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

[Phalanges Mycologist]

British Grocery Stores Are Stocking Empty Shelves with Cardboard Cutouts of Food

I've not seen that at all, while a lot of things are thin on the ground I've yet to see shelf fillers, the closest thing I have seen are scan cards for frequently stolen items of value, mostly booze even then on bottles of larger size, or oddly enough Baby food and Nappies but they had security tags on them before COVID, or things like razor blades.

 

[mandatorylurk]

Two months ago one supplier told us "yeah no problem, we can handle this middle sized order." We gave them the order at the beginning of the month, and they still said it's no problem but they are seeing supply constraints. Trying to get a status on the order we've been getting the cold shoulder for weeks now, and after finally getting ahold of someone were told they had a Chyna Virus outbreak and about half the people in the office and shop are out and it's caused delays. A lie? Probably, but it's somewhat believable. This is a good supplier the company has dealt with for almost 25 years but they're acting like we don't exist or simply can't say there's an issue. And because of this supplier not being upfront with us, it's putting us in a position where we can't shift off the job to another supplier without a delay for the customer. I believe the customer would be understanding but it makes us eat shit and so many of us are tired of having to take the arrows for the suppliers. And that's not including the clear degradation in quality in finished products over the past year because of inexperienced or no quality check workers.

The constant on/off streams of workflow (ridiculously busy one week, crickets the next) and dealing with everything is really making the boss think about retiring.

 

[RumblyTumbly]

I said it about the Afghanistan debacle, I said it about COVID, and I'll say it here too.

I want to beleive that this is all being done on purpose for some kind of evil reason because this all happening because our government is run by morons is even worse.

 

[Sped Xing]

Also in regards to DP I am the only one who seems to be able to taste Carrot when I drink it, not unpleasantly but as a component of the flavour, having said that I grow my own carrots and it oddly reminds me mostly of Purple carots most that have a bit of a stronger flavour.

Sometimes DP goes off, and it smells like dirty socks. You'd think that alone would make me swear off soda water.

That said, I'm currently drinking a nice unsweetened iced tea, like a good boy. It's not that I hate sugar in tea, but lately the Southern US autism of "Swate Tay" has overwhelmed Texas, and people think tea needs to be sickeningly sweet.

When will the bad food trends supply chain break down?

 

[Sarcastic sockpuppet]

To fix the supply chain you need to buy less crap https://www.theatlantic.com/technol...g-global-supply-chain-shipping-delays/620465/

 

[Quijibo69]

They have new refrigerators doors now in stores with screens in them. I saw them in a Walgreens by where I live.

British Grocery Stores Are Stocking Empty Shelves with Cardboard Cutouts of Food​

Spoiler: Full Article

(archive)
UK supermarket Tesco claims it has nothing to do with supply chain issues.

Earlier this month, British consumer-goods publication The Grocer surveyed 1,000 people to ask whether they were concerned that the country's ongoing supply chain issues would affect their ability to stock up on holiday favorites this year. Over half (56 percent) of those who responded said they were either worried, slightly worried, or very worried that they wouldn't be able to find the food and drinks they wanted at the supermarket during the festive season.

Meanwhile, some supermarkets in England have reportedly been filling empty produce sections and bare store shelves with pictures of whatever items should've been in those spaces, while others are using their empty freezer cases to display non-food items like toys and games.

According to The Guardian, these out-of-stock items are just an ultra-visible representation of the consequences of the truck driver, fruit and vegetable picker, and food processing plant worker shortages. There have also been issues at the country's ports, where handlers can't unload and re-pack the deliveries that seem to have arrived all at once — and then there are ongoing complications from Brexit and the ongoing pandemic to deal with, too. Pictures of the inedible cardboard foodstuffs have also been shared widely on social media. "Tesco have the fake asparagus out this morning," one widely shared Tweet read, and it was accompanied by two pictures of produce bins filled with photos of rubber-banded fresh asparagus spears.

Other Twitter users included pics of what cardboard cutouts their own supermarkets had placed on the shelves. "Tesco Express in Cambridge," a user named @GoatSarah wrote, along with pictures of cardboard dishwashing liquid. "Look carefully. The middle three rows are photographs."

