Global Supply Chain Crisis 2021: Megathread - A cozy thread for watching the supply chain fall apart just in time for the holidays

[George Lucas]

How often is your trash pickup? From context, it sounded like it was twice a week, which is way more than most places. Ours comes every other week; opposite to recycling.


Just so there's some sort of counter-opinion represented here: yeah, white collar jobs are "less stable" than blue collar ones (although in my experience, blue collar jobs are less stable because the people that work them are often also not very stable--even in resi electrical work, the least-rough out of all the trades, people would routinely walk off the job for retarded personal reasons and show up drunk or stoned).

The flip side is that you can also make $350k/yr being a VP who sits on his ass and tells other people what to do over Teams, sitting in his own comfy home office. You get connected with other people in the industry. You take days off when you feel like it. You get everything from housing allowances to car allowances. You won't start there, but if you aren't literally retarded, you should end up somewhere around there by your mid 30s and you won't have destroyed your body doing it.

So yeah, we need the trades to function, but nothing beats the feeling of walking off with half million dollar bonus because the stock market is retarded and you have options with a low strike and an accelerated vesting schedule.

There is nothing wrong with a hard day's work, but believe me when I tell you that there is also nothing noble in working your ass off just to end up middle class. If you can make it in a corporate job, you should--you will eat shit for most of your 20s and survive off fast food, and then you will get your big break and make more money than you know what to do with, so long as you are smart, ambitious and competent.

You actually have to be smart for that though. This website is for retards.

 

[Phalanges Mycologist]

A interesting shortage I've noticed today -

Non basic breads, normal breads are in stock as normal but things like Bagels, Wraps, Flatbreds, etc are either thin on the ground or non existent. This also goes for things like Gluten Free breads or the lower sodium / special dietry stuff.

Sliced white, brown and the baked in store stuff is fine and in full supply but if you wanted somthing elese or where on special dietary stuff you are kinda shit out of luck in some cases.

 

[Raze]

As promised, I took pics of a local CVS and Publix's empty stock. I'm in a Florida city suburb, just to reiterate.

This amount of stock has been consistent for about a month now. I'm not just taking these a day or two before they get a supply truck; in fact, the CVS must have gotten one recently, their frozen food section was empty last time I went. Publix had some gatorade this time, too.

Spoiler: Beverages and Snacks

Spoiler: A surprising lack of fruit snacks?

There's empty shelf space in almost every aisle (except meds and booze).

Specifically, what have I seen missing in both stores?: Specific candies (Kit-Kats, Oreos) don't seem to be getting restocked, certain chips and junk food brands are gone, fruit snacks are being wiped out, Gatorade/Powerade/Bodyarmor are all in short supply, soft drinks / energy drinks / soda are all in short supply, bottled water is almost gone, ramen was wiped out at Publix but I'm in a college town so take that with a grain of salt, and there were a bunch of random products missing throughout each aisle.

This may look mundane to some, but where I'm at, I'm used to these being fully stocked every day of the week. Even if a popular product sells out, it's never so bad as there being empty shelf space in every aisle.


Bonus pic: I got lucky and found the last remaining can of NOS at the back of a CVS fridge. It was the only thing I bought, but...

Spoiler: CVS Is Not Lacking In Receipt Paper, Can Confirm.

All these fucking coupons are worthless too. They expire in a week and they're for face care products, tooth paste, antacid pills, and other random shit people buy every few months. What a waste.

 

[Clockwork_PurBle]

How often is your trash pickup? From context, it sounded like it was twice a week, which is way more than most places. Ours comes every other week; opposite to recycling.


Just so there's some sort of counter-opinion represented here: yeah, white collar jobs are "less stable" than blue collar ones (although in my experience, blue collar jobs are less stable because the people that work them are often also not very stable--even in resi electrical work, the least-rough out of all the trades, people would routinely walk off the job for retarded personal reasons and show up drunk or stoned).

