Supply Chain Woes

Lots of news outlets doing articles on the supply chain, and they are substantially better than before! They are now describing how there are really a couple supply chains, and one of them is overloaded and the other has lost its end consumer almost entirely. Whether it is TP, avocados, onions, flour, meat — the people who make it sell it into one or the other of these supply chains, and the packaging is different, the requirements on quality are different, etc.

Some of this stuff is dead easy to redirect. While it is possible to find people who — legit! — say you cannot take a 50 pound bag of flour in the commercial / institutional chain and plop it onto the shelf in the grocery store, and while I am not advocating for opening bulk bins up in grocery stores generally (the specialty stores having already closed theirs down for The Duration), it is not actually that hard to communicate to ordinary customers Hey If You Are Engaging in Baking Therapy or Have Four Friends Who Are, Just Order Your Big Bag Over Here. Some enterprises exist in the middle: Grocery Outlet has gotten some press lately, but a lot of the box deliveries that existed Before (CSAs, food waste reduction operations, etc.) were already picking at both chains. They can ramp up. And they are. It is encouraging.

Commercial TP is a particularly tricky problem. People my age and somewhat younger remember an era where it was utterly common to request TP from the next stall over. The dispensers in the stalls had somewhat larger rolls than a typical household, but basically the same form factor, and there were basically more than one roll in the dispenser but typically not more than 4. So they ran out during a concert, say, and were not refilled, creating problems. A lot of us had habits of checking to make sure a stall had TP before using it; now, we just check to make sure the bowl is clogged and just assume the TP is fine. If we stop and think about it, we know that commercial TP is not distinguished — as many of the articles say — by having more post consumer recycling content, or being less soft, or being sold in different packaging. The real difference is the JRT: the massive roll, equivalent to 5 or more large household rolls, with a specialized dispenser, and weird core configuration. Even the commercial stuff has to have available core adapters to ensure they can continue to restock their installed dispensers.

Redirecting effectively the commercial TP to the household market would probably involve setting up household acceptable dispensers. But here, again, there are problems! Charmin attempted some months ago (possibly a year or more) a Forever Roll marketed to the general public. It was an attractive metal stand and a JRT and you could basically subscribe. The core was, IIRC, just a household roll core size. Charmin’s delightful efforts were greeted with endless retweeting and laughter. Sort of a pity; it could have been a bridge between the supply chains.

There have been other efforts to innovate on the commercial side; I think mostly to hit better numbers for smaller outlets. But in general, the goal of commercially marketed TP is to reduce how often they have to be resupplied. Some of the bridge products were for sale on Amazon, but got wiped out pretty fast during The Beginning of The Now. Georgia Pacific, for example, had a product with larger sheets that dispensed one sheet at a time; Amazon is out, but you can buy direct from the GP website and they have a guest option so you do not even need an account. The problem lies in the need for a dispenser, and having to suck it up and deal with having a commercial dispenser in your house. You can go classy with stainless steel in some products, altho those mostly exist in the JRT format, and making sure you buy compatible rolls for the dispenser you have selected seems to be a component of the facility knowledge set that helps people get jobs doing this for a living. Having to work this all out from the ordinary, household consumer end is a chore.

Anyway. If you are sitting around with a credit card, and strategizing how to get more TP or flour or whatever from Costco, or whatever, you might consider doing yourself, and all the people who do not have your options, and the commercial supply chain a favor. Take a look around and see if you can order the commercial side option. Make sure you can store it. Allow time for the delivery. And try to anticipate compatibility issues (you will not see them all coming, I can all but guarantee it). If all the people with money and time tap the commercial side, the retail grocery side will catch a break, and all the people who cannot afford the time or money to do this sort of exploration can get a better shot at the TP and flour they need.

Good luck out there, and if you think of any other ways to move your household resupply needs from the consumer side to the commercial side, feel free to share in the comments or by dropping me a line. I am interested and happy to further share them by editing this post.

ETA: Apparently there has been a bit of a run on dish soap, because people have finally understood that as a lipid enveloped rna virus, covid is no match for ordinary soap and water. Fine, sure. You can buy cases of dish soap from food service distributors. I used Food Service Direct.

ETAYA: ordered sofpull mini dispenser and 16 roll case from the GP Pro website on Monday night, it shipped fedex ground on tuesday, arrived at my house early thursday afternoon.

Tuesday: walk, leftovers for lunch, ordered a chair from staples

T. wants a new chair (his current chair is an Aeron that is much older than he is). He wanted to go to Staples After. I was like, check online, see what they have. Free, next day delivery is what they have. So that should arrive tomorrow.

A. had a much better school day today. She had an assignment to read some stuff at the EPA website for kids about conserving water. She noted that just eating less meat is probably as or more effective than most of the advice there. Fair! The assignment was one of those common core pick one things: write a paragraph, draw a comic strip, etc. They were trying to encourage opinions, which, whatever. I suggested we do the video option, and make a movie of doing the test from the epa site where you put food coloring in the tank and watch to see if it goes into the bowl without flushing (basically, do you need to replace your flapper valve). We put together a simple script written big enough to read from a distance and put it on the wall for her to read. Then I used my phone, and she read the script, pointing at the elements in question, and then she put the food coloring in the tank. We came back a half hour later, established that the coloring was still in the tank and not in the bowl. And then she wanted me to combine the two with a fade in between. Which I knew was possible! But had never done. Also, imovie was crashing on my phone. So I did an update, then assembled the movie, felt irritation that I now had a horizontally oriented piece from my vertical filming (sigh). Then we had to get it onto her classroom’s padlet. I logged her into my newly downloaded google classroom and padlet on my phone, uploaded the movie to the padlet and then we went to her computer to confirm it looked fine. It did. She was happy with the fades. But then she wanted to have google classroom and padlet on her iPad.

I ate leftovers for lunch. It never fails to amaze me how awesome random bits from the fridge can be.