"Yum tasty cardboard carrots," another added. "Fakenham Tesco last week." (Yes, Fakenham is actually the Norfolk town's name.) And a picture taken at a Sainsbury's showed shelves that were lined with cardboard cutouts decorated with the shapes of the items that could've been on sale.

Some insiders believe that having photos of temporarily unavailable items is still a better option than just leaving bare shelves throughout the store. "No one wants empty shelves as it's a negative perception of availability and that can impact sales and leave customers thinking that the store is poorly presented," Steve Dresser, a director at Grocery Insight, told The Telegraph. "Blocking the shelves with cardboard 'fillers' is preferable as it's a nice halfway house, reflecting that gaps are longer term but not forcing the store itself to change layouts."

A representative from Tesco supermarkets told the Daily Mail that supply issues weren't the reason for the cardboard displays. "For the images that contain fresh food, we have these available for selected large stores to use when there is additional space," the spokesperson said. "These have been in use for many months now and are not connected to the recent supply chain challenges. Overall availability remains strong."

And a Sainsbury's spokesperson said that its suppliers were "working hard" to ensure that customers could find all the items they went into the store for. "Availability in some product categories may vary but alternatives are available and stores continue to receive deliveries daily," they said.

 

[Justa Grata Honoria]

I said it about the Afghanistan debacle, I said it about COVID, and I'll say it here too.

I want to beleive that this is all being done on purpose for some kind of evil reason because this all happening because our government is run by morons is even worse.

The biggest psy op that CIA pulled on those who are immune to propaganda and indoctrination is to convince them that the establishment is more powerful than god and can exactly predict everything and everything that happens has to be for a reason on the global stage. Sounds familiar?

The establishment is not some deity that is almighty all seeing and all powerful. Nobody is in charge deal with it. And yes they are that mich incompetent because they live separate from the reality in their ivory towers just like any elite and rulers in the empires and kingdoms before them .

 

[Jarolleon]

The idea of getting a job because you don't know what else to do with your time is depressing. Are people really so lost? I hear people express this idea so often I think they must really feel that way. "If I won the lottery I'd still want a job" wtf?

Anyway, as to the worker shortage, there's a thread in AnH about a guy applying to 60 entry level jobs and getting only one callback. Apparently big companies are all using highly autistic hiring software, rather than hiring actual humans to look at actual applications and get people to work. If so, it's one more example of modern "flexibility is waste" dipshits destroying society.

If anyone is looking for nonspecific work, I suggest talking to smaller businesses. If the hiring manager is either the owner or reports directly to the owner. Chances are they aren't plugging resumes into some exceptional AI, and will actually care to get positions filled.

I wonder if it's just there to fulfill some misguided "anti-nepotism" laws or something like that, so they don't really care that the AI doesn't find enough good candidates to pay for itself because they get more than enough people from their informal networks. Perhaps they want it to be as autistic and inefficient as possible so they can say "There's nobody applying, I guess I have to hire my nephew's girlfriend's brother/the desperate Pajeets that my recruiter found two weeks ago".

 

[Lorne Armstrong]

I keep seeing posts on here about what folks experience while shopping, and I might as well do the same.

Let me say beforehand that I do all the grocery shopping in our home, (Southern US and that’s as specific as I’ll get), but I don’t shop the way most folks do. I shop one day a week, Shop multiple stores for the items that each sells cheapest plus to pick up the one/two items that each has for sale, and am at the 1st store before it opens to be first in line for the meat they’re marking down that day. I’ve been doing this longer than COVID has been around, just because I like our family eating steaks on a hamburger budget.

So, anyway, I never locked down, went shopping every week through COVID, experienced the shortages due to that, and what’s going on now is nothing like it at all.

For one thing, the circulars the stores send out each week showing you what’s on sale, (you can get these online too), have grown a LOT smaller. Stores that used to put out a 3-5 page circular now only put out a single page.

Also, packaging is a lot more stingy, and it’s small amounts you might not notice. Chorizo was $0.99 a piece last week, limit 10. That’s usually a 10oz chub and to look at it you’d never notice the difference, BUT I noticed they’re 9oz packs now. So they shaved an ounce off. Noticing this elsewhere too. When I buy a bag of potatoes or something like that, I always check with the hanging scale to make sure I’m not being shorted. I’ve found short bags before but never all of them. I found that 2 weeks ago. Every bag I weighed was around 1/4 lb short. I just opened another bag and took a potato out to fill mine up.

