Category: Disaster

News Roundup

Bad News, Disaster

Coronavirus coronavirus coronavirus coronavirus… doesn’t anyone have a juicy sex scandal to report anymore?


…oh dear god, if anything makes me want to catch the virus and die, it’s a nude Madonna pic.


…that would be Tylenol (acetaminophen) to us Murkins.  Looks like that 300-tab bottle from Sam’s Club wasn’t such a bad idea after all.


…always the tough choices:  beer or sanitizer.  I know which one I’d choose.


…after all those Epstein memes, the Clinton gang gets creative.


…there being no ice floes in the Mediterranean to put the old people onto.


…EVERYBODY PANIC!!!  You mean you don’t have a SHTF porno stash?


…okay, that made me LOL.  Am I a bad person?


…Charles Darwin, call your office.

Flashback

Business, Disaster

Britain starts to panic:

A food policy expert has warned a food disaster could be imminent unless the Government implements rationing. Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University in London, has written a letter to Boris Johnson asking him to ‘initiate a health-based food rationing scheme to see the country through this crisis’.
He wrote to the Prime Minister ‘out of immediate concern about the emerging food crisis’ and in the letter described public messaging about food supply as ‘weak and unconvincing’.
His warning comes after shoppers across the country have been met with empty shelves as panic-buying takes hold.

Back when I was running a now-defunct supermarket chain’s loyalty program in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and New Hampshire (Grand Union, if anyone out there remembers them), we had a common problem with “hot” items.

Often, our buyers got such good deals from manufacturers from bulk orders that our shelf retail prices were better than the wholesale price offered by distributors to local grocery stores and bodegas.  So the small-store owners would descend on our supermarkets and buy up all the sale items, to resell them in their own stores.  Nothing wrong with that, of course — except that it took stock away from our “regular” loyal customers, who typically accounted for 70% of total sales and close to 90% of gross profit.

So I put an end to all that.  Whenever the buyers told me about their hot price discounts (which they had to, as I was also in charge of Advertising), I would do two things:  make the low price available to loyalty card holders only, and then limit the number of items at that price to two or three per day per card.  Result:  we sold the same amount of product, only it was spread across a larger number of customers.

And I designed a sub-system for item purchase limits that automatically instituted the policy whenever the daily sales rate started accelerating past a certain velocity.  So if there were storm warnings and people started to stock up on, say, batteries, the in-store stock was quite- or nearly sufficient and would-be profiteers couldn’t play their reindeer games.

I did all this, by the way, back in the mid-1990s, so it’s not like it’s a new situation.

As I look now at the panic-buying of toilet paper and hand sanitizers, and the resulting empty shelves thereof, I can’t help wondering why all grocery stores haven’t been doing that now.  I know that not all chains (Wal-Mart especially) have loyalty programs, but most of the big ones do.  Doesn’t say much for their planning, does it?

And by the way, there’s also an answer for chains who don’t  have loyalty programs:  just institute price escalation (instead of -reduction) for multiple purchases:  first two items, $1.99 each, third or more items, $8.99 each.  With today’s technology, the software change should take about an hour to implement.

Food logistics is not something government should get involved in, despite the frantic appeals of “food policy” professors.

Timely Warning

Disaster

From a buddy:

On a related note, I see that pharmacies are reporting that as more and more people are self-isolating, sales of hair dye are going through the roof:  proof that some among us have their priorities perfectly straight.  (Question:  if you’re immured in your house, who the fuck is going to see you anyway?)  Some people are too stupid, or vain, to exist.

In other news, I await with interest the headlines which will finally attest to the fact that public schools are not educational institutions but really just State-provided daycare:

Suburban mothers go batshit crazy at having to look after the kiddies 24/7;  start drinking Bloody Marys nonstop from 6.30am 

or

Mother stabs teenage son to death after 45th time in a week that he leaves the toilet seat up

or

Mother tells kids to “do whatever the fuck you want” after trying to homeschool them for four whole days

Your suggestions in Comments.

