Shipments being decided by distributors that don't live anywhere near here rather than filling entire order placed by store management.
Early on there was a Reddit post by a store stock manager showing the chaos of his spreadsheet for tracking and such, and he included info that no store in his company was receiving everything ordered. Additionally they were specifically warned about padding order numbers to try to manipulate the computer system they used.
He needed the spreadsheet to see what could substitute for other items, and such. The computer didn’t have any features for that sort of analysis.
He mentioned that his own company in normal running mode would use not a warehouse but surrounding area store orders to cover single store shortages in regular times. So when every store has shortages, there’s no slack anywhere for a supply side whipsaw.
At that time he estimated it would take three months to return to normal without new upstream outages or massive production increases to backfill the initial numbers lost. And that was roughly two months ago, and both of those things naturally got worse.
It’s definitely not “just” a rural thing. His store was IMHO a “mid-sized” city suburban location.
“JIT” or “Just In Time” distribution driven by computers has been SOP for most supply chains for decades now, for better or worse. Trucks re-routed “in flight” even.
Unfortunately, I usually bookmark anything that useful or interesting on Reddit (because finding anything that interesting and useful there is quite rare! Ha...), but I didn’t on that one. Kinda wish I had to see if he followed up.
