Thread by @garius

What Johnson and co. haven't realised is that supermarket supply management is starting to prioritise core goods as the crisis deepens with road haulage.

If you start noticing a lack of booze on supermarket shelves this is why.

And a UK booze shortage will be harder to dismiss.

https://twitter.com/WinstonCProject/status/1419277361946693638

Essentially, the perishables go first as they're time critical, but then they have to start making hard choices about non-perishables.

At that point, booze goes next. Mostly by triaging down to the big brewery lagers.

So (silly as it may sound) a good sign that your local supermarket is struggling with supply, for whatever reason, is ALWAYS when you start seeing empty shelves for things like Newcastle Brown Ale, bitters (that aren't John Smiths) and other Tier 2 booze.

It's not because your area suddenly developed a more adventurous booze palate.

It's because the chain is using what precious haulage they can spare for booze on keeping the generics flowing to shelves.

The Fosters must flow.

(For the record, I got utterly fascinated with how supermarket supply chains work a few years back when I started wondering why Mince pie filling was always so hard to find at Christmas, when you'd think they'd overstock it)

This is really critical to note as well. I was surprised how heavily the power sat with the supermarkets when I got obsessed with supply chain dynamics.

It's why, as always, the first victims here aren't the big suppliers or those within that framework.

https://twitter.com/Jodada_Films/status/1419582329069182978

People are asking about the minced pie filling shortage thing:

Basically a hyper-seasonal version of this problem. Tier 2 christmas good. So when the pressure hits it drops way down the priority in comparison to christmas dinner critical items.

The Yorkshire puddings must flow.

If I get a chance later in the week, I'll do a thread on Ski Yoghurts and how they massively disrupted the yoghurt game.

It's pretty batshit crazy, in the most eighties of ways.

https://twitter.com/RKemb/status/1419591142526656514

"tell me about the before-times again, Grandad"

"Well bobby, in the old days you could get a pizza that WASN'T BBQ chicken from the store..."

https://twitter.com/rogerlipscombe/status/1419592646415339523

Anyway. TLDR:

When Supermarkets triage, good booze goes first. Less demand, and the big breweries throw their weight at the haulage markets to keep their generics on the shelves.

So we're about 3 weeks from Boris trying to convince us all drinking Fosters is a patriotic duty.

And if that booze shortage hits, I suspect they'll try and turn drinking anything they can vaguely brand as craft into a culture war.

You'll have photos of Johnson and Raab holding up pints of John Smiths and talking about metro elites hating good old fashioned English beer.

It'll be "woke liberals TURN THEIR BACK on the traditional British pint"

Which is funny af* given how decidedly UN-woke a lot of the craft industry is, where rampant sexual discrimination and privilege abounds.

*not actually funny af

Combined with the fact that 'metro elites' (in London AND up north) have done more to help reinvigorate the market for British booze than any government. Tory or Labour.

FUN FACT: The Northern Line tunnels needed repairing as so much brewing is happening in London again.

A good fifteen years ago, they'd actually started leaking/rusting because the lack of brewing in London had caused the water table to rise.

Now they've had micro-cracking because the table has dropped again and the ground has dried out.

Anyway. Support your local brewery. Buy direct where you can.

Unless they're one of the sexist, fratboy breweries. In which case, fuck those guys too. Don't encourage them.

Oh, and given this thread has ALREADY sheered down a massive tangent, I should point out that the closest amalgam I can think of to booze as a potential trigger for a shift in public opinion on government competence is...

Tea in WW2.

Tea in WW2 largely fell under the responsibility of Lord Woolton, as Minister for Food. As did all rationing.

This was back when governments thought that hiring experts to run things in a crisis. Not the landlord of their favourite pub.

Woolton, thanks to national surveys, became CRITICALLY aware of what products the nation regarded as signifiers of how well the war was going.

One thing that surprised him was how this was often DIFFERENT from what people needed to, ya know, survive physically.

And slap bang at the absolute TOP of that list, was tea.

So once tea had to be rationed, serious conversations were had in government. Not least, the absolute terror at the idea it had to be rationed at all.

Indeed he was told rationing tea would be political suicide.

Well Woolton DID ration it. But he was very, very careful throughout the war as to HOW it was rationed and on creating exceptions.

His mantra to the Tea Division was that they needed to have an attitude of:

"We not only cope, we care."

But the thing Woolton and the Division saw as CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN (to go @cstross). i.e. the thing that would trigger the British public into seeing the war was being lost, would be if tea supplies got so short the Division had to mix blends.

