First it was toilet paper. Then ground beef. Then bicycles. Building supplies. Paper towels. Americans who are used to getting pretty much whatever they need (or want) when they need (or want) it, are suddenly finding empty shelves. Even for products that don’t make the news – a certain brand of something you like, perhaps, it can be difficult finding everything you’re looking for.
While we scoff at the inconvenience (or grab 37 of things when we find them), what we’re experiencing is a lesson in supply chain. Those products you’re looking for going into the fall? Their unavailability largely traces right back to Covid-19 related shutdowns in the spring and, more recently, staffing limitations in plants and warehouses. Toss in a hurricane for good measure. With manufacturing plants closed, many items that we would be purchasing have simply fallen behind in production.
You see it every day, but you might not realize what it is. There’s a restaurant we like that makes great Buffalo mac-and-cheese. They usually use the hearty, chewy, swirly pasta, but during Covid-19, we ordered and they’d used ziti. And who wants that? It wasn’t a strategic change. It was what they could get their hands on. Supply chain.
The supply chain is intricate. By the time a manufactured good gets to you, it’s gone through dozens of processes to move from raw materials all the way to your home or business. Ocean, rail, trucking, warehousing, production, data entry, pick-and-pack, shipping – there are a lot of necessary activities that can be affected by, say, a pandemic shutdown. We complain when our online orders take an extra three days to get to us, but if you have staffing limitations at different stops along the way, delays are unavoidable.
