Mercury Marine beginning layoffs

[slonezp]

Looks like the boating market is beginning to reset.

https://www.wbay.com/2024/07/26/mercury-marine-layoffs-begin-friday/

[Susky River Rat]

When people have extra cash they buy toys. Every month bills keep going up for people and the toys are getting put aside. I’m starting to see a drop of people on the water. Whether they can’t afford it or just don’t have the time I can’t answer that. 
 

i know it’s not good for the sport but, I can’t wait till the days of only the “regulars” being out. 
 

edit: maybe the are doing a push in their factories to start manufacturing more electric outboards. 

[Jig Man]

White River Marine has also done it in some plants like Tracker, Triton and Ranger.  I haven’t heard anything about Nitro yet.

[padon]

yes i have noticed prices starting to drop and lots with alot of inventory

[Bankc]

It doesn't necessarily mean much, other than to the people getting laid off, of course. 

 

This is happening across most sectors right now.  Companies laid people off in mass during the pandemic because they miscalculated the affects of the pandemic on the economy.  Then people retired in mass or just didn't come back to work.  The economy quickly rebounded and people started buying like crazy, though manufacturing and shipping wasn't able to keep up.  Stockpiles of products had vanished.  Prices skyrocketed due to high demand and no supply and companies needed to hire more people to both cover the people they lost, and to meet the increased demand.  Workers were scarce, so they raised wages.  And they over hired due to how difficult it had become to find new employees.  Employees became a product of supply and demand, and since supply was scarce and people were retiring or quitting so quickly, it made sense to CEO's to hire more than they needed to cover those loses.  Then the economy (and demand) returned to normal.  Now they have too many employees.  So they're going back to how they were situated before the pandemic. 

 

In other words, this doesn't mean that demand is low.  It probably just means that demand is returning to normal.   These days, employees are generally considered like a commodity.  So companies add or subtract them as necessary in the moment, rather that trying to keep a useful average employed to ride out the ebbs and flows of the economy, as they had in the past.  It's a result of the problem of having too much and too immediate data.  It exacerbates the problem of separating the signal from the noise to extract useful data.  So the more you zoom in on the timeline, the greater the noise affects the signal you want to measure.  Or, in this case, the faster you react to changes in the economy, the more likely you are to make mistakes because the data you're basing your decisions on becomes less reliable.  And human nature is such that if we make bad decisions based on data, we tend to demand more data, rather than less, which of course will have the opposite effect of what we desire.