This was known as POOL TEA SCENARIO

(Or, occasionally, as X BLEND)

Under the POOL TEA SCENARIO Britain would be running on tea shavings, and the Division would be forced to start mixing and matching from different suppliers to ensure that enough tea could be provided to meet the ration by weight alone, not allow for specific blends.

Maintaining Britain's tea supply, and avoiding the POOL TEA SCENARIO became a legitimate and serious War Goal.

I'm not joking here. Tea had a higher shipping priority than most munitions.

This is why the MASSIVELY overlooked efforts of the Indian and Far East Commonwealth forces in holding off the Japanese at Kohima and elsewhere were CRITICAL to keeping Britain in the war.

Malta was rightly granted a George Cross for its role in WW2. India deserves one too.

Indeed in 1942, Britain essentially bought the ENTIRE "free" world's tea crop, with the approval of all the major powers and then oversaw it's GLOBAL distribution.

I'm not shitting you. That's how seriously the government took the need to address the supply of drinks people like

The tea auctions in places like Columbo, Calcutta etc. were suspended by agreement. ALL tea for export was purchased by the Ministry of Food. Then it was sold on, at trade rates, to other countries based on pre-war consumption levels to avoid any issues with British tea supply.

So the final question bugging you, I suspect, is...

how close was POOL TEA SCENARIO?

The answer is: pretty close. Three times I reckon if National archive papers (there's some CRAZY stuff in there on all of the stuff required to pull all this off) and Woolton are to be believed

The first time was at the outbreak of war, when - in a repetition of recent bog roll hoarding - the British public panic bought tea.

This was the scenario that allowed Woolton to push through rationing it at all.

But the other two came due to something that nobody had considered until too late:

90% of ALL UK tea entered the country via London's docks.

And twice in the war the Luftwaffe decided they fancied extensively redecorating that part of London.

This led to a frantic decentralisation of the tea perparation and blending industry in the UK, with Cardiff, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Hull, Dundee and Leith being declared as wartime tea hubs.

Warehouse space was commandeered in these cities and tea shipped there in barges or coastal transport by the millions of tonnes from London's warehouses at night - often as the bombs rained down.

In those towns and cities, emergency packing and blending plants were set up.

All that took time though, and could never be entirely completed without issue. So whenever London was hit hard, and U-Boats were rampant in the Atlantic, Britain got perilously close to POOL TEA SCENARIO, but just about avoided it.

According to Woolton himself, the 'big' Blitz, combined with the U-Boat war and the early chaos of decentralising the industry was the absolute closest they got to POOL TEA SCENARIO.

Not just close, but briefly PAST the point it should have been implemented.

The labels were printed. The packaging was made. The plan was agreed with the distributors and blenders. The Tea Division asked Woolton to sign it off.

He looked at things about to get better, rolled the dice, and refused.

I'll leave you with his words, about that day:

"It was the logical to take... It was an extremely hard conclusion to resist, but I decided to take the risk against the weight of evidence - and fortunately the results justified the conclusion."

"I recall this incident because the decision was important. If we had given up during the war the blending tea, the use of brands, if we had decided on this dull level of equality, we should have lost something in our national life."

"We are a nation of individualists, and our strength lies in persistent determination not to sacrifice that individuality. Taste, individual taste, is worth preserving and cultivating; it adds to the joy of living and flavours existence."

"I'm glad to think that, in some measure at any rate, the people were still able to get the sort of tea they wanted from within the Empire.

And so very grateful we all were, through many tumultuous nights, to the sailors who brought it to us."

Anyway. Unexpected history thread. Feel free to QT the beginning of THAT part if you have no interest in the current looming booze apocalypse scenario.

As always, if this historical tangent bought you joy, then you can buy me a tea - not a coffee! - here: ko-fi.com/garius

And because someone inevitably always rocks up and tells me real history can't be this awesome I say, as always:

THIS IS WHY YOU SHOULD BUY OLD BOOKS THAT LOOK BORING.

They rarely are.

Also: the National Archives are a fun place to spend a day off exploring rabbitholes.

SIDEBAR FOR MEDIA IN MY DMs: Yes, the issues with supermarket booze supply are fascinating. But you want to speak to industry experts, not me.

Knowing obscure weird history is my bag. And tea. And booze. But mostly Lots of tea.

TEA COMPANIES WHO AREN'T SLIDING INTO MY DMS: You absolutely should be sliding into my DMs.

Me writing this stuff makes people drink tea. You should send me tea.

Oh, and one of y'all remind me to do a thread on industrial diamond supply chains in WW2 at some point. That stuff is WACK.