Discover the latest trends affecting the pallet industry. Marcus Blood, Regional Director of Supply Chain for the West, breaks down the key factors at play and how they're currently shaping the pallet market going into 2025.
We've seen inventory stabilize over the last year. We've started to see the price stabilize in most markets, and in some cases even kind of turn back the other way and start to, to climb back up a little bit. The biggest term that I would use to explain our industry right now is stabilization.
What’s influencing the recycled pallet industry right now?
A year ago, all of the retailers had excess inventory they were still working through. Prior holidays this year, they didn't have that, so that moves some pallets as they kind of normalized after the last four or five years back into a normal holiday trend.
The interest rates coming down a little bit has also helped consumers feel more comfortable about getting out their credit cards and using that for the holidays. So I would suspect that we're going to have a decent holiday season.
How have retail trends and consumer spending shifted?
The reality of it is, as much as we don't want to talk about the pandemic anymore, it redefined normal for a five year window. What I think we're going to see see over the next year is normal.
Prior to that, normal spending trends for consumers, normal traveling trends for consumers that we used to be able to pretty well predict what the holiday season meant as far as increase in pallet purchases and increase in the flush after Thanksgiving.
Are any regions in the US experiencing unique market activity?
Southern California stands out. Florida often stands out and a lot of that ties to produce and it ties to ports. We've seen that through this year. They're kind of the markets that have rebounded first and started that, but it always carries through.
California's activity going into the holidays with produce and holiday activity has started to draw from surrounding markets, which is not outside the norm, we just haven't seen it for a couple years.
What are you watching for in Q1 2025?
Ultimately, I think that we'll see a change in how the economy's been viewed and that we'll see some continued changes from the Fed and interest rates.
The tornado season that we saw this year combined with the lower interest rates, we're gonna see an increase in building trend which will change, not just from a lumber standpoint, but in a lot of the supplies that go into electrical fixtures, plumbing fixtures, all of those different things that will give a boost to job creation, to some spending in that market, that's really kind of been dormant for the last couple years as the interest rate went up.
How can 48forty help customers plan for 2025?
My best advice to our customer base as they enter 2025 and on is we can always do it better if we know it's coming and plan ahead of time than we can if we're reacting and trying to plan after the fact.
The biggest strength that we offer for our customer base is the ability to move pallets around from market to market as needed and, and as we stabilize, we still know that there are markets that need more pallets than they generate and there are markets that generate more pallets than they need and, our ability to have that national footprint and move those pallets around gives security to our customers.
Whether they need to get the pallets out of their DC and off their docks, or whether they need pallets to put product on, we can move those around within our network to ensure that our customers don't have to worry about that.
For more market insights, contact our national sales team via our website.