Companies that feed America brace for labor shortages and worry about restocking
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Looting and robbing, even were they to get away with it, will only get them a limited amount when there's virtually no food to be had.
I don't think guns are going to be the solution here.
But anyhow, food supplies aren't drying up, and there is plenty of workforce available with other businesses slowing down.
Martial law would be declared, the National Guard would be called out, curfews would be instituted, rationing would be enforced.
The little pea shooters a few survivalists have stocked up on are going to do them precious little good against the might of the US military, which would have little compunction against shooting a looter during a crisis of this magnitude.
We can still aspire to do the right thing.
We're going to keep shopping at this rate for months, are we? After all, we don't eat more than we usually do.
There are a number of "pinch points" in the supply chain, vulnerable to employees getting sick, that (coupled with inventory problems from hoarding) could easily result in reduced local supply for a week or two.
I don’t know the sick-leave policies of Kroger, Walmart, Publix, or Aldi, but there does not seem to be a high-availability, fault tolerant system to handle an entire workforce being unavailable for weeks at a time.
Most of this food is reasonably long-lived (frozen meat, frozen veggies, rice, etc.) yet I plan to continue grocery shopping as normal (weekly) and only dipping in to my supply if we need to quarantine or lock-down.
Eventually, enough people will have been infected to build up immunity, and eventually there'll be treatments and vaccines, but that again is probably going to take significantly longer than 4 weeks.
It might take a year, or even two. At this point no one knows.
aren't emergency rooms required to treat patients regardless of whether they're able to pay?
An anecdote, the last time I had to go to an ER in the US was when I cut the flexor tendon in my pinky, I knew it was severed but since it wasn't life threatening they stopped the bleeding, put some liquid stitches in the cut, wrapped and braced it and sent me on my way.
I had to wait until the weekend was over to see my primary care doctor which I have access to because I have insurance / money.
I get that, but how is that relevant when it comes to the coronavirus? It's not like it's a chronic condition. If you had it and were experiencing pneumonia, I doubt you'd be turned away for being undocumented.
My understanding is that the coronavirus is viral, not microbial, so we don't have any medicine to cure it directly (antibiotics don't work on it).
In addition, the risk is from having a respiratory problem, either from this or from something else (like pneumonia).
So if you get coronavirus then the basic treatment is to put you in a hospital to help your body live through the respiratory problem until your body can fight off the virus on it's own.
That's why there's so much emphasis on slowing the growth and flattening the curve. If (when) all the hospital beds fill up then whoever doesn't get in will have a much tougher time surviving, and there's no treatment other than having people lay in a hospital bed for a couple weeks.
tl;dr: It's not a chronic condition, but you'll need several weeks of intensive care to survive. ERs themselves just diagnose, treat what they can in the moment, and then send people home or on to the hospital.
Price gouging laws should have a very high ceiling to ensure legitimate business needs can be met, to compensate workers for increased risks and or extra shifts.
No law against ending "on sale" prices.
Second, labour costs are not 100% of a supermarket's costs, so a 10% increase covers a lot of extra labour. Considering the sheer volume of sales they're doing, it might actually pay for that %200-%300 wage increase... though you don't actually need it to go that high.
The divisive, isolationist, "only me and my immediate friends and family matter" attitude that is so prevalent in America starkly shows its corrosive effects in crisis.
Also, would love to hear how I, as a quarantined software developer in an apartment in one of the densest metro areas in the U.S., can "help make and deliver food" in a way that doesn't kill even more people in the process.
This machinery has to be operated by somebody, and people can be trained to do it. It takes people willing and able to do it, however.
Also, once delivered the food doesn't have to be eaten right away. The virus only lasts a certain number of hours or days (I've heard estimates of up to two weeks). After that, it can be eaten safely even if it was contaminated with the virus when it was made. Of course, that means perishable food that won't last that long is out of the question, but other food that can last should be fine.
This makes sense, I don't disagree.
But to my limited understanding most large scale food prep & processing happens well outside of city limits. Apart from some bakeries and doughnut shops I imagine most of what I find on the shelves of common grocery stores is largely shipped in via complex distributions chains originating either a) much closer to the farms/source ingredients or b) outside the state/country entirely.
> This machinery has to be operated by somebody, and people can be trained to do it. It takes people willing and able to do it, however.
So if things start going really bad (ie, large scale interruptions in production AND delivery) then yes, your situation starts to apply where I, a software developer, might have to trek out hundreds of miles somehow and start learning and operating food production equipment. I'm not saying I would refuse to do it -- but things would have to get incredibly bad for that to be a reality. To my knowledge there is nobody seriously predicting collapse on that level.
What's so unnecessary about making and delivering food?
That sounds like the very definition of necessity to me.
How many people are going to sit at home for a year without food?
Someone's going to have to make and deliver the food. If food manufacturers and distributers lack people to do it, then someone will have to step up to the plate and help them or we'll all starve.
Yes, people have been told to stay home, but at the cost of starvation? I don't think so.
>This machinery has to be operated by somebody, and people can be trained to do it. It takes people willing and able to do it, however.
Sure, but it's on the companies to make the move and hire people, not the people to go and beg to volunteer for them. This isn't the old days where you walk into a factory and give the manager a firm handshake and then you get the job.
If a company is willing and happy to train anyone who is up for these jobs and will pay them properly, then there will be people who will do it. But if they are still going to reject people based off credentials or experience like usual, then that's their problem if no one wants to do the work in a crisis like this.
If the people who run the manufacturing companies aren't doing what has to be done we as a society have to step in and do it. There's only so long we can wait for others to fix the problem when there's no food.
Money will have to take a back seat to necessities like food. This society will have to face this fact if things get bad enough.
Maybe society does have to go through something like this to realize their mistakes.
In fact, the government has to actively take steps to evict people if they are unable to pay their rent. I wouldn't put it past the current government to actually do that, but they could if they wanted to provide relief for people unable to pay their rents or pass laws freeing them from that responsibility.
The making and distributing of food is really non-negotiable, however. Unlike money, we actually need food. You can't eat a stack of dollar bills, and plenty of landlords are going to be just as screwed as their renters if there's no food. The only people safe are the tiny percentage of survivalists who managed to stock up a year or two worth of food. The rest will have to get food one way or another.
Unfortunately, plenty of governments have caused or allowed famines through inaction, malice, or incompetence. We can hope they won't let a famine happen this time, but hope and a couple of bucks will buy you a cup of coffee... or maybe not for long.
Again, I have to ask how long people will sit around watching their food stocks dwindle and hope someone else fixes their problem.
We already have plenty of people farming/growing/making food in farms, factory kitchens, plenty of people in the (refrigerator) warehouses and logistics services transporting that food, and plenty of people in the grocery stores and delivery services delivering that food.
The problem right now is simply that extremely temporary short-term demand has exceeded most local stores' ability to restock commensurate with demand.
However, some stores have already re-established depleted inventory. My local grocery store, for example, was fully re-stocked this morning in pasta, soups, beef, frozen meals, and frozen meats. And yesterday evening, they were low but not out of most of these foodstuffs. Another nearby grocery store was also reasonably well stocked, though the nearby Whole Foods was quite empty due to Amazon's practice of maintaining just-in-time inventory levels.