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

[contradiction of terns]

I have personally seen some of this: retailers are now filling the shelves with massive amounts of the items they can still get to make the store look filled out.

Retailers turn to bizarre tactics to cover up empty shelves as supply chain crisis worsens



Live link to the Twitter post, since it's actually a video showing the ENTIRE STORE is filled with nothing but lawn chairs.
Archive just in case. Video doesn't work here.

The Britbongs have gotten slightly more devious and are putting out photos of products. If you look closely, the plastic bottles on the middle three rows (second photo) are actually print outs.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

You know, this whole thing would be seen as a ridiculous parody if it was in a 40k novel: "50M people starved to death in forest world of blahblah, the reason was lack of pallets. The shipment was delayed because the High Lords decided only ships with a specific chip is allowed to carry pallets and that chip is only created in a single planet that is currently besieged by Orks. The shipment that did finally arrive was delayed for months because that the ship navigator did not like how the ground crew referred to him. Loading the cargo was also delayed because the cranes in the orbital station are thousands of years old and nobody know how to replace them. Those pallets couldn't have been created on the forest world because the trade union forbade it since it will be bad for their bottom line".

 

[contradiction of terns]

Just to prove how impotent our species is, we now have a seamen shortage.

Archive of article
The supply crunch that has dogged the global shipping industry could worsen before it gets better, with new challenges ranging from crew retention to wage inflation.
That’s a warning from executives at Wah Kwong Maritime Transport, a privately owned shipping company based in Hong Kong. They caution that contrasting approaches to containing the virus continues to disrupt the turnover and repatriation of seafarers landing at ports around the world.
“There’s a real squeeze that we’re starting to see in terms of the disappearing applications for seafarers,” William Fairclough, managing director at Wah Kwong, said in an interview. “For certain types of ships, it may become very difficult to actually find the crew and you may get delays because of that. That’s conceivable, it’s never been the case before.”
The mental toll for seafarers on the front line of the pandemic disruption and concerns over travelling to countries deemed high risk for the virus are helping to drive wages higher, according to Hing Chao, executive chairman of Wah Kwong.

 

[Male Idiot]

That old trucker's sperg overlooks something, specifically certain possibilities of terminal failure or "managed decline" or whatever you want to call it. He's sort of assuming that everything will continue balls-to-the-wall and it'll just cost more and take longer, everyone will do their best, and certainly in the short term he seems to be correct.

In in the slightly longer term however, since he says there's essentially nothing to be done about it anyway, nothing that'll take less than several years and tons of investment if it ever gets done at all, I would expect to see a shift to simply having less product capacity overall. That is, less stuff. Less variety of stuff. Less actual manufacturing, translating into less shipping. Think about the abundance of shit we've gotten used to. Every corner has a retail operation stocking a huge variety of products, even in bumfuck towns. There's so much waste, even crappy products don't see use until the end of their (short) service lives.

I think that in the long run, assuming he's right and there's not a practical solution to the keep the wheels of consumption rolling as fast as they used to, there'll just be less stuff. This would also entail a holocaust in retail (and certain affiliates of retail) as they have to pare their operations back and only stock 3 kinds of chinese shirt instead of 10. The JIT and lean systems will probably have to be curtailed and stock warehoused again to keep common goods regularly available - imagine the losses those companies will post on paper (aka the stock market)? Honestly thinking about it makes me feel good but the reality is that this kind of event will probably occur right alongside (or even inseparably from) a massive economic depression... hmm.

You know, this whole thing would be seen as a ridiculous parody if it was in a 40k novel: "50M people starved to death in forest world of blahblah, the reason was lack of pallets. The shipment was delayed because the High Lords decided only ships with a specific chip is allowed to carry pallets and that chip is only created in a single planet that is currently besieged by Orks. The shipment that did finally arrive was delayed for months because that the ship navigator did not like how the ground crew referred to him. Loading the cargo was also delayed because the cranes in the orbital station are thousands of years old and nobody know how to replace them. Those pallets couldn't have been created on the forest world because the trade union forbade it since it will be bad for their bottom line".

Hah. But comparing the Imperium to Globohomo is unfair.
The Imperium is less corrupt, more efficient and certainly less malign.

 

[Mooger Meng]

I have personally seen some of this: retailers are now filling the shelves with massive amounts of the items they can still get to make the store look filled out.

