A few empty store shelves now in the UK

a reply to: Wide-Eyes

This link is pre-pingdemic.

While all of the world’s ports were impacted by COVID-19, new data from the container trading platform Container xChange says that post-Brexit trade disruption and ongoing congestion are now causing critical build-ups of containers at UK ports beyond the container availability issues experienced at Europe’s other large container ports.

An analysis of data on the platform for buying, selling, and leasing shipping containers, indicates that the situation has worsened since the beginning of 2021. The UK’s leading container terminals, Container xChange reports struggled to cope with the pandemic driven surge of imports last year which like most ports around the world resulted in lengthy delays for haulers and vessels and an excess of containers building up in ports.However, their analysis shows that since the UK departed the European Union on January 1 and started trading under a post-Brexit customs and regulatory regime, the container logjams at major ports have increased.
www.maritime-executive.com...

Q.E.D

a reply to: Uphill It is now Saturday, September 18, 2021, and here is what I have learned about global supply issues since I first created this post:

- about 10 days ago, a US news article reported that there is a major re-shuffling affecting many food supply chains. It's not about shortages, however, it's a re-alignment of the global food distribution industry in response to the shift among many families around the world to cooking more meals at home and eating in restaurants much less.

- for coffee drinkers, reporters have started saying that the long-range trend is for coffee prices to start going up, since some coffee varieties will not produce many beans during long heat waves and droughts. In Los Angeles, we just bought an 18-ounce package of ground Starbucks coffee for $12.89 US. That store (Smart&Final) offers close-to-wholesale prices. So if hot coffee becomes more pricey at your regional coffee shops, you may be able to brew more hot coffee at your home or your workplace. My family and I are not big coffee drinkers, but from now on we will keep one extra bag of ground coffee in a basement closet.

- on some mornings we stop at Starbucks to get tea, coffee, and some bagels. But they ran out of bagged green tea for quite a while, and on some days they had no bagels at all. I put the green tea shortage down to delayed container ships. The bagel problem could be due to continuing flour supply problems at the regional bakers that Starbucks uses. As of September 2021, they now always have some kind of bagels, I just have to be more flexible about what kinds of bagels I will eat ... *not* the end of the world. Most coffee shops now have some kind of green tea most of the time.

- for non-food items, we still have not bought a thermometer for at-home use, so we will have to shop for that later this month. I was thinking of looking at prices for pulse oximeters as well, until I saw an article on dirty little secrets of the manufacturers of those from The Economist magazine earlier this year; it turns out that pulse oximeters are accurate for men, but not women. Pulse oximeters are also quite inaccurate for people with darker skin tones ... it turns out that initial product testing was all on white people, and the product analyzes the pinkness of the skin, which is certainly not generalizable to the entire human population. The other reason that pulse oximeters often give inaccurate readings for women is that nail polish is usually opaque, so the machine cannot look thru the polish to see the pinkness of the flesh underneath.

- on the brighter side, my local natural food stores are stocking pumpkins and winter squashes a few weeks earlier this year, perhaps due to warmer weather this summer.

a reply to: Uphill

Typical under communism. I remember very vividly, images from the former Soviet Union . Long lines of people waiting in line for hours in front of empty shelves, for some meager supplies

a reply to: Wide-Eyes Wide eyes and everyone, most of the US meat shortages have been brief in 2021. The next time you see that meat items are out of stock at the grocery store, try a natural foods store. Most of those stores now carry high-grade meat items. At least that would be a fall-back source to keep in mind.