A rush on snow tires, brought on by an October snow and shortages of inventory because of the pandemic, has created backlogs at tire stores across Vermont. Some tire dealers say they’ve had wait times of a month or more since the end of October, with no end in sight.
“It’s been one of the biggest rushes we’ve ever seen,” said Patty Eastman at Vianor Tires in Montpelier.
The rush took the industry by surprise. In fact, because Covid-19 has caused more people to work from home than ever before, many sellers say they envisioned an unusually quiet year.
“I expected a slower season,” Eastman said. Instead, “we’ve been maxed out; we’re booking into December right now.”
Other tire dealers say the primary culprit for the boom in sales has nothing to do with the pandemic — it’s the snow.
“When it snows, we get crazy busy,” said Stan Switser with Stratham Tire. “But today, it was nice out, so the phones are quiet.”
Switser said people usually wait until the last minute to buy snow tires, so it’s hard to tell ahead of time when things will get busy.
“We usually have a rush on snow tires this time of year, but we had had a little bit of early snow, so that triggered it,” said Dan Deitz at Brattleboro Tire. “It usually starts in the middle of October — we start switching over, and run right through the end of December.”
Beyond the early snow, dealers say the pandemic has caused some supply-side problems that are increasing delays.
Joe Nagle, at Tire Warehouse in Berlin, said on the supply side, there’s definitely “some stuff that’s not there anymore,” especially in some of the more popular tire sizes.
“It’s starting to be a problem,” said Mark Wilson, owner of Bennington Tire Corp. “It hasn’t been to this point, but speaking with some other dealers, there are snow tires that we’re running out of.”
He said typically, the snow tires that hit the roads in October are produced in July. He said that means a determination had to be made in May or June about what the season was going to be like for the following winter. That forecasting can be hard in a typical year, but it’s even harder during a pandemic, he said.
“We were pretty apprehensive about numbers. We didn’t order the amounts that we would in a normal year,” he said.
And whether that was the right strategy, he said, remains to be seen.
“With the increase in Covid around the country, I think it’s still possible we sell a lot less this year than we have in the past,” he said. “But it’s kind of a guessing game, so we’ll find out in another month or so.”
The No. 1 reason tire sellers are overbooked right now is because the way the pandemic affected people’s lives six months ago. Dealers said that, because of the stay-at-home order put into effect, many Vermonters who put snow tires on this time last year never took them off when winter ended.
“And they drove through the summer, wrecked the tires that they had,” Wilson said.
He said snow tires are different from less robust tires because of two things: their aggressive tread, and their softer rubber compound. That compound, he said, is not something you want on the road if it isn’t really winter.
“If you’re not driving on snow, or really cold pavement, they wear out quickly,” Wilson said. “You’re probably not going to hear a lot of tire dealers say this, but you should wait as long as you can before putting snow tires on, and get them off as early as you can.”