The flip side is that you can also make $350k/yr being a VP who sits on his ass and tells other people what to do over Teams, sitting in his own comfy home office. You get connected with other people in the industry. You take days off when you feel like it. You get everything from housing allowances to car allowances. You won't start there, but if you aren't literally retarded, you should end up somewhere around there by your mid 30s and you won't have destroyed your body doing it.

So yeah, we need the trades to function, but nothing beats the feeling of walking off with half million dollar bonus because the stock market is retarded and you have options with a low strike and an accelerated vesting schedule.

There is nothing wrong with a hard day's work, but believe me when I tell you that there is also nothing noble in working your ass off just to end up middle class. If you can make it in a corporate job, you should--you will eat shit for most of your 20s and survive off fast food, and then you will get your big break and make more money than you know what to do with, so long as you are smart, ambitious and competent.

Over the past two years my family's had a rash of problems within the home, like leaky pipes and such. Everybody we got out to fix it fit into one of two categories:

1. retarded, barely knew what they were doing and their "work" later broke, acting like they didn't want jobs
2. would ignore us in favor of bigger jobs that would pay for, specifically building McMansions in big cities

It was also like squeezing blood out of a turnip getting either type to show up. My high school best friend went to electrician school and he ended up quitting because of the conditions. Half the class almost died several times because the instructors were incompetent. He wasn't the only dropout because of this. My friend isn't lazy or a pussy so I know he wasn't lying as an excuse. Meanwhile you have people that can't get jobs in STEM because it all gets outsourced to Asia and now medical workers are getting fired en masse for not complying with jabs.

 

[tehpope]

It’s all good, unless they run out of High Life. That’s my cue to riot, and not until then.

Do The Right Thing - Da Mayor Wants Some Miller High Life!!!

Where's the Miller High Life???

youtu.be

Just wait until places run out of Chicken.

Gamers and Niggas rise up. It ain't gonna be pretty. Nathan and Tyrone, hand in hand, wrecking shit for lack of tendies.

 

[NoReturn]

Fuck no, it's just A CUBE. There's no doors, inside or outside, just painted walls. No employee halls stretch around back that way, it's just walled off. Did they legitimately seal off that much space in a store for nothing? There's no department there, no windows, again- no entrypoint. Do they go in through the roof? Is that where they keep SCPs? Who knows! But I've been seeing them at other Walmarts in Florida as well.

that's really fucking weird. do you have any pictures on hand of what it looks like?

I am fascinated. Someone please do get a picture.

 

[Enig]

Mid-upper IL has yet to feel the full pain of the supply breakdown due to it being one of the more arterial areas of the entire system, but even then there's noticeable faults starting, like periods of time where you go into a Walmart or Target and the meat coolers are next to barren and the candy aisles are 85% depopulated, along with the funny thing going on where Pepsi is able to keep things going but Coke is asleep on the job. Also noticed that there's still random issues with vitamins, such as zinc only showing up in large bulk supplies or odds and ends like L-arginine running out of large packs as soon as they show up leaving only the pricier smaller bottles. The holidays are going to be interesting, since this is right where a heart attack in the system can instantly occur thanks to the wonderful schizoid murder weather in this state combined with the trucks breaking down, so either I'm going to be seeing a lot more flights in and out overhead or a lot of pissed off truckers hanging around stores looking for friends in rioting.

 

[Frostnipped Todger]

On the 2nd of this month I was told I'd been on a tier one exposure site, so I had to quarantine for 14 days. I ordered a few supplies from Dan Murphy's (for non-aussies, a big liquor company), expecting that they'd arrive on the following Monday or Tuesday, since I was ordering on a Thursday night. 27 days later, my order has finally arrived.
It's gotten to the point that if you order something online, you get a "your delivery has been delayed" message from Australia Post as soon as it gets dispatched.

 

[I can't imagine]

There's empty shelf space in almost every aisle (except meds and booze).

