An Addendum

[jsburbidge]

I noted that no place I had been in had implemented one-way aisles. That is now no longer true; the Loblaws I was shopping in this afternoon had put down arrows in tape on the floors of the aisles. Except... nobody, as far as I could see, was paying them any attention. Or not enough to make the necessary number of people going in the way indicated significantly larger than I would expect at random.

Comments

[graydon]

Shopping habits are deeply ingrained. It'll take some really active effort to change them.

[jsburbidge]

Yeah.

I also see evidence of the same sort of thing that's affecting flour and toilet paper in other areas. (Yes, I've been following the thread over on Charlie's blog. Tempted to jump in regarding limited liability,bbut u gave nothing actually original to say there.) (Suppliers and or deliveries not reflecting the new reality.) When I was there last week the area with yeast and similar baking supplies was almost empty; now it's even more empty, with no new items at all even with the gap in time.

I'm sure the deliveries from that supplier are slotted in N times per month (1 or 2 at a guess). And they can't be easily rejigged for changes in demand. As with flour, I'm sure there's lots of baker's yeast out there, but it's not going through channels which put it into small packets for the consumer market, and I'm sure the supply chains for the packaging are both longer and more complex than those for the yeast itself.

Give it a couple more weeks and we'll see what else is becoming unravelledm

[graydon]

Pretty much every medical supply, including the critical drugs (the minimum capability required for a functioning hospital), work the same way on slower timelines. (Just because there's usually more levels; groceries are supplier-distribution-store, generally; drugs are usually supplier-region-distribution-(store|hospital), and pharmacies do maintain stocks, but not very large stocks, thereabouts of a week.) I'm seeing various warnings that we're a couple months out from a general broad drug shortage for everything.

Deliveries all follow a really detailed demand model; grocery stores/supermarkets/whatever run on < 1% margins in general, and have massive incentives to tune the model as closely as they can. Only now it's totally busted for an indeterminate and indefinite period, and even if they go "right, normal's never coming back", all that gets them is not knowing what to order.

(I am of six minds about stability of food supply; there's a lot of time dependency and there's a lot of dependency on migrant labour and there's (in Canada) a lot of dependency on the US. It could be fine; it could be absolutely terrible. No earthly way to tell.)

Meanwhile the production chains are doing the same thing; I keep trying to think of a reason it's not going to crash hard and I wish I could but I can't. If you replace feedback with timing and then introduce random delays (from the point of view of the system as a whole) it's going to splatter. And various national efforts to make sure they don't run out of sewer pipe junctions or engine coolant are going to make that worse by introducing more disjunctions. (So will profiteering attempts.)

I was kinda annoyed when I'd had to replace the NAS and other backup stuff in January; I had that budgeted for June. I am now extremely thankful it's all up to date, because I suspect availability for a lot of things is going to become positively medieval. (You can get whatever just came off the ship that just came in, or you wait for the next ship...)