Supply Chain Breakdown and Inflation

[temporal1]

Hubby and I usually don't frequent expensive places, but yesterday I broke that rule and went to the gas station.
Last year it cost between $30 and 35$ to fill the gas tank on our VW Jetta. Yesterday it cost almost $50.

After that I went to the grocery store (fast becoming another expensive place) and many of the frozen vegetable shelves were empty. Thankfully I have some vegetables from our small garden.

However I am thankful and grateful, as there are many people around the world who have so little. I fear many of us have been molly coddled and feel entitled to an abundance of goods, rich foods, etc.at our finger tips.

This is my experience, AND, with heating fuel costs doubling, i don’t have to leave my house to “frequent expensive places,”
my natural gas bills have already doubled. i fear a miserable winter ahead, people will suffer.

Another thing. About poorly stocked grocery shelves.
i’m sure watching the local Walmart, they have many self-checkout stations, AND they are pushing online orders for pickup or delivery. when i asked one clerk about a missing item, he told me they HAVE plenty of that item - RESERVED for online customers.

my area has so many empty brick+mortar buildings, i wonder if this is where Walmart is headed? - to compete with Amazon.

strange, isn’t it? Walmart was hated for pushing so many businesses out, are they next??
also strange - hourly pay has never been higher, yet so many refuse to work, it’s causing widespread service problems.

we are living in a cauldron of incompetence married to corruption. the worse it gets, the more people clamor for the incompetent and corrupt to fix it. “as-if.”

another note:
prior to the Wuhan virus, all predictions were that CDL drivers would soon be history as a career. hmm.
i’ve never seen so many semis on highways as there now are.

Just noticed this on Page 1:

Our stores vary.
Sometimes shelves are empty and other times they aren't and never the same shelves empty.
From what I have been hearing it is also lack of labor to stock shelves and stores like Walmart are catering to the online folks and so just keep supply back in storage. So it's a big combo of things.

Gas prices are up and food prices.
I keep things stocked up at home but I did that before covid as I can't or won't just run to a store for an item needed any day of the week but shop once a week. 10-12 miles to nearest stores which isn't that far but gas adds up so we minimize trips.

[mike]

My daughter worked the past summer at our local Safeway grocery between graduating HS and going to college so it wasn’t a permanent job and she had total flexibility of scheduling. It was her first real job other than babysitting and teaching piano lessons so she didn’t know better. And they paid $15/hr so not bad. But what I noted was the ridiculous and unpredictable scheduling. They used some sort of scheduling software and her hours were automatically limited to 30-35 per week even though she could have easily and happily worked 50 if given the opportunity. But the most egregious issue was the seemingly random scheduling. The place was open from 6 am to 11 pm and she would get shifts randomly assigned, sometimes early mornings, sometimes closing, and on random days. I don’t know how someone who needs to arrange child care, wants to have a family life with their kids, and/or work a second job can actually work under these conditions. They refuse to give you a full time job with benefits, but at the same time demand that you are basically on-call 15 hours/day 7 days/week. And then in service jobs you have to deal with increasingly rude and aggressive customers.

It doesn’t surprise me that these sorts of employers have a hard time attracting and keeping employees. It isn’t just the base wage, it’s the working conditions. The first thing they need to do is throw out these profit-maximizing scheduling software programs and give people stable shifts and full time jobs. I think the pandemic is revealing some of these trends that have been longstanding frankly. My daughter would have been happy to work more and earn more but the corporate software prevented that. Yet they constantly were whining about not having enough workers.

I love giving people stable schedules/regular shifts; we have a much bigger problem with employees who just can't seem to work regular schedules. We have a constant issue in particular with our single mom employees who constantly have to arrange and rearrange their work schedules to fit childcare, school, doctor visits, sicknesses, court-ordered parental visits, and other things. It makes my scheduler tear her hair out. I really feel badly for working single moms. So much is stacked against them. Mothers with young children should not be in their position.