Different stores are out of different things, and what they’re getting in isn’t always their usual brand. One grocery store hasn’t had cream cheese in 3 weeks. The last time they had it, 4 weeks ago, the only brand they had was a store brand from the Midwest. That store doesn’t have a single location in my home state but somehow their store brand cream cheese ended up on the shelf here. Weird. Also weird that other grocery stores have it, (although overpriced), and one store has it for the same cheap price they’ve always had.

With that said, all the stores have 3 things in common. First, prices are way up across the board. Not like during COVID where prices fluctuated up and down. Prices are way up and they’re staying there and that’s across the board. Second, all stores are missing certain products but they’re never the same things. One store is short on bread, one store has no cheese, one store has rotten produce. You don’t know which until you go to them all and figure out which one is the best for each thing you need. Third, all stores have less product overall. They have 10 gallons of milk out for sale than the usual 20, 5 packs of ground beef when they’d usually have 10. Instead of completely bare shelves, they just have sparse shelves where they’ve got stuff but not that much of it. If I wasn’t getting to the store at 6am on a Saturday I can see how folks would be finding them sold out of stuff later on in the day.

Just some observations. Any questions, feel free to ask.

 

[Art Kassul]

British Grocery Stores Are Stocking Empty Shelves with Cardboard Cutouts of Food​

Spoiler: Full Article

(archive)
UK supermarket Tesco claims it has nothing to do with supply chain issues.

Earlier this month, British consumer-goods publication The Grocer surveyed 1,000 people to ask whether they were concerned that the country's ongoing supply chain issues would affect their ability to stock up on holiday favorites this year. Over half (56 percent) of those who responded said they were either worried, slightly worried, or very worried that they wouldn't be able to find the food and drinks they wanted at the supermarket during the festive season.

Meanwhile, some supermarkets in England have reportedly been filling empty produce sections and bare store shelves with pictures of whatever items should've been in those spaces, while others are using their empty freezer cases to display non-food items like toys and games.

According to The Guardian, these out-of-stock items are just an ultra-visible representation of the consequences of the truck driver, fruit and vegetable picker, and food processing plant worker shortages. There have also been issues at the country's ports, where handlers can't unload and re-pack the deliveries that seem to have arrived all at once — and then there are ongoing complications from Brexit and the ongoing pandemic to deal with, too. Pictures of the inedible cardboard foodstuffs have also been shared widely on social media. "Tesco have the fake asparagus out this morning," one widely shared Tweet read, and it was accompanied by two pictures of produce bins filled with photos of rubber-banded fresh asparagus spears.

Other Twitter users included pics of what cardboard cutouts their own supermarkets had placed on the shelves. "Tesco Express in Cambridge," a user named @GoatSarah wrote, along with pictures of cardboard dishwashing liquid. "Look carefully. The middle three rows are photographs."

"Yum tasty cardboard carrots," another added. "Fakenham Tesco last week." (Yes, Fakenham is actually the Norfolk town's name.) And a picture taken at a Sainsbury's showed shelves that were lined with cardboard cutouts decorated with the shapes of the items that could've been on sale.

Some insiders believe that having photos of temporarily unavailable items is still a better option than just leaving bare shelves throughout the store. "No one wants empty shelves as it's a negative perception of availability and that can impact sales and leave customers thinking that the store is poorly presented," Steve Dresser, a director at Grocery Insight, told The Telegraph. "Blocking the shelves with cardboard 'fillers' is preferable as it's a nice halfway house, reflecting that gaps are longer term but not forcing the store itself to change layouts."

A representative from Tesco supermarkets told the Daily Mail that supply issues weren't the reason for the cardboard displays. "For the images that contain fresh food, we have these available for selected large stores to use when there is additional space," the spokesperson said. "These have been in use for many months now and are not connected to the recent supply chain challenges. Overall availability remains strong."

