It was a perfect storm for fireworks dealers this Fourth of July season. 

“This has been a weird year,” said Chris Good, owner of Western Pyro Enterprises. 

Good said he got calls from people all over the country asking if he had supplies in his warehouse.

In late June, Nate McDonald, owner of Wyoming Fireworks Warehouse in Cheyenne, made a 14-hour round trip to Powell to buy fireworks from Western Pyro Enterprises. 

“... Our main supplier doesn’t think they will have more until way after the Fourth of July, which is kind of pointless,” McDonald told Cowboy State Daily at the time. “It’s been an insane trip. We’ve never had to do anything like this before.”

According to the American Pyrotechnics Association, American consumers bought $1 billion in fireworks in 2019, and display fireworks revenue hit $375 million. 

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic last year, and display fireworks sales dropped to $93 million, the lowest the industry has seen in over 20 years. Inversely, with few fireworks events to go to, consumers bought $1.9 billion fireworks to celebrate the holidays in 2020.

That left supplies depleted going into this year’s Fourth of July season, which was exacerbated by the fact China manufactures the vast bulk of fireworks imported. With factories in China shut down due to COVID-19, imports were hard to come by.

Add to that problem the difficulties with freight. There’s a labor shortage in the trucking industry, and so businesses across the board are facing logistics issues.

Good said he ordered 25 containers of fireworks for his warehouse this year, which is about 27,000 cases of fireworks. So far, six of those containers have been delivered.  

“The others are still in the supply stream,” Good said. 

He has 11 containers waiting in California for a truck to ship them off the docks, and a few more containers are on an anchored barge, waiting to get to the United States. 

Good tried to fill the orders of prior customers first, and then Western Pyro started wholesaling to others. If it wasn’t for the fact that the business tends to keep a good supply on hand every year, it wouldn’t have had as many to sell this year as they did. 

“We carry a fair amount every year, so it’s good we had that carryover,” Good said. 

Now, the fireworks dealer is down to almost nothing in stock until those 19 containers arrive.