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At the end of the day, there are two underlying problems, I think. One is that the supply chain and shipping world is just completely bottlenecked and screwed up, some of it is COVID related disruptions (airlines not flying for a long time, shippers/dock workers not working, etc), some is residual shocks from the Ever Given (which pushed a massive "bubble" into the normal flow of containers/etc - which is creating weird paradoxical effects all across the supply chain as it suddenly becomes very important or not important at all to hustle on specific parts of the chain), etc. The other is that we just killed 700k people in the US alone, a disproportionate number of whom were "frontline" workers - the people at your grocery store and fast food places. Yeah a lot were seniors but of the ones who weren't, a ton of them were frontline workers. And that's just creating a massive labor shortage. In a sense this is also a preview of what the "send 'em home" policies certain political groups push for would look like. Vaccination policies are another log on that fire but frankly I don't think it's the grocery store workers who are the ones digging in their heels about getting vaccinated, it's the karens who are their customers. I think it's a comparatively small effect compared to the above two, but it's still yet another compounding effect. The supply chain was very "just in time" and disruptions to that supply chain can have surprisingly long-term effects before the ripples finally smoothed out - even if COVID had disappeared you are probably talking "at least several years" to return to normal, in the global shipping chain, and in certain long-leadtime supply chains like electronics. And really we are not even past the part where ripples are still getting created, due to the general labor shortages. Again though, we tell workers to have a 6 month supply of all expenses just in case "something unexpected" happens, and yet these JIT policies have been the darling of the business world. This is the downside, something big happens and they don't have any slack in their production chains. The companies that planned ahead and had a "6 month emergency supply" of computer chips aren't having problems as bad as the companies who were living paycheck-to-paycheck (or supplytruck-to-supplytruck). |
https://www.supermarketnews.com/issues-trends/grocery-worker...
I encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can, but vaccinated customers also transmit the virus. There is only a limited and temporary reduction in transmission risk.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y