And a Sainsbury's spokesperson said that its suppliers were "working hard" to ensure that customers could find all the items they went into the store for. "Availability in some product categories may vary but alternatives are available and stores continue to receive deliveries daily," they said.

brits face when

To fix the supply chain you need to buy less crap https://www.theatlantic.com/technol...g-global-supply-chain-shipping-delays/620465/

B-but the stores only sell crap!

 

[Corette]

I said it about the Afghanistan debacle, I said it about COVID, and I'll say it here too.

I want to beleive that this is all being done on purpose for some kind of evil reason because this all happening because our government is run by morons is even worse.

Could be both.

 

[spinch]

To fix the supply chain you need to buy less crap https://www.theatlantic.com/technol...g-global-supply-chain-shipping-delays/620465/

the whole narrative of any ONE person, or even any THOUSAND people being able to make a dent in any kind of climate/government/supply chain issue is absolutely ridiculous IMHO. It's like "oh use paper or reusable straws!!!"

the five straws I use in a month are not personally killing seaturtles. It's the millions of defective straws and plastic waste made in producing the straws.

Buying less pasta just means the two people behind me in line will also get a miniscule amount of pasta. It doesn't fix any global issues.

 

[Male Idiot]

So far, only thing we noticed is car fuel. It went up to almost 2 usd per liter from 1.
This does make sense as we have no natural resources since ww1 so it is all imports.
Everything else is good so far. We are on good terms with Ruskies and Chinks too, so hopefully they won't cut us off.

We got food factories, so even at the worst, it will be just western brands that are out.

But then again, we aren't that choosy. A lot of Hungarian (or any ex soviet I bet) food is wartime food that stuck with us, and the difference of 10-20% fat ground beef is such a silly idea, like blue arms but for food.


Pork and beef* is interchangable and mostly so is poultry except for some authentic sausages. The only different flesh is fish.


* and deer and boar and horse. These are rarer as deer and boar need hunting and horse isn't killed for meat.

If you guys want it, I can translate recipes for pork feet soup, chicken gizzard stew, and Pasta with Sugar.

Well the last one is just boiled pasta topped with sugar and maybe jam or salt and pig lard.

 

[Sped Xing]

My company downgraded from Grade "B" to Grade "C" pallets due to supply constraints.


Holy fuck I hate these pallets. They're basically firewood with extra nails.

 

[RussianParasite]

My company downgraded from Grade "B" to Grade "C" pallets due to supply constraints.


Holy fuck I hate these pallets. They're basically firewood with extra nails.

I saw skid prices (same thing) got bumped up like 80% in the span of one month back during the lumber price boom. As far as I know, these have not been lowered back to their prior levels despite the fact that lumber is at/below pre-pandemic levels.

So long as companies can keep passing on higher input costs to consumers, the longer we will see prices for goods stay high.

 

[Evo]

Results here in the South are mixed - noticed someone earlier mentioned different grocery stores being out of different products and select brands and that's what I'm seeing as well, although I'm seeing mass-shortages at the bigger big box stores like Walmart where even fucking seasonal products like Halloween decor are barebones and nearly absent. Produce & meats are up massively in price but it isn't just those select things, it's everything from your meats to something as basic and trivial as a 20 .oz soda, which I've seen several subtle price increases on throughout the past two months; everything is going up incrementally and we're still in very early stages from all of this but one can notice the visible nervousness in some people at grocery stores or people seeming generally far more antsy than they normally would, meanwhile cases of armed robbery have very sporadically started to pop up in formerly-safer areas as I presume people without enough money to compensate for rising prices and shortages are trying to get theirs regardless.

Pretty small and marginal increase in crime, but a noticeable increase regardless - the areas seeing these sporadic cases of armed robbery or attempted armed robbery are areas that would've never formerly seen these things at all; in addition, the outages are simply nothing like the pandemic - the outages I saw throughout the pandemic were far less consistent.

Labor-wise, everywhere and everyone is saying they're hiring but as far as I've heard, no one is actually hiring - wages went up for things like nurses, pharmaceutical techs, and very slightly for some of the retail industry but those sectors are seeing massive labor shortages too, particularly pharmaceutical technicians; old lady went out to Walmart not too long ago and ended up finding them completely out of pork & packs of bottled water as well as a store full of scrambling customers with literally no employees to check them out - the self-checkouts were essentially overloaded thanks to a complete lack of cashiers with paper posted up at some of the registers mentioning a labor shortage and apologizing for the inconvenience as all they have on the floor right now are 'stockers and pickers'.

