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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

A relatively simple lockdown was enough to drastically impact our “just in time” supply and manufacturing system. We’re still recovering from that, and likely will be for months, if not years.

Even mere rumors of TP shortage caused such a shortage to actually occur through mostly social interactions.

Larger scale disasters will definitely screw things up for us all.

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Yes there was a brief TP shortage. I think the bigger takeaway was that a large portion of the workforce just stopped and there wasn’t a material reduction in the standard of living.

I’ve come to believe fraction of of the workforce could keep the economy going at current levels and much employment is only marginally productive and exists only to distribute the wealth of society.

That's a sort of tempting thought and it's mostly right IMO. My suspicion is that it doesn't take that many people to keep the factories running but it does take a lot of people to make new factories and improve efficiency at existing ones. And modern society is so predicated on growth that you literally need these efficiency improvers or the wheels fall off. On any give day or week or perhaps even year they don't matter. But over a decade they probably do.

There wasn't just a TP shortage, there was a sudden shortage in prescription medications as supply chains were interrupted. The FDA had a list of medications that were impacted and were in short supply, and many of them were on the WHO list of essential medicines.

That tracks with my gut feeling: many jobs (possibly a majority, but I’m not confident that it’s that many) exist as a fig leaf for the government to say “see, these people aren’t on the dole. Look how close we are to full employment.”

There actually was a shortage--of residential TP, due to people spending more time at home instead of at work, where commercial TP is used.

Luckily, diarrhea is/was not a Covid symptom, else things could have been a lot worse.

There wasn't really much of a shortage though - at any given time there were warehouses full of residential toilet paper, what their wasn't was capacity to keep supermarket shelves stocked when regular customers all suddenly doubled their purchasing pattern.

A supermarket stocks maybe 150 packs but sees well over that in foot traffic per day: if a relatively small number of people simultaneously think "hmm, I might need more this week" then it's pretty easy to empty the shelves.

This of course gets compounded by the group of craven **holes who decided "this is my time to get rich!" and also realized it's not that expensive to buy out every pack in a store because toilet paper is not expensive.

The well managed supermarkets reacted to this by doing per customer day by day rationing, which smoothed shelf stock levels out a lot almost immediately: if there was a problem, it's that we don't have enough automated systems to detect and level this off: it's pretty reasonable in fact to have basic prohibitions against single purchasers buying "wholesale" level quantities out from supermarkets, and directing them to the regular supply chain system when they try.

Another thing that happens is that when Costco is the only place in town with TP in stock, then you end up buying 48 rolls or whatever because that's the minimum purchase size.

That doesn’t make much difference to Rewe or Sainsbury’s where the largest packs have 16, and even the 4-packs were absent from the shelves.

> Larger scale disasters will definitely screw things up for us all.

Most natural disasters tend to be local..

It's actually hard to imagine something more global than a pandemic.

I remember not being able to buy milk last year. It felt like a war was going on.

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