Pursuing the Polio idea–this was pandemic Lite. Imagine Ebola with a 2 month gestation period. We have hamstrung our public health response to such a great extent because of the complaints of people like the OP that we are absolutely fucked if a REAL pandemic comes along. My state (MT) has made public health officials subordinate to the local politicos. Florida is far far worse. When hemorrhagic fever comes to your neighborhood, going to still head to the bar?
Yup, after all, you don’t know anyone who has died, yet.
Sorry. The link to facebook didn’t work.
Jay Jay Phillips from Americas Got Talent.
I knew him enough to say hi when I saw him.
No, it had nothing to do with supply chain disruption. It was hoarders. The TP and basically nothing was gone from stores immediately when Covid started becoming a thing.
I have explained this before. TP is simply an easy, feel good hoard. It takes up a lot of shelf space, but is easy to pick up and have a whole cartful that you can take to your home and feel so good about hoarding. It’s not going to go bad, either. It’s not especially useful, food is far more important than TP, why don’t people hoard food. Because the hoarding at that point is not terribly serious.
Not especially useful?
So you DID know someone who didn’t get vaccinated and got Covid. In fact, he died from it.
I’ll be frank. I don’t understand where you’re coming from. You don’t know anyone who didn’t get vaccinated who got Covid, except you know someone who refused vaccination and died from it. You got vaccinated (though you never said against Covid), and it kept you from getting seriously ill, yet you believe in conspiracy theories.
Maybe you could take a little time and try to clearly express your views, citing sources as necessary.
I got the 2 Moderna shots in 2021.
In addition to the well-attested hoarding behavior …
A part of the TP thing was/is that there is 1 set of factories producing 2 product lines: the small rolls for home use and the mongo rolls for the big dispensers in public and commercial restrooms.
Across the whole of America in any given month a lot of TP gets used in offices, restaurants, airports, etc. Until suddenly that demand collapsed when we all stayed home for COVID.
Just as much pooping was happening, just in different places. Vast mountains of industrial sized TP rolls accumulated while home size couldn’t be found.
A similar thing happened with paper towels.
I never carry much backstock of anything. It’s the stores’ job to hold backstock, not mine. Pretty early in COVID I couldn’t get ordinary rolled paper towels.
Amazon had the sort of fanfold paper towels that fit every dispenser in every public restroom in America on super giveaway; they were drowning in the stuff after all the momnpop restaurants and offices quit buying. As did the big outfits too.
So I bought a case of fanfold towels for my kitchen use for $not much. I wasn’t trying to hoard, but a case was the smallest package they had. Took wife & I 13 months to use that case up. By which time the ordinary consumer rolled paper towel supplies had long ago normalized.
Bottom line: US TP and paper towel production and distribution never faltered. It was consumer panic buying, folks buying vast quantities planning to profiteer by private party Amazon reselling, and the mismatch in production vs consumption between home vs institutional product lines that caused the problem.
Well TP won’t be important long if you’re not eating. Just sayin’
We’re still using those up. We didn’t hoard any toilet paper, to our detriment as soon none was to be found. Wound up with crummy weird Chinese rolls ordered from Amazon. As soon as we could get better paper, we donated them.
Ooh, I was breathlessly racing through the end of this thread to say the thing about the demand for TP shifting from businesses to homes, but @LSLGuy got there first!
We had a restaurant in town that sold their stock of TP and paper towels (drive-through, in their parking lot) during the period when they were shut down for dining, which I thought was very smart. Not that it replaced the income, but it was at least something until delivery really ramped up.
For a brief time in mid-2020, I thought it might just be possible that our culture would permanently change enough to make it possible for people to stay home and take care of their health and that of their colleagues when they were sick. Funny that someone as old as me could be that naive, huh?
As long as people get paid to stay home when sick they will stay home. And not a moment after that.
Had Congress seen fit to mandate fully paid sick leave that is not a deduction from vacation or “personal time” for all employees, part and full time, we’d be seeing responsible behavior from everyone.
Oh, someone would find a way to screw that up for everyone.
You’re not wrong, since there was definitely a lot of hoarding going on. But there were definitely other factors, too. @LSLGuy brought up a really important one about the change in usage from commercial type TP to the home type, reflected in the article below. And there’s certainly no question that there were massive supply chain disruptions – I mean, among all those people staying home and using domestic type TP rolls, certainly some were workers in the plants producing it, truck drivers delivering it, and workers in other related activities in the supply chain. There were, after all, supply chain disruptions absolutely everywhere. And when shortages did start to happen, stores tried to control it by putting limits on purchase quantities.
On the inverse side of the demand-shifting-from-business-to-home-use coin, there was a few weeks at the beginning of the panic when the only flour we could get in stock at the store I worked at was 20 lb. bags marked “FOR HOTEL USE ONLY”.
I bought a 50lb bag of flour from a restaurant that was selling ingredients to the public. I used it all, too.
It actually DID change where i worked. I worked the sort of office job that you can easily do from home, and before the pandemic, many people worked from home when they were a little sick, but many people didn’t. The culture changed, and it became rude (rather than strong) to haul your sniffly ass into the office.
Of course, there are lots of jobs you can’t do from home…
I’ve never been tested but in 2020, after 2 COVID vacs and a booster - I suffered heart failure! I’ll never get another COVID vaccine. Screw Fauci!!
This might help you understand what transpired.
Did you forget a /s tag?
I’ve had all the covid vacs – while having a heart condition. It was strongly recommended, including by the cardiologist.