I work for a food company. Not gonna name brand names, but it's all non-perishable, so a lot of what we sell is precisely what's now being panic-bought. A thread about why panic-buying is so unnecessary...
Here's how the grocery trade works. Every shop knows exactly how much it's sold during the past week, 100 of X, 300 of Y, etc. So our sales rep goes in and the shop orders 100 of X and 300 of Y to replace what they've sold. They keep some back-up stock to keep the shelves pretty.
That's if they're a Dunnes Store cos we deliver to each branch. If they're a Tesco or a SuperValu or a Lidl, who have a central depot that supplies all their branches, they aggregate their sales across all the branches and order 100 pallets of X and 300 pallets of Y.
Meanwhile our factories are busy making X and Y. Here's the thing about factory managers: they love efficiency. And nothing's more efficient for them than banging out 100s and 100s of pallets of X and Y at a time off the production line. So we've warehouses full of the stuff.
It all creates a pipeline that's in constant pumping motion, shifting loads and loads of X and Y from our warehouses to the supermarkets' depots, to the individual stores, to the individual shelves of those stores, to you the shopper who puts the stuff in your trolley.
So someone starts panic-buying toilet paper. Herd mentality kicks in and everyone starts panic-buying everything. Even the middle class get involved, they start panic-buying fucking quinoa or something. What effect does that have on The Pipeline?
Not much - a bit more than usual gets sucked out the far end. But Pipeline is still there, Pipeline gonna pump. Except now it's a bit constipated. There's still loads and loads of X and Y trying to get from our factories to those individual shelves but there's not enough trucks.
Greta Thunberg, cover your ears now. Yes, there's an environmental downside cos trucks run on diesel. Shit. There's a global pandemic and no-one thought to invent an electric truck? But I digress.
My point is this: our factory managers are still banging out X and Y by the, err, truckload. The depots have still got 100s of pallets of X and Y - Tesco & co don't have enough trucks either. The trucks they do have are full of X and Y which'll be on those shelves in the morning.
So if all you good people would please stop losing your shit (that's NOT a toilet-paper pun btw) and just go back to buying the same amount that you did last week, everything will be OK.
This has been a public service announcement, with no guitars. Youse are all lost in the supermarket cos the shelves are empty, but there's no need.
