TBH, the lumber yard I worked at you to flood. We would have bundled stacks of lumber float all across the yard. We can pretty much take them the next day and ship them to a construction site. KD-HT lumber is pretty good like that.
Now, most of our large customers just have a reasonable expectation of the product. It's wood. It's gonna warp. It's gonna split. It's like most things like fresh fruits, or meat, or leather. There is a lot of variability.
That is not a recent thing. Home Depot wood has been dripping wet for many years. It's routine to put a screw into it and have water running past the head as you tighten it. I typically buy 50-100% more than I expect to use on the assumption that a good chunk of it will warp as it dries and become useless.
I'm not sure if I should feel better or worse about the situation knowing home depot has been doing this long before the pandemic.
Plywood is fine, but if you need anything you build to last, buy pressure treated at HD, or buy plain lumber somewhere else.
(I bought some 2x4s for a non-permanent project during the pandemic. It was so soft and wet that when I fired a railgun into one of the pieces, the nail went all the way through. That should not happen)
HD sells pressure treated wood that's then kiln dried (KDAT), if you would like to open up a large line of credit with them.
YMMV, but for people who need actual kiln-dried wood it's usually a better option to go to a real lumber yard.
Now that I think of it, it kinda makes sense: it's not the timber that's gotten more expensive, but the service of milling it. For products from relatively more expensive hardwood timber, milling costs constitute smaller fraction of the final cost, so even if milling costs triple, the final product might only go by 50%.
Imagine you've got a project to build a bookcase. You're using cheaper normal plywood for hidden structural parts and nicer but more expensive red plywood for the stuff people will see. You price the whole thing out.
Then the price of wood skyrockets. To keep the price of the whole project under control, you start cutting costs. You use more of the cheaper plywood for the whole project and decide to skimp on the red oak.
Scale that across many projects and you get a paradoxical result where the cheapest goods in a category go up in price while the better goods don't, because people are subbing out the "cheap" stuff for the good stuff.
I'd guess (with some insider knowledge) that (1) there wasn't any prebuilt link to adjust substitute pricing & (2) Depot didn't care enough to adjust pricing.
Both Depot and Lowes are in it for volume and long-term, which is why they don't do things like spike generator prices after hurricanes.
Modern glues in exterior plywood and OSB-like products are amazing, but they don't use that in oak plywood.
There's about four layers between the chainsaw and the consumer. So HD, Lowes, etc all exist at layer 4, sometimes 3 and 4. None of them are going to price cut below what they paid. Call it a gentleman's agreement, or common sense.
What you'll most likely see is buying from layer 3 at say, 50, and selling both 100 and 50 dollar wood together at 75.
Eh it’s always been that way. Warped and with plenty of knots too. It was considered poor quality back when a 2x4 cost $2.50.
> There's "we bought a sawmill!" ads here in the rural lands now for fresh sawn green pine and oak; which isn't "lumber" yet in any useful sense. I've seen porches being built that won't last the summer.
The allegedly "kiln dried lumber" home depot has been selling has been criminally wet throughout the last year too. Not only have people been paying through the nose for the stuff, it's been nowhere near ready to use. I had to let boards I bought for building gambrel rafters sit for a month on my covered deck before attempting to cut them to the pattern. And even after that, a bunch of them shrunk another 1/4" from the pattern in the subsequent month of waiting for me to install. Infuriating to pay so much for stuff that isn't even top quality and ready to go. I also had to throw a few away from splitting and twisting during the drying process...