Well, you can produce more, or have higher prices at the grocery store, or you can have empty shelves, or you can ration, or some combination of those. But that

Well, you can produce more, or have higher prices at the grocery store, or you can have empty shelves, or you can ration, or some combination of those. But that's about it. Of those, producing more sounds nice, but it takes more effort to do so, and you also need the correct pricing signals to make their way to the producers for that to happen. E.g. "Wow, we're getting twice the normal price for our tomatoes - let's grow more of them!" But then this requires a period of socially-uncomfortable profits for businesses along the way. The other three non-production options don't sound very nice, and our social aversion to profit discourages price increases, so we're left with empty shelves and/or rationing fairly often. In this case the grocery store chose to ration rather than raise prices or allow a few customers to buy up all the stock. But then there's no reason to pay upstream providers more, and therefore no incentive for those upstream providers to produce more.