ports.
With these containers now not in free worldly movement supply of containers ran short, so the price of shipping continued to rise, delays of shipping started moving into months rather than weeks and the world literally ran out of shipping containers, I can only liken this disaster to an everyday situation when the trolley man has a day off in the supermarket and there isn't a trolley to be seen anywhere except at the far corner of the car park where there is already a stream of people racing to get it.
But slowly and surely things looked as if availability and prices would start to return to a near normal, albeit with a little inflation costs on top, but then, disaster yet again, the Ukraine war started.
Some of you may know that all of my firewood is imported from Latvia, and now with winter approaching the country faces a number of problems. We know that Russia was a major supplier of gas to the UK and many parts of the EU, but also Belarus was a major exporter of firewood. The Ukraine president had announced that due to the gas shortage, there would be no more firewood exports. The Polish prime minister advised people to burn household rubbish as fuel, as now all coal and firewood stocks by mid-September had been exhausted, leaving Latvia as the major supplier to all of its neighbour's. Great news for Latvia, but unfortunately wood can only grow so fast and there is only so much available, so in terms of volume and costs, there was no cost effective way to deal with the UK when they could send it out on a lorry just a few miles down the road.
Yet again the price almost doubled overnight increasing by 10% per container load every 14 days.
Many firewood suppliers closed their doors for that year, refusing to get into an increasingly expensive market, a decision I also thought long and hard about, but the reality was that everyone was having to pass these costs on. Prices that I wouldn't have dreamed of charging were now that and more on other firewood websites. There was no profiteering involved by anyone I believe, while revenue had gone up, profit definitely hadn’t.
With prices beginning to level out in January 2023 I took the decision not to replenish my stock. The price was still too high and I would be stuck with price-inflated stock going into the 2023/24 season. So come February, we fast forward to July 2023 and things seem to have levelled out again. A few digits higher than before, as to be expected, but we seem to be on a level playing field again. Some things have reduced in price and some have gone up substantially, but isn't that with most things of late?
Next week I'll talk about why I import rather than buy UK Kiln Dried Firewood , and whether kiln dried wood is really better than that bulk bag of seasoned wood for £50 on Facebook.
Have a great Sunday and remember it's never too early to light that fire!
(the above blog post is the opinion of Alan @ Wheelie Good Firewood)
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