I made a similar observation in april 2020. everyone was saying that covid was exposing the inherent fragility of JIT shipping or even the entire system of capitalism. in reality, the worst that happened was toilet paper was out of stock for a few weeks and I had to settle for my second-favorite shape of pasta a couple times.
If you were into board games, you'd probably have felt it. Just about every board game release and reprint has had (and are still having) significant delays thanks to the pandemic.
This is the point though, having plenty of slack in the economy (board games, theme parks, etc) means that we would have to fall a long way before people started feeling hungry.
The number of homeless people I see in the streets has visibility doubled, but I'm sure the marginal availability of board games is a sign they aren't feeling any hungrier than usual.
Folks are also hording these for secondary market resell. Margins are good and a resellers can easily eat half the stock or more for secondary markets.
Well, I have been trying to find zero-drop trail shoes for almost a year now. The shops just don't have my size anymore. Shop owners tell me the logistic chain has been pretty impacted indeed.
The secondary market for shoes sweeps up all stock and resells. It’s gotten insanely competitive and bots are one-upping other bots for speed. If you want a desirable shoe just go ebay or stockx. You can’t compete as a manual buyer
there are some very specific items I am still having trouble finding. close substitutes are available, but I'm willing to wait for the exact thing I want. looks like the picture of graceful degradation to me.
The weakness of capitalism doesn't need to be exposed, it needs to be acknowledged. And since it's a system that is very profitable for a lot of very powerful people, it's going to take more than a simple pandemic for the status quo to change.
