COLUMBIA BASIN — The great furniture crunch is mostly over, according to experts.

“It was pretty bogged down there,” said Matt Moore, owner of Moore Furniture in Ephrata. “It took a long time for the industry, in general, to get back up to normal production.”

COVID-19 affected the production and shipping of just about everything, from computer chips to lumber to plastics. Between factory shutdowns with their subsequent labor shortages and strikes at ports and transportation companies, anything that had to be imported or shipped from one place to another was liable to be either delayed or just plain unavailable. A survey published in August 2022 by the Association of Washington Business showed that 73% of businesses in the state were finding the inability to get materials either a challenge or a major disruption. Furniture and appliances were among the markets affected.

“I went and toured one of our large appliance providers regionally, they're in a warehouse and they're finally starting to get back,” Joel White, executive director of Spokane Home Builders Association, which includes Grant County, said in an interview in April. “But they had chip shortages; there's microchips that they didn't have. All the appliances have all kinds of technology in them, and so the microchips are essential.”

“Some of these manufacturers had six to 10 months' worth of orders already in the books, going back, because they were so far behind,” Moore said.

As a result, prices fluctuated so wildly that many furniture retailers were left in a state of uncertainty.

“Every month you were getting a new price sheet mailed out to you,” Moore said. “You just couldn't rely on that sort of data. It was beneficial to us, as prices are going up, being a retailer that sells out of a warehouse … If I was a place that was reliant on special order work, which a lot of furniture stores are, you're getting pinched left and right, because you can't even rely on the price to sell someone an order, because, by the time the thing came in four or five months down the road, the price might not even be on the same price sheet.”

With the dust mostly settled, Moore said, the quantity is available, but not the same variety, because manufacturers concentrated on turning out as much of their top-selling products as they could.

“Particularly in the realm of appliances, they really focused on getting their most popular 50% of items back up to where they needed to be,” Moore said. “So there's still a shortage of unusual stuff, things like induction cooktops and stoves, or oddball sizes or finishes. Those are still not back really into production.”

“If you're gonna have a standard refrigerator, it's easy to get the stainless steel, French door type stuff,” he explained. “It's still quite difficult to get white; it would be virtually impossible to get black or bisque or anything else like that. The most popular items and the most popular sizes are back up to normal, but they really haven't done much to bring anything back into the line where it would cause them to pause production and change color or change sizes or something like that. Those things still haven't really come back very much.”

Joel Martin may be reached via email at [email protected].