Where’s Our Magazine?

Supply chain. Two words we never thought we’d hear so often yet know so little about. But here we are, your intrepid Santa Clara Magazine team of editors/publishers, announcing that our next print issue is going to be a little late this season because of, you guessed it, snags in the supply chain.

Frankly, it’s miraculous that it took more than two years of pandemic pandemonium for us to get snagged by the supply chain. As store shelves were cleared of toilet paper and canned goods for months, as production of lumber and construction materials slowed, congestion at ports and closed borders and COVID-related disruptions caused shortages of automobiles, food items, clothing, and more, Santa Clara Magazine kept printing. We persevered by reporting out more online-only stories and moving to a two-print-issues-a-year schedule. Despite our momentum, we simply couldn’t outrun the global tidal wave of a supply chain that is seriously out of whack.

We won’t try to explain how the supply chain works. There are plenty of economic experts—including several at Santa Clara—who can do so far better than us. We did, however, ask our paper suppliers and printers at Lithographix if they could bullet point the delay. In a nutshell, they said, paper is getting more expensive and scarce. That’s basic Econ 101, supply and demand. Still with us?

As our senior account executive, Bill Goodenough, put it in an email, “It’s hard to get the raw materials and our biggest delay factor is labor shortages due to people sick with COVID and not being able to hire people.”

The main cost drivers, according to Bill, are energy, labor shortages, and materials.

• Pulp prices are near all-time record high levels (office goods giant Staples put the increase at 30-40%), the chemicals that go into making paper remain expensive, and the totes and drums used to transport these chemicals are in critically short supply so obtaining them costs beaucoup bucks.
• The price of natural gas that produces the energy required to make paper has also gone up dramatically; Bill says prices are up 150% from pre-pandemic levels.
• The U.S. is experiencing critical labor shortages, especially among employees in manual labor fields such as paper production.

All this is to say that the paper that goes into making Santa Clara Magazine, which we’re proud is recycled (made up entirely of paper that consumers have already used once!) and 100% American-made, and goes to a printing facility certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, is running into some delays getting made. We appreciate your patience as we nudge back our printing date from spring to summer, and hope you’ll visit us online at santaclaramagazine.com as we continue telling the epic story of Santa Clara University.