Supermarket shelves across the United States have been cleaned and left empty as stores struggle to quickly replenish them with essential daily items such as milk, bread, meat, canned soups and cleaning products.
Disgruntled consumers have flooded social media in recent days with posts expressing their frustration, posting photos on Twitter of empty shelves at various chain stores such as Trader Joe, Giant Foods and Publix, according to a CNN report.
After two years of pandemic and supply chain problems, supermarkets still do not have the improvement they expected. Instead, they now face new setbacks.
Up next at 5: Empty store shelves.
My brother in Philadelphia sent me these pics of his Trader Joe's just yesterday. pic.twitter.com/sKlxkd8AiZ- Heidi Hatch KUTV (@tvheidihatch) January 11, 2022
The catastrophic blow of Omicron
As the highly contagious Omicron variant continues to plague employees, there is a shortage of staff for critical economic activities such as transportation and logistics, which in turn affect product delivery and store shelf supply across the country.
Albertsons CEO Vivek Sankaran acknowledged that many products are in limited supply, his company results are presented to analysts.
"I think as a business, we have all learned to manage it. "We all learned to make sure the stores are still very presentable, to give consumers as many options as we can," Sankaran said during the meeting.
However, he added, the Omicron variant has posed serious obstacles to efforts to improve supply chain gaps. To estimate that "we expect more challenges in the field of supply in the next four to six weeks."
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Less staff
Supermarkets operate with less than their normal workforce, according to the National Supermarket Association, and many of its members have less than 50% of their normal workforce.
"While there is plenty of food in the supply chain, we expect consumers to continue to experience sporadic shortages in certain product categories, as we have seen over the past year and a half due to ongoing supply and labor supply challenges," said Craig Ferrara, President and CEO advisor to the Union.
In fact, labor shortages continue to plague all sectors of the food industry, said Phil Lebert, industry analyst and author of SuperMarketGuru.com.
"From farms and food producers to supermarkets, there is a shortage of manpower everywhere," he said. "During the pandemic, these companies had to implement social distancing protocols but they did not do that and it affected production."
And as the pandemic continues, many workers in the food industry choose not to return to low-wage jobs at all.
Trader joe's #silverspringmaryland empty shelves #sunday pic.twitter.com/OgIAu38xMD
- neteraru (@artisanwellness) January 9, 2022
Transportation problems
The continuing shortage of trucks continues to slow down the supply chain and the ability of supermarkets to make up for shortages in products and to quickly replenish their shelves.
"The truck industry has an aging workforce in addition to a lack of staff," Lebert said. "It's really been a problem for the last few years."
However, the biggest problem of internal transport is the continuing level of congestion in the country's ports. "Both of these challenges work in parallel and create shortcomings," he said.
Weather issues
At Trader Joe stores, shoppers over the weekend saw messages pasted on empty shelves that attributed the shortages to emergencies that caused delivery delays.
Much of the Midwestern and Northeastern states have recently been exposed to severe weather and dangerous transport and road conditions. Not only are people stocked with more supermarkets, but this high level of demand combined with transportation challenges makes it harder to transport goods in bad weather, resulting in even more shortages, Lebert explains.
But climate change is also a continuing serious and long-term threat to the food supply chain. "Fires and droughts are damaging crops like wheat, corn and soybeans in the US and coffee crops in Brazil," he added.
Pandemic and eating habits
Another aspect of the problem is that more and more Americans are starting to cook and eat at home because of the pandemic, a factor that also helps limit food supply, according to Lebert.
"We do not want to continue eating the same thing and we are trying to change the cooking at home. "As we do this, we are buying even more food products." Shortages have also made the food market more expensive in 2022.
Supermarkets are certainly aware of empty shelves, Lebert said, and are trying to curb panic shopping, which is only making matters worse.
Source: in.gr