Specifically, what have I seen missing in both stores?: Specific candies (Kit-Kats, Oreos) don't seem to be getting restocked, certain chips and junk food brands are gone, fruit snacks are being wiped out, Gatorade/Powerade/Bodyarmor are all in short supply, soft drinks / energy drinks / soda are all in short supply, bottled water is almost gone, ramen was wiped out at Publix but I'm in a college town so take that with a grain of salt, and there were a bunch of random products missing throughout each aisle.

This may look mundane to some, but where I'm at, I'm used to these being fully stocked every day of the week. Even if a popular product sells out, it's never so bad as there being empty shelf space in every aisle.
[/SPOILER]

I work in the grocery business, so I can give at least a tiny bit of clarity on some of this. Most of the big manufacturers are cutting products out to focus on their top sellers. Of all of the vendors I've spoken to, Frito-Lay is probably the most egregious with this; like half of their Lay's potato chip flavors and most of the bulk packs aren't being made at all at the moment, at least in my region. Nabisco's been doing similar with their product categories as well, so certain types/sizes of Oreos haven't been available for weeks, while we can order all the Family Size Double-Stuf we want. Fruit snacks seems to be a pretty widespread thing, though I haven't heard anything specific. Isotonic drinks have been shipping consistently, but in massively inadequate quantities (about 1/3-1/2 our normal rate of sale), and, again, certain flavors/sizes are either not being shipped or only being shipped rarely. All the soda vendors have been able to keep us in stock for the most part, though there are certain flavors that, again, they aren't making at all right now (mostly stuff like the more obscure Minute Maid/Fanta/Crush flavors, but some others as well).

Bear in mind, these are products people come into stores to get all the time, so it's kind of a nightmare for the people on the sales floor having to deal with the (understandably) upset customers who can really only be told "well, we don't really know when we'll get it back in".

For what it's worth, pretty much any vendor I've spoken to has been told by their bosses that this issue will persist for a while, possibly well into next year. So...look forward to that, I guess?

 

[DamnWolves!]

Meanwhile you have people that can't get jobs in STEM because it all gets outsourced to Asia and now medical workers are getting fired en masse for not complying with jabs.

STEM is a meme; do you see Chad Cocksworth III going into STEM? No, Chad gets a Commerce degree and then does a Harvard MBA because Chad was born on third and his dad's golfing buddy is an MD at Goldman. You can be like Chad; you just have to work a little harder and work for a shit-tier bank like UBS first, or one of the big 4 consulting firms, then maybe get your MBA or your CFA 1 + 2. If you don't like 12 hour days or you aren't a competitive person, go work in the Finance or CorpDev department of any Fortune 500 company and start working your way up--they'll take you all day long.

Disclaimer/Slight PL: I have a STEM degree and it was a waste of time. Who do you think pays better, the NIH or a hedge fund? It's not even a competition. Every Pajeet can run gels or do static loading calculations; what they can't do is be a reasonably handsome white guy with decent social skills who can also make decks and models with actual, proper English instead of Pajeet's disgusting Amerimutt patois of "please to come in to bank, sir, we be doing the needful here!".

 

[Jump]

Specifically, what have I seen missing in both stores?: Specific candies (Kit-Kats, Oreos) don't seem to be getting restocked, certain chips and junk food brands are gone, fruit snacks are being wiped out, Gatorade/Powerade/Bodyarmor are all in short supply, soft drinks / energy drinks / soda are all in short supply, bottled water is almost gone, ramen was wiped out at Publix but I'm in a college town so take that with a grain of salt, and there were a bunch of random products missing throughout each aisle.

If your seeing the same brand out at multiple stores I wonder if this is because they can't get route drivers to bring the stuff the last mile. Not everything in supermarkets and stores comes in one big truck from a distribution center. Lots of it comes individually via local vendors. In some convenience stores its common for local distributors to actually go in see whats sold out then then restock the shelves themselves.

 

[George Lucas]

STEM is a meme; do you see Chad Cocksworth III going into STEM? No, Chad gets a Commerce degree and then does a Harvard MBA because Chad was born on third and his dad's golfing buddy is an MD at Goldman. You can be like Chad; you just have to work a little harder and work for a shit-tier bank like UBS first, or one of the big 4 consulting firms, then maybe get your MBA or your CFA 1 + 2. If you don't like 12 hour days or you aren't a competitive person, go work in the Finance or CorpDev department of any Fortune 500 company and start working your way up--they'll take you all day long.