[temporal1]

mike:
I love giving people stable schedules/regular shifts; we have a much bigger problem with employees who just can't seem to work regular schedules. We have a constant issue in particular with our single mom employees who constantly have to arrange and rearrange their work schedules to fit childcare, school, doctor visits, sicknesses, court-ordered parental visits, and other things. It makes my scheduler tear her hair out. I really feel badly for working single moms. So much is stacked against them.

Mothers with young children should not be in their position.

Careful. The big push is for gov to take over childcare, from birth. Not acceptable.

When our children were young, we were pretty broke, i was grateful it did NOT pay for me to work outside the home!
Money was tight, but i preferred to live on a tight budget at home with the children, rather than live on a tight budget with them in childcare all day everyday. i hate to think i might have felt obligated to work outside the home, if it seemed more profitable.

Be careful what you wish for. i wish for fathers to be present and providing, even if budgets are tight.
What “policies” are there to encourage fathers to be present in their homes to provide for their families??

Free-cheap childcare for single mothers does not accomplish this.

[mike]

What I'm seeing in the food business is that there isn't a shortage of food. But there are shortages of specific items from specific vendors who obviously have supply and/or labor issues. The candy shelves in my store look like we're going out of business. But there is plenty of supply of most things. Some categories and some specific items and some specific manufacturers have issues.

[mike]

mike:
I love giving people stable schedules/regular shifts; we have a much bigger problem with employees who just can't seem to work regular schedules. We have a constant issue in particular with our single mom employees who constantly have to arrange and rearrange their work schedules to fit childcare, school, doctor visits, sicknesses, court-ordered parental visits, and other things. It makes my scheduler tear her hair out. I really feel badly for working single moms. So much is stacked against them.

Mothers with young children should not be in their position.

Careful. The big push is for gov to take over childcare, from birth. Not acceptable.

When our children were young, we were pretty broke, i was grateful it did NOT pay for me to work outside the home!
Money was tight, but i preferred to live on a tight budget at home with the children, rather than live on a tight budget with them in childcare all day everyday. i hate to think i might have felt obligated to work outside the home, if it seemed more profitable.

Be careful what you wish for. i wish for fathers to be present and providing, even if budgets are tight.
What “policies” are there to encourage fathers to be present in their homes to provide for their families??

Free-cheap childcare for single mothers does not accomplish this.

I made no comment to the effect that the government should be doing something about this societal problem. All I said is that it should not be this way.

[Josh]

If you don’t have enough crane operators, demanding they work 24/6 doesn’t seem like a good idea to improve employee morale. Rather seems like a way to get a bunch to quit or go on strike.

I don’t see how the government can just “order” them to work; they aren’t government employees, and aren’t doing some kind of essential safety activity like air traffic control.

If we need more port workers, then we need:
- better pay
- better working conditions
- better hours
- more job security

Making any of those things worse means fewer workers.

[Ken]

If you don’t have enough crane operators, demanding they work 24/6 doesn’t seem like a good idea to improve employee morale. Rather seems like a way to get a bunch to quit or go on strike.

I don’t see how the government can just “order” them to work; they aren’t government employees, and aren’t doing some kind of essential safety activity like air traffic control.

If we need more port workers, then we need:
- better pay
- better working conditions
- better hours
- more job security

Making any of those things worse means fewer workers.

I don’t think the current logjams are primarily due to the lack of enough longshoremen, who are indeed very well compensated. If you read current coverage of the big ports around the country they are overflowing in containers right now as there aren’t enough truck drivers to haul them all away. And a lot of companies like Wal-Mart are essentially using the ports as free warehousing by slow-walking their trucking fleets, or simply not hiring enough.

Here is a recent NYT article about the container backlog at US ports. They have pictures of the port of Savannah where there are 50% more containers than normal stacked in the yards because trucks aren’t hauling them away fast enough: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/11/busi ... ticleShare

Better pay, working conditions, hours, and job security for truck drivers is probably the more important long-term solution to breaking loose this logjam. But the big retail corporations are loath to pay the money required to ramp up their truck fleets which would mean hundreds of millions of new dollars invested in both new truck drivers and new trucks. And that itself is also problematic because new trucks are as hard to buy as new cars right now for all the same reasons.

