Downstream End Of The Supply Chain

I stopped by the Roseville Target yesterday morning on my way back from another errand. It was 7:50 AM.

I don’t need toilet paper – a 12 pack tides me over for good long while,  now that I have no kids at home – but I took a stroll past the paper products aisle. There were maybe a couple dozen packages of toilet paper scattered about the place.  Call it 95% empty.   

I thought “must’ve been a busy night“.

Then I talked to one of the girls at the coffee stand. She said trucks came in mid-evening last night and completely restocked the toilet paper (and the produce, which was picked pretty clean last night). And they sold out again before closing at midnight.

And then, more trucks came in, and restocked the paper products overnight – and what I saw was what had gone out the door between opening and 8 AM.  she chuckled recalling that they were 50 people in line to get in when the store opened at 7 AM.

So the good news is, apparently, the supply chain is working as well as it can. And if you own Target stock, you are going to be very happy next quarter.

In fact, I noticed a few tweets like this from young “socialist” fops over the past few days:

 

I tried to ask Mr. Ackerman if stores in Venezuela were upstocking several times a day between bouts of empty shelves. For some reason – dare I say, “unexpectedly” – I haven’t heard back.

The bad news? There are a lot of panicky ninnies out there.

16 thoughts on “Downstream End Of The Supply Chain

  1. Amid the general panic, I must have missed the part where it was revealed Kung Flu manufactured poop out of thin air. Imagine working in a muni water treatment plant, watching people heading home with 200 rolls of TP each.

    It occurs to me that this is a golden opportunity for street sh*tters to make some extra drinking money holding seminars on TP free pooping.

  2. I have a friend who tells me that Walmart will accept returns on toilet paper (unopened packages). So the cost of hoarding TP is zero.

  3. “So the cost of hoarding TP is zero.”

    Well, if you call the bloody nose you receive procuring it nothing, I guess so…

  4. On Sunday, the shelves in the bread aisle of Cub in White Bear Lake were empty, and all the peanut butter was gone except the generic. Fleet Farm in Oakdale was sold out of 9mm and .223 except the Russian stuff.

    What, exactly, are we preparing for, people?

  5. My daughter-in-law lived in the Carolinas for a spell. She saw the panic buying, water and toilet paper and bleach, and said, “That’s hurricane stuff. Why are Minnesotans buying that for the flu? Y’all are weird.”

    The CDC is saying hunker down for eight weeks, California is confining the elderly to their homes, but President Trump is telling people to ease up on the hoarding, it’ll pass. I wish I knew who to believe.

  6. Joe, the official South Carolina End Of The World© (heavy rain; Hurricane or God forbid 1/8″ of snow) panic buy is milk and bread.

  7. Pingback: In The Mailbox: 03.16.20 : The Other McCain

  8. They got married in Jacksonville, North Carolina. At the wedding dinner, they served Shrimp & Grits. I objected there was no such thing. I saw Forest Gump. I know the whole litany. Shrimp kebabs, shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo . . ..

    She gave me that Southren Woman look, you know the one I mean, and told me “That’s an Alabama movie. This here’s Carolina.” Shut me RIGHT up, I can tell you that.

  9. And by the way, Mitch, I don’t think you can call them “pickaninnies” nowadays. I’m pretty sure that’s Unacceptable.

  10. Just watched the governor put a pistol to the head of Minnesota restaurants and pull the trigger. Now I’m worried the same crap will happen in Florida. I don’t want to be having to catch my dinner on vacation. At least I bought trip insurance. With all the talk of flattening the curve, seems like just as many people will get sick. Yeah, I know the optimistic models say no, but it’s all in the inputs. I’d rather take my chances now. Welcome to the People’s Republic!

  11. With all the talk of flattening the curve, seems like just as many people will get sick.

    That is my interpretation as well. It sounds tho’ as if you don’t think that “flattening the curve” is a good policy. Could you expand on this?

  12. I had the ordinary flu back in early February. Kicked it in three miserable days, as usual. Then today I was driving into town and got a bad headache. I was sure it was covid-19, so when I stopped for gas, I applied purell to my hands. Then the headache went away, a MIRACLE! So I guess my headache came from the guy who is replacing the floor on my downstairs bathroom telling me that I needed a carpenter to fix some stuff before he could put the new floor down, and the carpenter is busy until the weekend.
    I am a little disappointed .

  13. I won’t speak for golfdoc, but I have concerns about the current methods of implementing the policy, too.

    If 50 people in Thief River Falls have it but nobody else, throw a quarantine around the town. Everybody in town gets it, some severely, a couple die, but in two weeks, it burns itself out. Containment. That’s what the travel ban was trying to do – keep it away from the rest of us.

    Too late – it’s already here. Everybody is going to get it. The question is whether we all get it at once (a spike in the numbers) which will swamp the hospitals, or whether we get it over a longer period of time (a flatter curve in the number graph) so the hospitals stay busy but not swamped. That’s flattening the curve. In theory, the policy makes sense.

    How do we do that? We delay people getting the virus. We slow the spread. We close the schools, shopping malls, concerts – anywhere people gather, so one guy coughing doesn’t pass it to everybody in attendance and cause a spike in the numbers.

    For how long? That’s the big question.

    Look, I’m an old white man, I have white privilege which explains why I have money in the bank to weather this storm (I didn’t earn it, it was all given to me by racist society and slavery and stuff). Fine, but what about the Usual Example the media trots out – the undocumented single mother of color working as a waitress at Swans’ Café in Kimball? She’s one of the 40% of Americans who don’t have $500 for an emergency. How long can her family hold out? Oh, the employer will pay them? That guy isn’t making any money, either. A tax credit? The business won’t survive long enough to claim it, we have bills to pay. Suspend the bills – don’t have to pay your rent, insurance, taxes, gas, electric, water? How do those entities pay their bills?

    Right now, nanny-staters are in a game of one-up-man-ship, each trying to look more concerned than the next by imposing greater burdens than the next, all holding up the fear of DEATH as a shield to deflect questions about the soundness of the policy. The overall concept sounds good but then, it always does. What about the details? One city has a night curfew, 8pm to 5am. Another wants to ban sales of guns. A third wants to confine people over 65 to their homes, against their will. Are these really necessary? And for how long?

    The Devil is always in the details. I’m questioning the details.

  14. Of course, idiot Walz can’t be one upped by other DemocRAT run states. He had multi millionaire foodies Andrew Zimmern and founder of Caribou Coffee and Punch Pizza millionaire John Puckett, along with a token female restaurant owner to support taking away the livelilhood of thousands of food industry workers. Oh, but we’ll give them unemployment with no waiting period and no penalties to the employers.

    I was going to go to the Perkins on 494 and France this morning to watch all of the older couples that go there for breakfast every morning, that didn’t hear the news and show up to find it closed. Should have been a fun sight. And, I was there yesterday morning for meeting and most of the customers in there around 7 a.m. were over 70.

  15. In a few weeks, when this has become yesterday’s news, I’m going to demand reparations from the DNC.

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