For example, my understanding is that if everybody simply bought toilet paper at the rate they normally bought it there would have been no toilet paper shortage. Corrections welcome, of course, as if I even need to say that.
While there was never an overall TP ‘shortage’ there were distribution problems. Prior to lockdown, people used TP at the office, mall, etc as they were out and about. TP suppliers for businesses such as those were different from TP suppliers for home use. Business TP was generally supplied by delivery from warehouse stocks of business supply locations.
So when folks were suddenly at home all the time, the use of the home product rose rapidly, supplies of the home product at local grocers were used up far more quickly than expected, and there was no mechanism to divert business TP stocks to retail TP stocks. And whose home bathroom is set up to accomodate those giant rolls of 1 ply anyway? ;-D
I think there are tons, and ongoing.
The computer chip shortage has been widely reported, and is likely to continue for some time. It’s hitting big players in the auto industry, and while I’m sure there are some manufacturers who have more than they need stockpiled, the nature of computer chips is such that it’s unlikely to make sense to pre-buy more than a few years of capacity in most industries. There simply aren’t enough as demand has increased.
Bicycles are in extremely short supply. Many models are back-ordered for 6 months or more. I went into a bike shop the other day and asked about a gravel bike. The guy pointed to an empty rack that could hold a dozen bikes and said “that’s where they’d be if we had any. We expect to get about 20 in the next month. They’re all pre-sold”.
Good luck buying a video card at anything approaching twice what they were selling for 2 years ago. Etc.
Sure. There were plenty of hogs and cattle being raised by farmers–but meat packing plants were either closed or operating at reduced capacity because so many workers caught Covid–thus the shortage of pork and beef and high prices. A similar loss of workers because of Covid caused many other shortages.
Apparently the entire US decide to do home remodeling at the same time as it took me over a year to get the Induction Range that I wanted. This seemed true of other large appliances as well.
We had a hard time buying furniture because people at home all the time decided they wanted to remodel or expand. Also, bicycles were (are?) on a huge backorder because people working from home all the time wanted to ride around, I guess. My dad tried to buy a couple of bikes early last summer and was told that he would be lucky if he got them by the fall.
I don’t think either one of those was fear of a shortage.
On the toilet paper front, there are apparently two distinct supply chains, one for home use and one for commercial use – even for regular-sized commercial toilet paper, they were sold through specific distributors (who didn’t work with retail stores) in pallet-sized quantities. During the height of the pandemic, one local deli was giving away free rolls of TP with food purchases of a certain size.
There were brief, minor shortages of certain baking supplies that, as I understand it, weren’t due to panic-buying, but rather quarantined people at home deciding to do some baking to pass the time. Rarely has so much active dry yeast been so sought-after!
That’s got to be some sort of production disruption; as I understand it there’s not a lot of overlap between chips meant for automotive applications and chips for PC/IT type uses. Yet both are being impacted by shortages, etc…
And video cards are going for about 3x what they used to cost… if you can find one. I got REALLY lucky and bought/set up an entirely new rig in late January/early February 2020, complete with a Sapphire Pulse Radeon 5600XT for the princely sum of $289. These days they go for upwards of $900 when they’re in stock at all. And that’s for a squarely mid-range GPU.
Like many of the shortages, it was a shortage in packaging rather than product. There was never a yeast shortage, after all, yeast makes itself. You could continue to buy the 1lb blocks of yeast that commercial bakeries use. What was in short supply were the tiny sachets that were used to package single servings of yeast and the machines that could pack yeast into the sachets.
Similarly, There were reports of farmers having to pour eggs and milk down the drain for a lack of supply of cardboard egg cartons and PET bottles.
We got two puppies in April but applied to three places. The other two never responded, I guess because they had none to re-home. Suddenly a lot of people must have thought they needed companionship…
A small amount, but it’s largely a demand increase, not a supply shortfall. Think about how many people and companies upgraded their computers and other equipment to work from home, how many people spent a bit more money on video game systems instead of going out to eat, etc. Purchasing behavior shifted and the existing supply couldn’t respond quickly enough.
Bikes are the same story. People who live in cities bought bikes because they didn’t want to take public transit. People who live outside of cities bought bikes because biking is a fun thing you can do outside and a lot of the fun things you can do inside were cancelled or unsafe.
