> Craig Boyan: We’ve been working very hard right now to deliver meat and poultry and eggs to our stores. We’re accelerating opening a new warehouse in Houston

> Craig Boyan: We’ve been working very hard right now to deliver meat and poultry and eggs to our stores. We’re accelerating opening a new warehouse in Houston that was due a few months later. We’re taking some of our warehouses in the state and transitioning them over to serving just meat, because we’re seeing such significant demand for meat, poultry, and eggs. We’re still having a real hard time sourcing eggs. We had big loads in the last few days, and they’ve been scooped up as soon as they hit the shelves, so we’re working very hard with egg suppliers to see where we can get additional eggs. But our meat plant is running 24/7—we have our own meat plants here. They normally don’t go 24/7, but we’ve focused them down to serving the top fifty items out of our meat plants; they normally carry several hundreds. [Focusing on top items] means fewer changeover delays, and it allows us to ship significantly more meat. We’re seeing those kinds of moves across the board as we look to ramp up volume in a rapid way. One interesting thing about disasters and wars is the ways in which they point out (if only by subtraction) how the world spends its capabilities and resources during peacetime. In this case, what HEB is pointing out is 'the cost of variety': by offering hundreds of slightly different meat products, HEB is able to manufacture a lot less total than it would if it focused on a few products and could scale them & get economies of scale / experience curves (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/02/what-cost-variety.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/02/what-cost-variety.html). Similarly, one can see this with any retailer like Aldi or Apple which makes a point of having as few distinct units as possible. This massive societal loss is particularly disconcerting when you note how rarely the different varieties ever actually differ in a noticeable way (I've done this with many food staples), and in some cases are literally the same product in different labeling (for price discrimination); they don't exist because of any actual need for such specialization, but because they can and they are useful for rich First Worlders to help signal & consume an identity. But when the rubber hits the road, no one really needs those hundreds of varieties of slightly different meat products, and 50 works fine.