Retailers turn to bizarre tactics to cover up empty shelves as supply chain crisis worsens

View attachment 2687501
View attachment 2687502
Live link to the Twitter post, since it's actually a video showing the ENTIRE STORE is filled with nothing but lawn chairs.
Archive just in case. Video doesn't work here.

The Britbongs have gotten slightly more devious and are putting out photos of products. If you look closely, the plastic bottles on the middle three rows (second photo) are actually print outs.

View attachment 2687509View attachment 2687510

That's not so outlandish on its face. Assuming nothing has changed since I worked retail, large runs of empty shelving are something you try to avoid at all reasonable cost, as I'm sure has been said in the thread before.
The cardboard cutouts is where it starts smacking of desperation.

 

[Glad I couldn't help]

Food prices in China are up every week in October. Pork increased by 10.6%, chicken eggs 6.4% and food overall 3.7%.

 

[Stoneheart]

Unfortunately, I'm not sure if things will stay like that since this manufactured crisis will go on for quite a while.

Imports from the EU and South america should stay fine. you guys maybe have to change to Rum, Irish whiskey, Austrian Brand, Italian Grappa, etc.

 

[Lorne Armstrong]

I’ve actually noticed Beef and Pork prices down a bit here, but Chicken is through the roof again. Then when Chicken drops back a bit, either Beef or Pork ticks back up. They never drop all the way back either. 2 steps forward but only one step back.

I THINK the reason why is that they’re getting less frequent shipments, so inbetween shipments when they don’t have as much, the price jumps up. When they finally get their last 3 missing shipments, though, it’s all at once and now they’ve got more than they need so the price drops because they need to sell it all before the “best by” date. That’s my guess.

Also, last week I saw a guy in a ratty box truck unloading fresh veggies and fruit in front of a big chain grocery store. I talked to him, he said the store had run out of produce and the manager had gone to him and bought everything he had. The guy is an importer from Mexico, normally supplies taquerias and Mexican grocers. The big store had missed enough shipments that they had no produce left to sell. They didn’t even have the guy pull around back to unload. They pulled him in up front and unloaded straight into the Produce section of the store.

 

[Corette]

You know, this whole thing would be seen as a ridiculous parody if it was in a 40k novel: "50M people starved to death in forest world of blahblah, the reason was lack of pallets. The shipment was delayed because the High Lords decided only ships with a specific chip is allowed to carry pallets and that chip is only created in a single planet that is currently besieged by Orks. The shipment that did finally arrive was delayed for months because that the ship navigator did not like how the ground crew referred to him. Loading the cargo was also delayed because the cranes in the orbital station are thousands of years old and nobody know how to replace them. Those pallets couldn't have been created on the forest world because the trade union forbade it since it will be bad for their bottom line".

Navigator can just suck it up.
Sanctified mutant is still a mutant.
t: Ordo Hereticus

 

[tehpope]

The chinese are panic buying.

https://twitter.com/h5LPyKL7TP6jjop/status/1456095002048622598

老司机 on Twitter: "场面震撼!全国多地超市柜面米粮被买空! 被饥饿记忆所唤醒？还是政府号令有效？商务部一个屯粮号召，引起惊…

archived 4 Nov 2021 23:41:24 UTC

archive.md

https://twitter.com/brikeilarcnn/status/1456227125346832384

"A gallon of milk was $1.99. Now it's $2.79. When you buy 12 gallons a week times four weeks, that's a lot of money."
@EvanMcS goes grocery shopping with the Stotlers and shows us how badly inflation is hitting the middle class.

 

[FatalTater]

12 gallons of milk per week? Wot?

 

[Lorne Armstrong]

12 gallons of milk per week? Wot?

I was about to say, their last name isn’t Duggar, is it?

I’ll tell you what I do to save money on milk. There a local grocery store that usually puts half gallons of milk on sale for $0.80 cents a piece, limit 5, every 4-6 weeks. I make sure to buy the limit whenever they go on sale, throw them in the freezer, and pull one out to defrost overnight when the one in my fridge runs low.

 

[Free the Pedos]

12 gallons of milk per week? Wot?

They have 9 kids (mix of biological, adopted, and foster), so that still doesn't make sense. Also, this video shows them buying a lot of prepared foods, which is well and good financially if you can afford it, but not smart if you can't.

 

[Lorne Armstrong]

They have 9 kids (mix of biological, adopted, and foster), so that still doesn't make sense. Also, this video shows them buying a lot of prepared foods, which is well and good financially if you can afford it, but not smart if you can't.