 

[Lorne Armstrong]

I forgot to mention one thing, a couple of weeks ago there was another person, an old lady, at the store early like me. She walked through the register before me, bitching out the cashier saying “Y’all didn’t have anything I came in here for!” Now, I obviously don’t know what she was looking for that she couldn’t find, but when I see comments about folks in the stores being “on edge” and “antsy” I can definitely say that I’ve seen signs of that myself.

Also, I saw a “Let’s Go Brandon” sticker on the front door of one of the stores I went to last week, so that seems to be spreading.

 

[1Tonka_Truck]

I saw skid prices (same thing) got bumped up like 80% in the span of one month back during the lumber price boom. As far as I know, these have not been lowered back to their prior levels despite the fact that lumber is at/below pre-pandemic levels.

Pallets are one of those knock-on effects from '15 days to slow the spread' that's still going get worse before it gets better. 18 months ago, for reasons I still don't fully understand, the hardwood market ceased to exist. When I say ceased to exist, for at least 2 months there wasn't a single broker willing to buy grade hardwood. Nobody harvests trees for pallet stock. Either a grade mill makes pallet stock out of the rejects or scrag mill buys logs a grade mill doesn't want. Either way, if nobody is making grade lumber nobody is making pallet stock.

Then international container traffic spiked. Now those cross loading facilities need unprecedented numbers of pallets while there is a shortage. All while most of the hardwood mills that got fucked 18 months ago are still trying to recover. Some of them closed, a lot of them are short handed both from 'cant find help' and people that quit when there was no work.

There was a screengrab few pages back about the pallet shortage. The guy said something about loggers don't work in the winter. The only good news is for a variety of reasons November to February is the highest production time of the year for midwest hardwood loggers. May not be true for the gulf coast boys, as I think that's their wet(er) season.

 

[Xx_Retard Faggot 1488_xX]

Everyone here wants to talk about the problems and causes, but I would like to point out the future possibilities with their consequences:

1) Despite what I and many here probably want to believe, this is not a crisis due to vaccine mandates. The amount of people who have quit/will quit/fired/will be is not high enough in these fields. It may play a hand, but it unfortunately is not enough to cause this. Some here have acknowledged this, but the next part isn't really being discussed:

2) What are our options?

a) If things become fixed, everything will become worse. The quicker things return to normal, the quicker Vax mandates are likely to stick instead of disappear, the quicker the great reset begins, and the quicker the real distopia starts. Is food on the shelves really HELPING us? Should we really be MAD? at Biden or whoever for all this shit, or thankful for their incompetence?

b) Things get worse, is it really worse? Is survival of the fittest really going to make this country WORSE? It will be hard, I'm sure those here who are the wheelchair commandos don't wanna hear this, but the sooner shit gets hard the sooner the weakest links of society are gone, and with it the bs social rules they create that brought us to this point over the last 20 years.

For those here who are against vax mandates, how is option a) going to benefit us?

 

[Leaf Wage Slave]

I'm going to try to avoid power leveling too much doing this, but - retail up here in Western/Central/the slightly less cucked part of Canada, mostly do my shopping at the local Walmart. I don't know if it's just a difference between how the company operates north of the border, but we've somefuckinghow avoided having any real shortages for a while now. I know some guys working back room there, trucks have still been arriving daily or every other day, and have usually been filled to the gills. Sure, the Halloween stuff all vanished the second it showed up, but easy money thats dipshit parents wanting to make up for last years lockdown Halloween for their little crotch goblins.

That said, prices on basically everything have jumped up since before the Coof - weekly grocery bill went from somwthing like $120 to almost $200, and that's just buying all the same shit. Gas locally is sitting around $1.40/L - I'll let you Americans figure out that conversion - and I see "Now Hiring" signs everywhere.

My only real bit of optimism is that at least with the coming Winter, we shouldn't have any of the fun of rolling blackouts - upsides of living somewhere that mainly uses Hydro, it's a green energy that isn't complete shit, means I shouldn't have the heat cut out in -40...