Irony

[Hook]

I haven't verified this, but my wife just told me...

This morning at about 4 AM in Dallas a big rig had an accident, caught on fire and burned up.

It was carrying toilet paper.



Hook

[Lewis - A2A]

LOL,

not sure about everyone else but here shops are all stocked up as normal again.

[CAPFlyer]

Most of the US is still taking time to get restocked. Don't know about Canada (who had a rush too)

Interesting note here - many of our "staple products" in North America are produced on a Just-In-Time schedule now. Things like paper products (including paper towels) are used as such a well established rate, that many of the manufacturers have gone to Just-In-Time production and delivery processes. This means that they might have a few days of extra production at any time in a warehouse in case of an unexpected shutdown of production, but nowhere near the amount of back-stock needed to fix the issue caused by us. That also means that adding a surge in capacity is difficult as well, so because people are idiots, it might be several months in North America before things are back to normal for supply of many of the staples since there's not the excess production capacity available to fix it.

Also, I'm not saying that Europe or the rest of the world haven't done the same, but in Europe the production is much more direct since the plants often serve a much smaller physical area (due to legacy national production schemes), making it easier for a small surge in production to be used to help fill the shelves of areas that are harder hit.

[dvm]

Most of the US is still taking time to get restocked. Don't know about Canada (who had a rush too)

Interesting note here - many of our "staple products" in North America are produced on a Just-In-Time schedule now. Things like paper products (including paper towels) are used as such a well established rate, that many of the manufacturers have gone to Just-In-Time production and delivery processes. This means that they might have a few days of extra production at any time in a warehouse in case of an unexpected shutdown of production, but nowhere near the amount of back-stock needed to fix the issue caused by us. That also means that adding a surge in capacity is difficult as well, so because people are idiots, it might be several months in North America before things are back to normal for supply of many of the staples since there's not the excess production capacity available to fix it.

Also, I'm not saying that Europe or the rest of the world haven't done the same, but in Europe the production is much more direct since the plants often serve a much smaller physical area (due to legacy national production schemes), making it easier for a small surge in production to be used to help fill the shelves of areas that are harder hit.

Another interesting fact is that commercial and consumer TP are two distinct products and with more people staying at home instead of going to work the retail product demand has increased and without any potential for increase in production there will be a shortage for quite some time. Here is an interesting article on the subject.

https://marker.medium.com/what-everyone ... 12e1358fe0