October 23, 2021
A shortage of truckers now appears to be the greatest problem with the United States’ supply chain.
In fact, President Biden said in a town hall on Thursday that he would consider sending in the National Guard to drive trucks to reduce the crisis.
According to a Yahoo.com news report, the US trucking industry is short by a record 80,000 drivers amid the supply-chain crisis. That number is so high that I decided to set up this Excel chart to check it out for myself:
To create this chart, I went to the All Employees, Truck Transportation page at the Federal Reserve Economic Database, FRED. Because I had already set up an Excel template with the Power Query query I needed, I set up the chart’s green line in about two minutes.
I spent another few minutes adding a column of formulas that used Excel’s TREND function to calculate the data for the dotted trendline. I couldn’t use the chart’s trendline feature, because I wanted to continue a trend that ended in February 2020, the last month before the Covid recession began.
And then I add the subtitle to the chart, which updates automatically as the data updates.
As you can see, the estimate of a trucker shortage of 80,000 people appears to be correct. But unfortunately, it also looks like there’s been virtually no progress in closing that gap.
Because I used my Excel Productivity reporting strategy, I was able to create this chart in a few minutes—and I can update it in a few seconds
In a couple of weeks I’m giving some free training about my productivity strategy. If you want to be notified when the training begins, follow this link and download the sample workbook.
