Okay, that is pretty crazy. I mean resistors aren't that big after all :-). Of course when the great resistor/capacitor shortage hit I looked into building a manufacturing plant in the US. It would have been surprisingly affordable however I was warned off by all of the environmental hate that would come my way if I tried.

Yeah, stopping your assembly line due to having ordered 312 resistors and you needed 313 is just - plain - madness. But that's what they did, and took a big hit to the bottom line because of it.

Part of the problem stemmed from rating employees on how successful they were at JIT inventory. You get what you rank for, not what makes sense.

Would it not have been affordable to make it clean?

Yes, however a weird side effect of the environmental laws in the US (and California in particular) is that you can use the state to incur so much cost to the builder to show that it would be clean, creates a huge sunk cost you have to pay back before your manufacturing plant is making any money.

It doesn't make a lot of sense, and sadly there is no equivalent of "recovering court costs" from the people who exploited the law to shut you down.

Resistors!? Unless they were particularly specialized ones, the first THT resistor I picked on digikey had about 1.5 million in stock (and Digikey is profoundly not a particularly big-boy market)

The lead times are absolutely horrific though. And I do worry that fast PC parts (specifically GPUs) may be this price for a while.

The inventory people were not allowed to buy more inventory until the monthly buying time came around again. It was not an external issue, it was entirely internal.

"monthly buying time" sounds like a very... interesting... interpretation of just-in-time supply chains.

"Just in time" is great for finance people, but not a healthy scheme when you consider life does not run on tracks. It is a bet that sometimes you win, but sometimes you lose.