I was just thinking the other day that I’m a bit sorry I just threw my old Radeon R9 380X in the garbage when I set up my new rig.
How often do you get the chance to have used a video card hard for five years, THEN sell it for more tha you bought it for ($199)?
That “shortage” would have taken months to roll out, though. You aren’t going to use 10x the TP at home just because you’re there more often. TP was gone from the shelves two days after this all started.
TP was hoarded because it’s an easy hoard. It’s light and easy to carry a whole bunch out of the store. Everyone uses TP, look I can buy a whole bunch easily, I get lots of hoardy feel goods from buying so much. Plus it takes up a lot of visible shelf space, everyone can see it’s gone right away. That’s all that was.
Chip fabs are incredibly expensive and there are relatively few of them. And as long as the silicon layer is the same, changing the actual chip that’s manufactured is a much smaller change than the rest of it.
Obviously, this is oversimplifying a lot, but think of screen printing a t-shirt. It’s pretty easy to change the image that goes on a given shirt. Easier, in fact, than changing the material of the shirt or how long the sleeves are. To change those physical characteristics, you have to reconfigure large machines. To change the image, just change out a printing mask and some ink.
As iamthewalrus pointed out, the semiconductor chip shortage is very real indeed. There was/is immense demand for PCs, telecommunications, videoconferencing gear during the pandemic, and chip-making foundries take years to build - they are among the most complex and expensive private facilities ever made (a state-of-the-art 3-nanometer chip fab can cost $20 billion.) There was no way that chipmaking capacity could be suddenly scaled up to meet demand.
There was a shortage of canning lids. It seems to be easing now, but some on the Facebook canning group still say that lids are hard to come by in their neck of the woods.
It was pretty much a case of increased demand – people staying at home decided to can some of their garden produce. The stories I heard of people buying lots of lids didn’t seem to be due to hoarding, but the amount they usually use in a canning season. It’s not that uncommon for a canner to put up 1000 jars in a season.
Having said that, I bought a few more boxes than I normally would when I found some online that were reasonably priced. I still have about 3 boxes (36 lids).
I would have been perfectly happy with a giant roll of business stock 1-ply during the worst of the TP crisis. 
My impression is that the supply chain for all kinds of home improvement items is still all screwed up and impacted by supply issues. Lumber prices are coming down now, but major home appliances are limited, and I’m pretty sure it’s not because people are buying a few dishwashers to stock up. It’s because a lot more people installed new dishwashers and used up all the regular supply.
One of our neighbors was talking to us just the other day about how he has several issues that need to be fixed around his house and in addition to contractors booking far out because they have a lot of work right now, they’ve told him that many parts are hard to come by, so he should be prepared for them to come out, find the problem, and still not be able to fix it for weeks or months. Again, I don’t think that people are stocking up on plumbing supplies. A lot of people bought more plumbing supplies because they were fixing/extending their plumbing in the last year.
Here’s a recent thread over in MPSIMS about hobby equipment shortages:
I’m in the market for a new smartphone one of these days, but a lot of models seem to be out of stock. I assume it’s a consequence of the chip shortage.
I’m sure there were all different reasons for shortages for different products - but I’m also sure a lot of them intersected with each other. I had to wait a long time for my kitchen cabinets - sure, the places involved with manufacturing them probably had less production due to people being sick with COVID. And that may have affected shipping them as well. But another factor was the reason I was replacing my cabinets. I hadn’t planned to pre-COVID. Maybe I would have at some point, but I wasn’t planning it in Feb 2020. So why did I ? Because I suddenly had a lot of money. I didn’t actually make money because of COVID - in fact my husband took a pay cut. But for months, we didn’t go on vacations or out to eat, my husband didn’t bowl in leagues or tournaments, we didn’t go to the casino. My household wasn’t the only one in that position and I’m sure we weren’t the only ones replacing/renovating because our spending suddenly dropped. So you have decreased supply and increased demand - shortages will happen even without any hoarding.
Some of the “food shortages” were due to the same thing - the commercial supply chain vs. the general public supply chain.
This local incident didn’t help.
Yes, i bought a pound of yeast (and a 50 pound sack of flour) and we baked our way through both of those. Neither was expensive. I also found that one of my toilet paper holders DOES hold a large, commercial roll, and i bought a case of them. I rather like the quality of the brand, and decided to stick with it. (Something from Georgia Pacific.)
I understand the shortage of paper towels was real, though. Consumers used many more of them than usual, doing extra surface cleaning. And apparently the machines to make them are large, expensive, and companies had been reducing excess so as not to have to store bulky products and increase their expense margin.
Huh, interesting. I was worried about my tea, but never had any trouble getting it. But I’ve been mostly buying Chinese (Yunnan) black tea, not Indian tea.
I was able to order and receive a Majano Wand last week. It seems that recovery is beginning.
The main reason that we’re seeing shortages is that we had a single event that massively changed buying habits, combined with a bit of a dip in supply. What normally happens is that businesses forecast demand and have things in position to be able to take advantage of the changes in consumer habits that happen over time. Big businesses do this successfully in general or else they wouldn’t become big businesses or stay big businesses for very long, but they can’t do it without lead time. You can’t just create a whole new assembly line in a month. You have to locate real estate that has enough locally sourced workers, get plans drawn up for the building and the assembly line, source the materials to build the assembly line, etc.
If someone had said in the summer of 2019 that there was going to be a natural disaster that would cause X, Y, and Z, then maybe tuned-in businesses could have been ready, but we were all taken by surprise by how quickly things changed. Maybe someone who had read the reports out of Wuhan in early January could have predicted it, but they’d be unlikely to be able to see just how wide-ranging the effects would be, and if they were psychic, they’d have trouble convincing others involved that they needed to get production of certain things ramped up as soon as possible given that the economy was clearly reaching the end of an expansion.