There's a Mason Jar Shortage | Hacker News Reader

There's a Mason Jar Shortage

delish.com

18 pointswalterbell20 comments

Several people in my circle already had sufficient jars for their crop, but had extreme difficulty finding new lids, as they are not reusable due to the heat-activated sealant on the jar interface.

But then again, most of the North Anerican supply chain has ground to a crawl (30 week delays for a home appliance, yay)

what home appliance has a 30 week delay?

Shopping for a dishwasher in September, the earliest availably date for the model I wanted was December 26 + an estimated 1 month backlog for delivery. Many others were delayed until March 2021. I found another model that was supposedly available now, but 1 week before delivery in October my order was bumped out to 2021. This happened two more times.

Luckily I don't have very particular needs in a dishwasher and I have a trailer. Somebody at the big box hardware store near me canceled their order and because I'm constantly looking, I was able to pick one up just this very morning. When I picked it up, another customer was trying to buy it.

If you're able to be flexible, then you can probably get something in less than 6 months. A buddy of mine has a less-commonly sized space for their fridge which he cannot change w/o tearing apart the kitchen and the soonest he can get a replacement is February. They are living out of a couple dorm-room refrigerators until then.

I can understand if you want a particular modal there can be a delay. A quick look at the big box retailers near me show variety of refrigerators in different sizes are available today.

A fridge. Contacted the local appliance store and they told me about an almost 30-week delay for a customer. Thankfully, the delay benefited me. The original customer found a fridge somewhere else, so I got the one they had ordered.

Toilet paper shortages, rolling blackouts, now canning lids gone... America is turning into a faithful replica of 80s Soviet Eastern Europe.

That was caused because the system was defective/corrupt/ineffective, this is cause because the system is really tuned into economic efficiency. The system is not prepared to adjust easily to a disruption of this size,as it takes time to readjust the production process.

Yeah, I was more than half joking. Of these three, only the blackouts in California are troubling, the others are more like comedy material.

I thought so, the 80's on the other side of the wall sure weren't too funny, may interesting but not funny. The blackouts are the ones troubling because they are not linked to the pandemic, at least not in the ways the others are.

I'd say this is a defective system. Commerce and industry embraced JIT sourcing and long supply chains while either being ignorant of, or worse, willfully ignoring the fact it falls apart if every link in the chain before you doesn't execute reliably.

They may not have pictured a global pandemic when they did the numbers, but anyone with any length of hands on experience would have said "we've had some (industry-specific) situation which caused a 3-month supply kink before, and it nearly broke us..."

Honestly, I'd love to hear from businesses/economic planners in places where inconsistent supply chains are the norm. Would someone from, say, Iran, or who grew up in postwar Europe, look at a business plan that said "when we close the store at night, there should be nothing left on the shelves, and we expect the trucks to come overnight with replacements" and cringe or laugh?

> Commerce and industry embraced JIT sourcing and long supply chains while either being ignorant of, or worse, willfully ignoring the fact it falls apart if every link in the chain before you doesn't execute reliably.

No, they embraced JIT sourcing because if they didn't, they would've been outcompeted by the companies which did.

It's comforting to believe that this situation is a result of human ignorance that could've been fixed by installing smarter humans, but actually everyone in this process was following the rational incentives erected by capitalism. If you want to change the behavior, you have to change the incentives.

Defective system? What system sour have worked when it lost its entire work force? Many things were short because no one saw the need for such a large amount (think hand sanitizer) or that the ingredients serious be required for something else. Toilet paper is an interesting issue. There wasn't exactly a shortage of TP, there was a shortage of consumer tp. It took a few weeks to shift the supply chain.

Not just canning - there’s been a noticeable increase in interest and activity related to mushroom growing since the pandemic began. Mason jars are commonly used to colonize spawn before fruiting or spawning to bulk.

Noted, during pandemics people get into bread baking and growing mushrooms, seems reasonable enough.

Bread flour and yeast are back on the shelves, but there's still persistent shortages of toilet paper and basically anything containing bleach.

Back in February I picked up a couple bottles of multivitamins, just in case I got stuck inside eating rice for a few months. A cheap precautionary measure.

Vitamins in pills don't absorb in the body as regular diverse food do, so is not a replacement for food.

https://www.sciencealert.com/are-vitamin-pills-good-or-bad-s...

If a second coronavirus lockdown lasts more than a year, then I will have considerably more to worry about than malnutrition.

They didn't ramp up production when hipsters started using them as drinking glasses?

Sitting here drinking kombucha from a mason jar and nearly did a spit take when I read your comment.

weird, stared using mason jars for drinking in 2020

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