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Pallet C e nt ral • S e ptem be r- O ctobe r 2 0 26 1 9 A sk ten pallet makers how business is going right now and you' ll get ten different answers— which is exactly the problem. at's the takeaway from a member pulse survey Woodpack Global ran in June, asking members not just to rate the economy but to describe, in their own words, what's actually keeping them up at night. "Lumber of all types is tight, and pallet margins have been squeezed to what should be the breaking point," said Brian Schaefer of Troymill Wood Products, one of a dozen respondents who agreed to be identified by name. "We' ll see if rational thinking prevails." irty-four members responded—a fraction of Woodpack 's full membership, not enough to call this a scientific poll. However, the write-in comments, more than the multiple-choice answers, paint a consistent, candid picture: costs are rising faster than pricing power, demand is inconsistent rather than uniformly weak, and members feel like they're competing against rivals—and brokers—willing to sell below what the market can sustain. The Math Isn't Working Every closed-ended number in the survey backs up the comments. All 34 respondents said rising costs are squeezing margins. Not one respondent felt unaffected. Roughly half describe the hit as "severe." Meanwhile, costs and revenue aren't moving together: nearly half of the respondents say costs are up more than 10%, but almost as many say revenue is merely flat. "e cost of doing business in California keeps eating away margins," said Callen Cochran of United Pallet Services, "along with my sanity." It's a dry line, but it captures something real: the squeeze isn't abstract. It shows up in day-to-day decisions about which jobs to take and which customers to walk away from. Transportation and logistics costs were the single most-cited driver of the squeeze, named by 82% of respondents, followed closely by domestic lumber and timber prices at 67%. Labor and energy weren't far behind. Almost nobody pointed to just one culprit—the more common story was several cost lines rising at once, none of them fully passable to the customer. Lumber: Tight, Twitchy, And Hard To Read If there's a theme that shows up in more than a third of the open- ended comments, it's lumber. Several members described a market that's behaving nothing like a normal supply-and-demand commodity right now. "e dimensional dry pine market . . . has reacted as anything but [a normal supply-demand product] in the last eight months," said David Hammons of e Timbermen. "Most of the major DP mills are Canadian-owned in our area, and they are having a hard time gauging the needs of the market." Others described the same tightness in blunter terms. "Lumber yards are becoming empty, and prices are climbing week to week," one member wrote, comparing the current climate to the disruptions of 2020. Another put it more simply: they're "waiting on timber indices to catch up with actual material price increases." is is a sign that even the benchmarks the industry relies on are lagging what's happening on the ground. A Market That's Both Slow And Busy—Depending On Whom You Ask Perhaps the most striking thing in the data is how little members agree on demand. Some describe record A member pulse check finds an industry absorbing rising lumber, freight, and labor costs while brokers and low-cost rivals keep prices pinned down. And members are more anxious about demand than the headline numbers suggest.

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