After months of supply chain disruptions led to reduced inventory on store shelves across North Texas, retailers are increasingly facing the inverse challenge: managing a glut of excess stock.
Short of selling goods at substantial discounts, which many retailers have resorted to this year, businesses are increasingly demanding additional storage capacity to address the challenge.
Supply chains are not the only source of the glut. Historically high inflation has meant that Americans are returning home from the store with fewer items. As a result, once barren shelves have started filling out. To make matters worse, some retailers have actively padded stock, fearing further supply chain disruptions in the near future.
While a surplus of stock is not necessarily a bad thing, it does require costly storage capacity. As it turns out, Texas is an ideal location to build large warehouses for that inventory, and Dallas-Fort Worth is a leader in new industrial developments.
In October, nearly 67 million square feet of warehouse and distribution space were under construction in the metroplex. For perspective, that is nearly one-tenth of the 714 million square feet of industrial projects in the pipeline across the entirety of the United States.
Put another way, DFW is building the equivalent in warehouse space of nearly seven Tesla Gigafactory Texas facilities — itself one of the largest buildings by square footage on the planet. No other location comes close to the scale of industrial development projects occurring in the DFW metropolitan area.
Disruptions at U.S. ports on the West coast have led to an increase in reliance on cities like Dallas, which end up processing additional freight from central ports like Houston.
DFW’s central location in the U.S. is also considered an asset. Its proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border is increasingly valuable as companies strive for onshore or “near-shore” manufacturing activities to defend against vulnerability from overseas supply chain disruptions.
The city of Forney in the DFW metroplex recently announced plans to construct two new warehouses. The $18 million project is expected to break ground early next year.