Not-So-Splendid Isolation

Disaster

Sorry to start the day on a downer, folks, but this Chinese virus [cf. POTUS]  is screwing with my life, bigly.

With no travel going on and people working more and more from home, my Uber income has fallen off the cliff.  From a seven-hour workday net (after expenses) income of around $20/hour, the past few days have seen it fall to nearly zero.  I mean zip, zilch, nada:  two hours’ waiting between calls, on a good day, and those trips are all short ones — nurses to and from hospitals, etc.

I’m not the only one, of course.  The Son&Heir, who’s the F&B manager at a large restaurant, told me yesterday that their hourly staff (waiters and hosts) are having their hours cut by 80%, and layoffs may follow in about a week’s time — and I have to think that other similar establishments are faring even worse, as his place does significant home- and office delivery sales.

I, of course, don’t have any of that kind of thing to fall back on.  New Wife had her residence application finally (!!!!) approved and got her temporary green card;  not that it helps, though, because she works in — ta-da!!!! — elementary schools, and guess who’s not hiring at the moment because Chinese virus?  At best,she’ll be hired in July for the new school year, but until then…

Frankly, nobody is hiring at the moment, of course, so even if I was able to, I can’t find any kind of full-time work.  (I’m kicking myself for not getting my trucker’s license many years ago — supermarkets in the area are experiencing supply bottlenecks because of a driver shortage.  That’s why there’s no bogroll in the stores.)

So I’m doing what I swore never to do again, and asking for financial assistance from you, O My Long-Suffering Readers.  Without that, our modest savings will be drained and we face financial ruin within two or three months.  (Forget indulgences like takeout food or trips to Boomershoot;  we’re talking rent, car payments and utilities here.)

I know that everyone is suffering at the moment in one way or another;  but if you can see your way to helping us out over the next couple of months until sanity returns to our world, all contributions will be most gratefully received.  You can contribute a small amount monthly via Patreon (over on the right-hand side of the page under Links), or with one-time amounts through PayPal or by check to the sooper-seekrit mailing address.

I hate to have to do this, but I have no other alternative.

Replacements

Disaster, SHTF

A thoughtful post (as always) from Peter Grant, containing this insight:

[The company] sources a very large proportion of its products from that country, but its suppliers there — factories and exporters — are closed, and have been for weeks.  No-one knows when they’ll be open again.  The company is finding it very difficult to line up alternative suppliers fast enough to ensure that their products can get here in time to replace Chinese ones on their shelves as they run out.  If they can’t . . . they’ll have to close their doors.  It’s that simple.

Thousands of Chinese factories are closed because of the corona virus epidemic over there, and products of all kinds (not just the types referenced in the above excerpt) are not being shipped.

This, by the way, is why every country needs its own manufacturing base.  I know:  sometimes there are considerable cost savings to be realized by outsourcing production to cheaper (i.e. foreign) facilities — but those savings are only to be had if there is no disruption to the supply chain.  Come disaster — and given that China is one of the most consistently pox-ridden nations on Earth, and the source of so many of the world’s diseases — it should be clear that all those trumpeted “savings” are going to evaporate faster than Jeffrey Epstein’s emails.

Of particular concern is the fact that most pharmaceutical products are now either made in China, or else manufactured using Chinese raw materials — not just prescription meds, but also OTC stuff like analgesics.  Loyal Readers may recall that I myself had a scare in this regard a little while back, and learning my lesson from that, I set up a forward supply of my two most critical medications.

If you’re dependent on such meds, I hope you’ve done the same.

And just in passing, I should point out that all this has validated Trump’s initiatives in bringing manufacturing back home to the U.S. — although I doubt that Big Pharma ever responded, even though they should have — and if there is any criticism to be made here, it’s that Trump hasn’t pushed hard enough, through tariff protection of local manufacturing entities.

You see, it’s not just about protecting local workers, laudable though that may be;  it’s about strategically protecting the country from situations such as these.  And we need to do a lot more of that, if the current catastrophe teaches us anything at all.