The video card thing is related to both silicon production and cryptocurrency speculation. All of these are because people are buying more of stuff, but the ones I’ve mentioned (and many others) people are overbuying for real use, not due to fear of possible shortages.
Sure
Is there a demand increase for automotive chips though? They’re not the same thing that are used in your typical laptop or PC. That’s the one that has me a bit perplexed. I totally get why PC stuff would be in short supply, but not things like automotive chips or embedded system components.
Lots of folks wanted Maine Coon kittens. I was thinking about getting one before the world ended and the average price was 800.00. Now its 2400.00 and I’ve heard its the same with other breeds/species.
Yes, there was both an absolute increase in demand for cars but, more importantly, an increase in demand relative to expectations. Early in the pandemic, major companies expected a cratering of demand as the economy shut down so car companies slashed orders with suppliers in order to preserve free cash. Instead, the lack of spending on experiences coupled with massive amounts of stimulus meant that consumers funneled their money into things and especially cars as more people moved to the suburbs/avoided public transit.
By the time car companies realized it, the slots they had were already sold to other customers and they faced shortages of key components enabling them to ramp up supply.
The same thing happened with lumber, sawmills expected a drop in demand for building supplies and furloughed workers but instead, everyone started renovating their homes and cleared out all of the excess inventory of lumber.
It happens all the time in seasonal products, people know about they flow of them and plan around it. Yes some people stock up, but that’s already a known quantity.
Another one is lobsters, There are shortages at times and surpluses, price adjusts and as long as it isn’t during lent (which gets extra supply generally due to the higher demand) it goes just fine, people don’t stock up and they really can’t with lobster because of the limited ‘shelf’ life.
I love my black tea, and drink a lot of it. I cut the regular tea with decaf to keep my caffeine consumption down. I’ve developed quite a tea habit, and have gotten snobby as to the quality of stuff I drink. I like to order high grade loose-leaf black tea online, preferably Assam from India.
It has been a regular bitch trying to purchase a quality loose-leaf decaf black tea online. For several months there I just couldn’t find any, search though I might. I knew the pandemic had something to do with it, but this article describes in depth just how hard the tea industry in India was hit. It was a perfect storm of disruption, from the people picking at the plantations, through trucking and distribution.
Yesterday I finally found the loose-leaf decaf I wanted through Amazon. But it was $62 for a pound!
The exact answer to this question is resisting an easy googling because you’re right, PCs and cars use different chips. The most obvious difference is that car chips are apparently just now getting to 32-bit while PC chips have been 64-bit for years.
Reading between the lines, based on the following article and others like it, I think the the issue is that the same manufacturing plants make both types of chips, and can only manufacture one at a time. That seems like a weird, unsatisfactory answer that can’t possibly be true, though, so maybe somebody else has more insight.
It seems weird to me that the same factory line would produce Toyota’s car chips as produce the chips for smartphones, cutting edge video cards, etc… That seems really inefficient but I’m a fully ignorant layperson.
You’re not kidding. Just this past week I bought a brand new 1050 ti for $370 including tax and shipping. The 1050 Ti was released in 2016 with an MSRP of $139. FIVE years ago!
The model I bought usually is marked up compared to MSRP so figure this exact model probably cost around $160, but again, this was back in 2016 when it was a brand new budget model card. And I just paid over double that in 2021.
You remember the lockdowns, with all non-essential workers staying at home? Well, all of those folks were doing something, and when they were staying at home, those things were going undone. So every product that’s considered “non-essential” was in short supply.
Now, for some of those things, there was also a decrease in demand, so it didn’t matter as much. But for others, there wasn’t.
Yeah. I lost my dog Duncan not too long ago. Cavalier King Charles spaniels were pretty expensive to begin. COVID seems to have caused a number of breeders to retire for some reason and demand has gone up. I finally found a breeder that has dogs that are breeding but they have a waiting list and puppies are starting at $5000 (to compare Duncan was $1500 ten years ago).
Bicycles are suddenly also a practical, safe form of transportation for those who are avoiding public transit because of infection risk. And you don’t have to pay to park them, either.