I don't know where to post about food shortages? Is it a covid related issue like the media are saying, or is it something else?
Either way, i was in Tesco (British Supermarket) and like other British supermarkets, they have a high, top shelf, where they keep stocks of fast moving products. For talks' sake, say they sell 100 tins of beans a day, but the shelf only holds 80 tins, they'll have another 50 tins on the stop shelf to replenish without having to mess around in the store room.
Every single aisle and every single 'top' shelf was bare. Nothing on there. Looking down on the normal shelves and it all looks fine from a distance, then when you get closer you see that products are being spread out horizontally, to make the shelves look full.
If the supermarkets (I'm sure Tesco isn't the only one) have no free floating stock, and the shelves of even slow moving goods are looking bare...just how bad is this situation? How much of these stocks do they have in their warehouses? Generally a Supermarket will hold thousands and thousands of pallets of stock in a central distribution warehouse. But if those stocks can't keep the free-floating stock replenished then that's bad. Really bad.
There's a lag time between running out of stock in the warehouse and running out of stock on the shelves. If the shelves are bare, the free-floating stock empty and the weekly deliveries are barely making a dent at full replenishment, then that means we are struggling to keep our heads above water and are eating in to the distribution stock, without THAT stock getting topped up.
Buy a big freezer, fill it with frozen veg, food and meat, because shit is going to get hairy over Xmas.