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in praise of logistics redux

24 may 2020

I have to admit it, I've left something out of this blog thus far. Much of this blog has been about how the store is running out of x or y item, or has been out of whatever item for months.

In the past tense, I've mentioned how we're out of hand sanitizer, toilet paper, masks, etc. And we're still out of all of these things.

All except masks.

I haven't lied. I just hadn't seen the throughline on this process until now, so I waited until I saw something worth saying about it.

You see, we were out of facemasks for around two months, but then we got a few in, first as a trickle and then as a torrent. Being in a small area, nobody had really gotten them back in until around four weeks ago. But in the bigger cities (and I'm sure a lot of you are aware of this) many stores managed to restock facemasks pretty early on.

By the time we had gotten facemasks back on the shelves, most of the people in the area had already taken a 45 minute drive to the nearest small city (and I do mean _small_) and bought some masks. So we haven't really sold any of our new supply.

And the things don't stop coming.

See, our store alone sold $15,000 in facemasks, and the entire company sold around $300,000, as of like two weeks ago, but that was mostly in the initial rush (these numbers are fuzzed a bit for dox and job-loss-because-proprietary-numbers reasons). The company saw the rush on masks and decided to buy in bulk.

This small regional pharmacy company decided to buy up 500,000 masks for its ~50 stores, AND THE THINGS DON'T STOP COMING.

Yesterday, the FedEx guy showed up with four huge-ass boxes of masks. Each one holds like two hundred of them. We've been getting like two of these shipments per week for the past four weeks. The entire time I was on shift yesterday, I sold like 5 masks. The things just aren't going, but corporate decided that we needed more of them because of how much money they made in the rush. They seem completely unaware of the fact that that time has passed. Nobody cares anymore. Everyone has already found all the masks they need -- at least in our area. Emails are getting passed around (my manager printed one and hung it above the timeclock with "what the fuck?" written across it in marker) where a manager at another store emails the store manager listserv asking who the fuck transferred a thousand masks into his inventory. Everybody wants to get rid of the shit. We've already got like two hundred facemasks on the floor: on three endcaps, a huge free-standing display, and a folding table up front (bear in mind that we only have like eight or nine aisles). Meanwhile, the backroom is littered with a couple dozen of those boxes of hundreds of facemasks.

They're all the same. I don't know where corporate wrangled them up, but they're four-packs for seven fucking dollars. Nobody's gonna want to pay that. The cost of the product is more marginal than the margin. Shit's nonsense.

We're still out of hand sanitizer (except a couple pint bottles of alcohol with peroxide and aloe in them from a local distillery -- they cost $12.99!), we're still out of toilet paper, we're perpetually on the edge of running out of tissues, we're out of paper towels, aloe, rubbing alcohol, handsoap.

Meanwhile, they ship us thousands of units of paper plates and facemasks while inflating the margins to cartoonish levels so nobody wants to buy them and even the stores are trying desperately to get rid of them before their stockrooms are consumed.

I haven't been to a Walmart in a while (nearest one is in that city 45 minutes away), but I wonder how they're doing.