Supply Chain

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Shot In The Dark

Mitch Berg

Jan. 11 2022

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This is the first worthwhile analysis of supply chain disruptions I’ve found. It’s worthwhile because it doesn’t focus on one tree (ships in port) but on the whole forest of supply chain issues, particularly the consequences of the abrupt shift in consumption due to Covid regulations. It’s another example of Second Order thinking.

Remember last year when Cub had no toilet paper? That’s because toilet paper in the office restroom is single-ply industrial grade on a huge roll, but toilet paper at home is two-ply softer grade. Toilet paper manufacturers know the normal office-versus-at-home percentages but when everybody shifted from working at the office to working at home, manufacturers weren’t prepared to instantly shift percentages and weren’t thrilled at incurring the expense because nobody knew how long lockdowns would last so they couldn’t calculate whether the shift would be worth the cost. It took months for the industry to catch up.

Everything in the supply chain works that way, including food. The author claims that pre-pandemic, 60% of all food in the US was eaten outside the home, at school and restaurants. How much during the lockdowns? Consider the consequence of shifting tomato sauce from Costco sized cans into Cub sized jars, if you can even obtain that many Cub sized jars because they’re made in Mexico where workers are quarantined for their own government’s lockdowns and the few jars they do make are shipped on boats sitting in ports waiting to unload containers.

(Snip)

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Once Again My 3 Small Simple Questions

1. What Do You Want

2. How Do You Get It?

3. Then What Happens?

If in Mar. of 2020 someone in government had asked and answered these small questions, we might very well not be i the situation we are today. This of course Assumes Our Betters in government have a problem with the situation we are in today.

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From The Comments

Mammuthus Primigenesis on January 11, 2022 at 9:00 am said:

Occasionally I run across a sci-fi story or movie, where, some weeks or months after the apocalypse, the lights finally go out or the water stops flowing from the taps.
Next time you drive past a power plant or fresh water treatment facility, look for the cars in the parking lot. If those guys don’t show up for work, it all comes to a halt very quickly. And as Joe Doakes notes, starting it all up again is not easy.
The pinheads in charge of the lockdowns thought they could start and stop the economy like turning a light switch on and off.

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