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Comment by dcolkitt | Hacker News Reader

> Everything I have looked for to stock up on from them due to the current conditions (alcohol wipes, nonperishable food, etc) is sold out.

Do you have any idea what the full industrial capacity of the American economy is? These type of basic items are all dead-simple to manufacture, and highly unlikely to run into supply-chain interruptions.

I guarantee you that once Americans get the full on prepping instinct out of their system, the inventories will all be replenished by next week at the latest. This isn't the collapse of industrial civilization. The factories are churning at 100% capacity.

People won't keep stockpiling six months of toilet paper every single week. There's virtually zero chance that there's any significant supply interruption beyond a few days.

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The toilet paper thing is bizarre.

We are a few weeks ahead of you here in Australia on the panic buying and toilet paper is one of the few things we actually produce here.

But it's still impossible to get in most places a few weeks after the panic buying first happened. People seem to buy it immediately on reflex, and people who didn't panic buy are beginning to panic search for it.

One factor is that toilet paper is a bulky item, which makes the logistics of shipping and storage tricky. But still! I'm very surprised at how fragile this (fairly simple) supply chain has proven.

Toilet paper hoarders: "Hold my burrito."

I wouldn't be so sure, there hasn't been a drop of hand sanitizer in any stores in the Vancouver area for at least a month.

If we move to a lockdown the factories are churning 0%.

>Supply Chain Expert Tells Tucker What Coming Shortages Americans Should Know About, And It’s Not Toilet Paper - Fox news had Daniel Stanton on over the weekend (link). Forget about toilet paper shortages, that'll pass. Worry instead about disinfecting wipes, hand sanitizers, the hospital masks. "We need more of those than what we would normally consume,” he said. “For those things, we need to be increasing capacity, maybe creating some new supply chains, and in a lot of cases, we are dependent on foreign manufacturing and long-distance transportation to get those supplies.” Stanton said the U.S. could experience an inability to make several products Americans “want to buy” in the coming weeks. Axios echoes this (link), pointing out that that some food producers could find themselves without enough employees to manufacture, deliver and unpack groceries. The U.S. imports a lot of food from China, where factories are currently closed — meaning a possible supply chain challenge. Phil Lempert, a California-based food industry analyst, told the Washington Post "We’re going to have two-, three-, four-month lag time until those factories get back up to speed.”

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/supplychain/comments/fjleyw/covid19...

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