Disclaimer/Slight PL: I have a STEM degree and it was a waste of time. Who do you think pays better, the NIH or a hedge fund? It's not even a competition. Every Pajeet can run gels or do static loading calculations; what they can't do is be a reasonably handsome white guy with decent social skills who can also make decks and models with actual, proper English instead of Pajeet's disgusting Amerimutt patois of "please to come in to bank, sir, we be doing the needful here!".

NIH is a low-risk organization that probably still pays pensions. The comparable type of company risk-wise to a hedge fund is a tech startup, where you can potentially earn billions, and like startups, hedge funds blow up all the time.

Chad is more likely to be in a middle management role for a small real estate operation or car dealership, earning like $120k.

 

[Lorne Armstrong]

If your seeing the same brand out at multiple stores I wonder if this is because they can't get route drivers to bring the stuff the last mile. Not everything in supermarkets and stores comes in one big truck from a distribution center. Lots of it comes individually via local vendors. In some convenience stores its common for local distributors to actually go in see whats sold out then then restock the shelves themselves.
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I don’t see any High Life coming off the back of that Miller truck and it’s pissing me off. Miller Lite tastes like cold pot likker. I can do without a lot of things but if the store down the street starts running out of Luckies non-filter or High Life I really am going to go apeshit.

 

[DamnWolves!]

do you see Chad Cocksworth III going into STEM?

NIH is a low-risk organization that probably still pays pensions. The comparable type of company risk-wise to a hedge fund is a tech startup, where you can potentially earn billions, and like startups, hedge funds blow up all the time.

Chad is more likely to be in a middle management role for a small real estate operation or car dealership, earning like $120k.

Hypothetical Chad Cocksworth III didn't get to be third of his name by being middle management, bro. Do you really want to live your life in a "low-risk organization"? Why?

Pensions are for fags who can't figure out how to execute a mega backdoor Roth IRA. I'm only half joking, but obviously, international banks offer really solid 401k matching programs too.

So don't work at a hedge fund then; work in VC, or at a REIT, or in private equity. Like tech startups, when a hedge fund fails you just move on to the next one, with a fuckton more stuff on your CV. You think when Lehman failed everyone else saw their name on people's resumes and were like "nah, you worked for that bank that failed..."? No, of course not, they said "great, you have 25 years experience in capital markets, welcome aboard".

Meme-tier nonsense about the world of high finance aside, I really do recommend people skip the engineering degree or biology degree or whatever and get a business, economics or commerce degree instead. It has the same amount of math with much higher salaries at the end of it. It has higher education that is actually worth something (god knows your mom is impressed by your PhD in Neurochemistry, but the market won't be). If you really think about it, science is mostly charity or taxpayer funded, with a tiny slice of STEM graduates being required for Industry (and most of them are engineers). That revenue base can only support so many scientists and even if you become a nurse or something, that's where your career path ends. The business world can support infinite numbers of smart graduates, because there's always more companies and there's always more money to be made out there. Your ability to discover proteins and shit is only economically useful at a very small number of places. Your ability to put together a competent go-to-market strategy for someone's new product is valuable virtually everywhere. Throw some tech skills or some rudimentary coding knowledge in there and you can work for any number of SaaS or B2B software companies, because they need always need people to help bridge the gap between the Strategy & Product guys and the subhumanly autistic computer engineers.

 

[Blackwell Abyss]

Bear in mind, these are products people come into stores to get all the time, so it's kind of a nightmare for the people on the sales floor having to deal with the (understandably) upset customers who can really only be told "well, we don't really know when we'll get it back in".

For what it's worth, pretty much any vendor I've spoken to has been told by their bosses that this issue will persist for a while, possibly well into next year. So...look forward to that, I guess?

