The term retail apocalypse has been around since before COVID-19. Brick and mortar retailers had been struggling to compete with online sales, stores and entire chains closed up shop, retail employment was hemorrhaging jobs. In these #quarantinediaries posts, I’ve often mentioned anecdotal evidence from where I live about the supply chain woes that have manifested primarily as shortages of cleaning supplies and various food items. But I’ve started to see other consumer items being hard to find. Six months into this pandemic, supply chains are not healing; if anything, they’re getting worse.

Retail profit margins are notoriously thin (grocery stores possibly the thinnest at 1–2%) and competition for shelf space has traditionally been fierce. Empty shelves equals business failure. That’s been understood for a long time. Back in the day, I had a grunt job stocking shelves at Target. Managers there were fanatic about shelf space. On those very rare times when an item was sold out and shelf space was empty, managers would quickly have something, anything, sent from one of their warehouses and have us grunts change the shelf’s label and fill up the space. Trucks pulled up to the dock all day long and shelves were rarely empty for more than a few hours. A skeleton crew worked the graveyard shift, ensuring that all shelves were filled when the doors opened in the morning.

Today, an aisle from the Target nearest to where I live where Storage Drawers and Storage Boxes nominally reside according to the sign on the side of the end cap:

A few aisles over, Kitchen Towels, Potholders/Oven Mitts, and Kitchen Rugs:

If anyone tells you things will be back to normal soon, they’re smoking the good stuff.

Coronavirus News, Analysis, Opinion, et cetera:

University of Alabama told professors to not tell students about COVID-19 cases among their classmates

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Subprime Mortgages Fall Massively Delinquent.

Task force reports show dire reality despite Trump's positive messaging

The 459-page August 9 report has a section for each state, which includes extensive data on the state's cases down to a county level, as well as detailed, private recommendations to state and local officials to slow the spread, including promoting social distancing and face coverings, implementing contact tracing, and closing bars and nightclubs in "red zone" states… Just one of the previous reports had been made public, the July 14 report, which was obtained by journalism nonprofit Center for Public Integrity. That report showed 18 states in the "red zone" and called for the rolling back of reopenings, including the closing of bars and gyms in many places.

New Trump pandemic adviser pushes controversial ‘herd immunity’ strategy, worrying public health officials

Statins Linked to Reduced Mortality in COVID-19

^{Badge thanks to @arcange}