Maggie's Farm

This particular story might seem silly, but early on in the pandemic when people were hoarding toilet paper this was a serious consideration - with so many people not going to the office and so many kids not going to school, bathroom usage was confined largely to the home. It might seem a trivial issue, but the aggregate demand on more home-based toilet paper (as opposed to the commercial sort that accounts for institutional buying) created temporary shortages in toilet paper supplies.

I don't find that sort of thing silly at all, but rather quite fascinating in that you wouldn't normally take that kind of thing into consideration, it wouldn't occur to you to think about such a thing. (It also isn't something a government bureaucrat would necessarily think of, which explains why central planning never seems to work - you don't know what you don't know but most of us have the humility to recognize this fact whereas bureaucrats refuse to accept any such limitation on their knowledge.)

I don't know of anyone personally, although we did one time have to buy an off brand of toilet paper and there were definitely empty shelves in many places. The larger point is that with "lean manufacturing", plants tend to operate at or near 100% capacity because they can't afford to keep excess capacity sitting around idle and with "just in time" deliveries there's no excess product just sitting around in warehouses. When this pandemic caught everybody by surprise, there was little time to react before shortages starting showing up. Toilet paper manufacturers had all the commercial product you could want, not so much of the home-based stuff. And it's not as if you can just flip a switch and start producing more of one and less of the other, you have to retool a factory line. The question is, do you want to retool a factory line? How long is this pandemic going to last? Is it worthwhile to go through the trouble and expense of retooling? What are your competitors doing? You don't know, but either way you're taking a risk.

The same thing is true of complex supply chains, a hurricane here or a revolution there, and suddenly you're up the creek and you never saw it coming. If you're dependent on a foreign supplier for a critical part, you'd better have a back up plan.

It's funny that Politico ascribes Collins' plight to a wave of anti-Trump sentiment when it is Collins own anti-Trump sentiments that may account for her plight. Along with Murkowski, Collins has been well-known as one of the biggest RINOs in the Senate, too liberal for much of the GOP. "Hold your nose and vote for Collins" isn't as strong an argument as it used to be when you see with Trump what is actually possible to achieve if you refuse to settle.