[temporal1]

mike:
I love giving people stable schedules/regular shifts; we have a much bigger problem with employees who just can't seem to work regular schedules. We have a constant issue in particular with our single mom employees who constantly have to arrange and rearrange their work schedules to fit childcare, school, doctor visits, sicknesses, court-ordered parental visits, and other things. It makes my scheduler tear her hair out. I really feel badly for working single moms. So much is stacked against them.

Mothers with young children should not be in their position.

Careful. The big push is for gov to take over childcare, from birth. Not acceptable.

When our children were young, we were pretty broke, i was grateful it did NOT pay for me to work outside the home!
Money was tight, but i preferred to live on a tight budget at home with the children, rather than live on a tight budget with them in childcare all day everyday. i hate to think i might have felt obligated to work outside the home, if it seemed more profitable.

Be careful what you wish for. i wish for fathers to be present and providing, even if budgets are tight.
What “policies” are there to encourage fathers to be present in their homes to provide for their families??

Free-cheap childcare for single mothers does not accomplish this.

I made no comment to the effect that the government should be doing something about this societal problem.
All I said is that it should not be this way.

i did not intend to imply you did. i would not presume that, at all.

The problem being, in our overly+overtly politicized world, the immediate leap is to the present big push for gov to provide/subsidize child care, from birth on. Are you aware? (In Illinois, like abortion for all, it’s viewed as beyond debate.)

I’ve read, and learned in my family, during the Depression, jobs were scarce. women were somewhat criticized for working outside their homes, on basis they were taking a job that might have gone to a man with a family. men were humiliated if they did not have a job, they were known to get dressed for work, and leave the house, as if they had jobs - for appearances. it was part of their self-worth.

it seems many folks recognize some policies enacted with good intentions, have backfired, damaging family units.
i see gov funded childcare as adding to these now existing problems, not helping to find healthy solutions.

i empathize with your store’s scheduling problems.
“what if” your employees were married men with families, wherein their wives+mothers of their children were dependents,
allowing the wives+mothers to do the vital, necessary work of marriage+family, which supports their husbands to be at work, with typical obligations of work hours? no 1 person can do both jobs of being mother+father. there are always shortfalls. it can’t always be avoided! (it should not be normalized.) gov funding normalizes what should be exceptional.

imho, our culture does not value the reality that being a wife+mother IS A REAL JOB, it’s not a job “anyone” can do. and it’s not a job that can be done very well while employed full time elsewhere. women+children are not valued as they should be. our culture pretends this (more-than full-time) JOB does not actually have requirements to be completed.

i have thought about this for 40+ years. i have no magic wand.
i would prefer taxes go to support, or at least encourage, mothers+fathers keep their precious children home, keep fathers present to provide and guide their families, remove these unbearable burdens from single mothers and their children. give men the sense of purpose they need.

incentives should be to encourage traditional families, not tear them apart.

it would be super if failed policies could be identified+corrected; not the routine, normalized+expanded.

[RZehr]

If you don’t have enough crane operators, demanding they work 24/6 doesn’t seem like a good idea to improve employee morale. Rather seems like a way to get a bunch to quit or go on strike.

I don’t see how the government can just “order” them to work; they aren’t government employees, and aren’t doing some kind of essential safety activity like air traffic control.

If we need more port workers, then we need:
- better pay
- better working conditions
- better hours
- more job security

Making any of those things worse means fewer workers.

None of your listed things are applicable to the crane operators. They can make up to $250,000 per year. They take 2 hour lunches. They work whenever they feel like it, and don’t work when they don’t want to. They have about as much job security as anyone possibly could have. And they work in climate control cabs.

I’ve personally driven truck into the ports and hauled containers in and out, and waited on their fickle, self centered ridiculousness.

[Josh]

The answer isn’t a race to the bottom.

Personally I think we are all better off when global trade is harder.