The unique nature of COVID-19 is that it is hitting the entire world. will send in trucks to fix the electrical grid, for example. Even now, like if you see a hurricane hitting a region, the rest of the U.S. ![]() ![]() Tremendous disruption and dislocation, but it tends to be regionalized. You can think of things like a hurricane hitting the U.S. Usually, when we have a disruption, it tends to be local or regionalized. When so much of it came from, let's just say the wholesale or institutional level.Īnd then you were talking about the three factors, and was the third factor that the that this is global in nature? And we didn't have supply chains that were designed to get that toilet paper into consumers hands at the retail level. Suddenly, all of that is being now consumed or bought for home use. Think about how much toilet paper was used and consumed in restaurants, hotels, travel, workplaces. However, if you think about where people used and consumed toilet paper was very different. Toilet paper, the underlying demand for toilet paper did not change during the pandemic. Now, if we think about other stuff that made the news, toilet paper, for example. That's really because we had an unusual spike in demand. So if we start with demand, if we think that at the start of the pandemic, we saw shortages of things like masks, ventilators, everyone was talking about shortage of gloves and other PPE. Those three factors and how they're playing into this. And we can talk about the global nature of what's going on here, which is really quite unusual. And perhaps I could just start out by saying, you know, we've got three big factors. Some of it is supply chain related, sort of indirectly. The cargo adrift at the ports isn't the only thing that's behind the supply chain disruptions right now. This is happening at ports all over the world. That many ships at anchor outside of the Twin Ports in Los Angeles. We've never seen this many shipping containers backed up in Los Angeles. This is really unprecedented on a global scale. We've been reading and hearing about thousands of giant shipping containers stuck in limbo at ports on both coasts. ![]() Brent Moritz is an associate professor of supply chain management in Penn State’s Smeal College of Business.īrent Moritz, thank you for talking with us.
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