So assuming 2 parents that means each of them is consuming almost a gallon of milk a week? I’d guess that they’re doing a bunch of baking and home cooking but you said they’re buying mostly prepared/premade/prepackaged stuff so home cooking is out except for warming stuff up. Maybe they’re eating Lucky Charms 3 meals a day or something?

 

[Constellationzero]

That's not so outlandish on its face. Assuming nothing has changed since I worked retail, large runs of empty shelving are something you try to avoid at all reasonable cost, as I'm sure has been said in the thread before.
The cardboard cutouts is where it starts smacking of desperation.

But the lawn chairs and the iT's a pLaNoGrAm, pLeBs!

NO. Maybe it's FROM a planogram, but it is NOT A FUCKING PLANOGRAM. I think they took the photo from page 1 and blew it up. Technically, they didn't lie...

The lawn chairs and cardboard cutouts reek of gaslighting the public and makes it look even worse than leaving the shelves empty. We see this. We aren't stupid. Saying everything's fine by doing this is chilling.

 

[Jump]

I have personally seen some of this: retailers are now filling the shelves with massive amounts of the items they can still get to make the store look filled out.

The regional place I shop at is doing this bigly with the canned section. 4 shelves 2 feet wide with nothing but 1 type of cranberry sauce. They fulled the coolers that normally have the turkeys with ground beef and other stuff they process in store. They also have a bakery in store and they used to have their breads and rolls in their own section by the bakery and deli counter. Now they have the store baked stuff filling out the bread isle.

And I am finally being impacted by this situation. Ive stopped in to 3 different stores the past 2 days and can not find my iced honey buns.
Hostess must not be able to get local route drivers or something. The hostess sections are bare and filled with expired stuff.

I am really glad I have 2 turkey breasts and a whole turkey sitting in my deepfreezer for the holiday season.

 

[Lorne Armstrong]

The regional place I shop at is doing this bigly with the canned section. 4 shelves 2 feet wide with nothing but 1 type of cranberry sauce. They fulled the coolers that normally have the turkeys with ground beef and other stuff they process in store. They also have a bakery in store and they used to have their breads and rolls in their own section by the bakery and deli counter. Now they have the store baked stuff filling out the bread isle.

And I am finally being impacted by this situation. Ive stopped in to 3 different stores the past 2 days and can not find my iced honey buns. View attachment 2689478
Hostess must not be able to get local route drivers or something. The hostess sections are bare and filled with expired stuff.

I am really glad I have 2 turkey breasts and a whole turkey sitting in my deepfreezer for the holiday season.

Make them yourself. It’s cheaper, and better for you.

Honey Buns

We do quite a bit of baking around here. Usually I try to make Monday our baking day. This is when we make bread, sweets and sn...

homesteadfarmer.blogspot.com

 

[BluntyBitch]

I just read a rumor that there's a paper shortage incoming. European presses have stop production until the end of the year; it probably come to the US within the next few weeks.

Well there is commercial paper (like copy paper), paper like for packaging, paper for tissue/towel/napkin. Which kind do u mean?

Fun fact: there is no such thing as cardboard, only types of corrugate.

So the company that owns Dixie cups (it's one of the 6 branches of those conservative brothers in Wi, well only one is left now) (it's also the red headed stepchild of all their holdings, and makes the least amount of money, in fact it apparently always loses money)
Their paper plate and cup sales skyrocketed in the past year.,
Per a trusted insider in the paper industry, specifically those two brothers' company -
For some of our specific products we are looking at new avenues for sourcing paper, since we are basically at the limit of what we can produce ourselves. This is... Probably confidential, the workers haven't been explicitly told not to let this get out but the higher ups are treating it like it's not supposed to get out. Our biggest need is in the paper plate and cup area.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

Hah. But comparing the Imperium to Globohomo is unfair.
The Imperium is less corrupt, more efficient and certainly less malign.

And if the Emperor woke up he would fix shit..when Biden wakes up he just takes a shit in his pants.

12 gallons of milk per week? Wot?

When you have 8 welfare babies you go through milk.

 

[Ancient Pioneer]

https://twitter.com/brikeilarcnn/status/1456227125346832384

View attachment 2689295

This segment comes off like it was staged or the people being interviewed are just outright lying so they can get on TV. CNN does this shit all the time and I would really disregard this bit.