You can't always get what you want

... and what you want may be changing. From the very beginning of the shelter-in-place season, I've been watching with fascination how a disrupted commercial supply chain is changing our lives.

First there was the great toilet paper panic, now largely abated as far as I can tell. Certainly I had no trouble picking up a new package at the chain pharmacy and sundries vendor around the corner.

I don't know whether barren grocery store shelves have returned to normal as I haven't been in a supermarket since COVID came our way. I use staples from Costco via Instacart (one of the great exploitative rip offs of all time; TIP these workers!!). And for living food, I duck into the local fruit and vegetable market. But I'm lucky in my surroundings; this works in the Mission.

According to a Washington Post overview, grocery stores are responding to shoppers' haste to get in and out by reducing the variety of products they carry.

... the number of items offered in U.S. supermarkets went from 9,000 in 1975 to a staggering 40,000 to 50,000 by the beginning of 2020. The pandemic has not only halted that growth, it’s reversed it.

Food manufacturers are focused on producing more of the top-selling varieties of a particular product, pushing off the launch of different flavors or spinoffs until sample stations can return. Giants like General Mills, Conagra, Kellogg’s and Campbell’s, seeing a rise in sales of their dominant brands, are making more of those at the expense of new products. 

Meanwhile, budget-minded shoppers have embraced more-affordable private-label store brands, squeezing out shelf space for independent and rookie brands.

Online shopping only reinforces this trend. Sellers keep it simple so you can navigate your choices; the algorithms send you back to what you bought last time. Browsing just isn't happening when we can't/won't wander stores comfortably.

Changes are also afoot in Big Box stores -- places like Lowes and Home Depot. Fred Clark works in one in a Pennsylvania suburban setting; his job is to stock shelves.

Big chains like the Big Box stress uniformity. The cleaning supplies shelves in our location are supposed to look exactly like those shelves in every other location. Small tweaks might be permitted, but any major changes in the master plan were forbidden. That’s all gone out the window during this pandemic. Now we’ll get random boxes of whatever the buyers can scrounge (they’re quite good at scrounging) and I spend an hour or two every night pulling price tags off the shelves to shove ’em in wherever I can. 

Our shelves are full, and I think they look OK, but it’s all improvisation and these days no two stores in our chain will have identical offerings or displays. 

For example, our store hasn’t had a designated “home” for our paper goods since all this started. The shelves where we used to sell Bounty are now full of an ever-changing lineup of hand sanitizers, contractor-grade disinfectants, disposable masks, bleach, and spray bottles. When we get a pallet of name-brand paper goods,* we still just unwrap it and set it down somewhere up by the registers, then replace it with another the next day (if we can).

I find it interesting that new models of commodity retail supply apparently both result in variations between locations that used to thrive on their uniformity and, concurrently, reduce choice. We don't know yet what any of this will mean.