Yup….
And the people working IN the stores are saying …’No Trucks’….
When they do arrive and the shelves are restocked?
They are cleaned out quickly…
People ARE hoarding….
And with empty shelves?
Stores are cutting back their hours…
Added to this is people are now staying home so their home food consumption increases vs eating out or children eating at schools…
The aisles and aisles of empty store shelves give the appearance that the United States, improbably and alarmingly, is running out of food.
But the nation’s biggest retailers, dairy farmers and meat producers say that isn’t so. The food supply chain, they say, remains intact and has been ramping up to meet the unprecedented stockpiling brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.
Even so, shoppers can most likely expect to see empty shelves intermittently, as the nation’s network of food producers, distributors and retailers are stretched as never before. Industries that are calibrated to supply consumers with just enough of what they need on a given day cannot keep up with a nationwide surge of relentless shopping fueled in large part by fear.
Food suppliers and retailers are now not only struggling to keep up with surging demand for canned soup and oat milk, they are battling a perception that the scary scenes at the grocery store reflect a fundamental breakdown.
“There is food being produced. There is food in warehouses,” said Julie Anna Potts, chief executive of the North American Meat Institute, a trade group for beef, pork and turkey packers and producers. “There is plenty of food in the country.”
“Our stores are getting stocked every day,” Ron Vachris, chief operating officer of Costco, said in an interview on Saturday. “Transportation is functioning, our suppliers are working around the clock and the flow of goods is strong.”
The National Chicken Council said it was not seeing any disruptions in production and noted that there were “ample surplus supplies of chicken in cold storage” — totaling more than 950 million pounds, according to government data.
Still, the fear is palpable. The more empty shelves people see, the more panic-buying ensues, the more food is out of stock.
The panicky buying is testing the food system’s capacity in the near term….