The decline was driven more by nondurable goods plants, especially printing, plastics, paper, and food manufacturing.

All month-over-month indexes declined, except for the raw materials prices, finished product prices, average employee workweek, and supplier delivery time indexes.

While the headline data is bad enough, the comments are much scarier:

"We need an incentive for people to work. We have 10% increases or more in the cost of materials. We have 7% increases in cost of labor when available. We have raised prices 5% - can't do more. Hard to make money this way."

"Inflation still a big problem in our little corner of the world. Some commodities are better and some are still a problem. We likely are looking at another round of significant price increases in the short to medium term."

"We are seeing a little slow down of sales on certain types of consumer products, so have become a little conservative in our production plans for 2023 and the first quarter of 2024."

"Labor availability is the biggest challenge we are facing."

"Inflation is killing my business - everything is up and hard to get my price increases passed along to customers. Employees are very hard to find."