Opinion: Don’t rant about short-staffed stores and supply chain woes
Empty shelves at an Ikea store in Brooklyn on Oct. 15. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/...m_medium=social
Opinion by Micheline Maynard
Contributing columnist
Yesterday at 2:16 p.m. EDT

For more than a century, business experts have been trying to dial up the United States’ efficiency. Ever since Frederick Taylor published “The Principles of Scientific Management” in 1911, companies have focused on doing things more quickly, and raising consumers’ expectations as a result.

But Taylor’s ideas didn’t take into account the havoc a pandemic might do to supply chains — and how that would blunt what a few months ago seemed like a looming resumption of modern daily life’s zippy pace.

Across the country, Americans’ expectations of speedy service and easy access to consumer products have been crushed like a Styrofoam container in a trash compactor. Time for some new, more realistic expectations.

Fast food is less fast. A huge flotilla of container ships is stuck offshore in California, waiting to unload. Shelves normally stocked with Halloween candy this time of year are empty, as I saw the other day at a Target here in Ann Arbor, Mich.

The issue has become so troublesome — with alarming economic and political ramifications — that the White House is stepping in, urging unions, port operators and big consumer-goods companies to work around the clock (if they aren’t already) to unclog supply pipelines.

American consumers, their expectations pampered and catered to for decades, are not accustomed to inconvenience.

“For generations, American shoppers have been trained to be nightmares,” Amanda Mull wrote in August in the Atlantic, before the supply chain problem turned truly ugly. “The pandemic has shown just how desperately the consumer class clings to the feeling of being served.”

Customers’ persistent whine, “Why don’t they just hire more people?,” sounds feeble in this era of the Great Resignation, especially in industries, such as food service, with reputations for being tough places to work.

Rather than living constantly on the verge of throwing a fit, and risking taking it out on overwhelmed servers, struggling shop owners or late-arriving delivery people, we’d do ourselves a favor by consciously lowering expectations.

I don’t know about where you live, but in Ann Arbor the luxury of blithely tapping on a phone and summoning a restaurant delivery that arrives in 45 minutes is over. There’s a shortage of food-delivery drivers nationwide. The sanity-preserving move is to assume an hour and half for delivery, and then a mere hour and 10 minutes is a pleasant surprise.-- excerpt, rest at link above --

Ah, I get it now - it's not them - it's us, with our "high expectations".

Great Reset anyone?