This is pretty much sums up the problems in the area around here too. Between the vendor shortages and lack of drivers, certain products fly off the shelf as fast as they're delivered. Coca-Cola, Miller, Monster Energy and a few different cigarette brands are seemingly having the hardest time keeping up

 

[contradiction of terns]

That's a horror movie just waiting to happen. Imagine the Cube movies, but at Walmart. "We've got such deals to show you!"

Sorry, not sorry.

As promised, I took pics of a local CVS and Publix's empty stock. I'm in a Florida city suburb, just to reiterate.

This amount of stock has been consistent for about a month now. I'm not just taking these a day or two before they get a supply truck; in fact, the CVS must have gotten one recently, their frozen food section was empty last time I went. Publix had some gatorade this time, too.

GG, man! I stopped by the gas station from my first crop of photos and bought their last 4 yellow Gatorades today. Their drink cases are now almost entirely empty, but I didn't have time to grab photos. I'm going to try next time. You've inspired me (and hopefully others).

Also, for the Zoomers who will inevitably join us, remember, be like Raze; censor your info and make sure you aren't reflected in the glass cooler doors if you take pics. Use good opsec. Don't be a Kurt Eichenwald.

News roundup is inbound. I'm archiving and will edit this post shortly with additions. I just had to drop the Hellraiser Walmart greeter meme because the whole idea legit brightened my day.


News Roundup

• Baby formula shortages in Africa, but that's NBD, right? I mean it's not like they're also having them in...
• O snap. Britbongistan facing baby formula shortages as well.

Please, fellow Kiwis, if you know anyone who is expecting a baby, for the love of all things good, tell them to stash a bit of formula and buy their breast pumps now if they don't already have one. A lot of first time moms can't make enough milk to keep up with their infant, so just having the breast pump doesn't mean you're in the clear. Stash some formula and remember there's a raw materials shortage. Breast pumps are usually made with medical grade silicone (that thing there's a shortage of) and plastic (also a shortage). You can live off canned food-- your infant can't.

• Diaper prices are rising and shortages are expected.
• Shortages have already hit Arkansas.

You can cut up old clothing, rags, etc to make re-usable diapers, so this is less important. Interesting in that it's a reversal of WW II cotton shortages pushing people to use disposable diapers. (Not archiving this. It's just an interesting factoid.)

For the adults
• Someone said to wake them up when there are beer shortages
• More beer shortages, reduced deliveries
Largely due to--
• Aluminum can shortages
• Glass bottle shortages
• And, of course, the plastic shortage

 

[BIG BILL HELL'S]

there are certain flavors that, again, they aren't making at all right now (mostly stuff like the more obscure Minute Maid/Fanta/Crush flavors, but some others as well)

That would explain why I haven't seen Sunkist Lemonade anywhere for... 6 months now?

 

[veri]

this supply chain issue has shown me more than anything else how incapable of basic thinking some people are. they can't fathom the idea of the product they want not being readily available to them 24/7 and expect the places they go to to be able to replenish their stock daily. retail workers already have it bad enough around holidays, the phrase "can you just go check the back" will bring back flashbacks.

 

[contradiction of terns]

That would explain why I haven't seen Sunkist Lemonade anywhere for... 6 months now?

Apparently it wasn't discontinued, like it originally seemed.

A current (2021) article about the Diet Sunkist Lemonade shortage.

Edit: This was an odd bit of discovery because apparently they've been struggling as a company for a while. My verdict is you'll probably see a Sunkist bankruptcy in the near future, so... uh... hope you weren't TOO fond of that stuff.

 

[Thirsty Kitty]

Some photos from my local grocery store. I'm from central Pennsylvania and this was at a Giant.

Spoiler: Meat

A bit short but nothing too crazy just yet. I'm making wings next week so i hope they don't run out

Spoiler: Milk and Creamer

Looking rough, not pictured is the coffee creamer right next to the milk, which was also in low supply

@Raze Noticed his CVS was low on fruit snacks, similar situation here

Spoiler: Fruit Snacks

And probably the most concerning of all of these

Spoiler: Water