Comment by Animats
4 months ago
The head of Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock, which builds the US aircraft carriers, once ran a full page ad announcing that if Congress would order two carriers at once, instead of one at a time, they'd throw in a third carrier for free. The total shutdown between jobs was that expensive for them.
That reminds me of the restaurant using its liquidity to prepay its dry aged steak supplier.
https://commoncog.com/cash-flow-games/#3-pre-payments-in-the...
Liquidity is expensive. Selling a carrier one at a time is like a retail business where you're expected to hold onto stock. If you don't build up an inventory to sell from and just sell one unit, you have to markup the price to cover the cost of the factory when it is idle.
It’s a major cause of why the U.S. shipbuilding industry can produce such a tiny number of surface combatants per year, despite having the industrial capacity to do far more if it was steady work.