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>Like the great toilet paper shortage. I'm drawn to die on this hill every time. The toilet paper shortage made sense. At the start of the first lockdown in t
by thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
>Like the great toilet paper shortage.
I'm drawn to die on this hill every time. The toilet paper shortage made sense.
At the start of the first lockdown in the UK, we were told to minimise contact with others. This meant that it made sense for a daily shopper to become a weekly shopper & a weekly shopper to become a biweekly shopper. And if you're shopping less frequently but consuming at the same rate, you'll be buying more volume each time. Shops don't have the means to react to an overnight doubling of demand, so the shelves became empty.
To be efficient is to stop being resilient. The world runs on JIT. And if you buck that trend and make things resilient, you can't compete on price. So it's a race to the bottom where all it takes is one off-white swan event for things to fall apart. Does your country have food security? Does your country have energy security? If it does, what would it take for that to stop being true?
- pasabagi 5y agoThe annoying thing was, my position on first lockdown was: 1. Covid doesn't generally disable young and healthy people, so there will be no supply shortage. 2. It will be nice to have a reason to go out if I'm cooped up inside all day, and buying groceries is a good one. Then of course, I ended up using napkins as toilet paper for a week, because everybody else thought different.
- thinkingemote 5y agoWe were also told to prepare to self isolate a family for 2 weeks. That's a bunch of toilet roll for a normal sized family needed to stock up on. When internet deliveries were restricted to just the vulnerable too. Almost all "panic buying" is calm and rational.
- OJFord 5y ago> When internet deliveries were restricted to just the vulnerable too. That never happened? Perhaps new sign-ups (at the company's discretion)? I had groceries delivered before the pandemic and continued throughout, only affect was that for a few months slots would be booked up weeks in advance of normal, so had to plan ahead more.
- thinkingemote 5y agoExactly, booked up for weeks, so to plan you had to buy in the shops in bulk before a slot became available to your family of 4
- InitialLastName 5y agoAdditionally, everyone moved home and offices emptied out, so the daily/weekly/monthly demand for toilet paper went from 50/50 consumer/industrial to 100% consumer overnight. Those are two very different supply chains, with distinct, roughly (if you'll pardon the pun) incimpatible products, packaging and distribution networks.