Back in late April/early May I was doing some travel and realized I had totally forgotten my 96 W charger for my work Macbook Pro at home. "Well," I thought, "no fun to spend my own cash on a new charger, but better than the disaster of losing capacity to work while traveling, guess I'll just pop into an Apple Store and pick one up."

They didn't have one. OK, I asked -- did they know anyone who did? "No clue, you might want to call Apple Support."

Doing so revealed that there were none of these available anywhere, and the schedule on which they were projected to be available was early July.

Fortunately, I had two fallbacks:

(1) I was traveling in metro LA, which meant that I could check craigslist or FB marketplace or whatever and maybe a handful of 15mm Angelinos would have something up for sale.

(2) The MBP charged via USB-C so presumably I could find anything that could deliver 96W or thereabouts and use it.

Option #1 panned out, but it was still a flashbulb moment for me indicating that we're not exactly in familiar territory economically. It isn't just consumption goods that are sometimes scarce, this was a key piece of equipment the lack of which might have interrupted my productive capacity entirely or forced the cost/adaptation of entirely new substitutes.