Are Your Store Shelves Bare? More Shortages Expected For Weeks To Come

It is happening again.  In December, Joe Biden stood in front of the American people and boldly declared that he had defeated the supply chain crisis, but of course that wasn't true.  There have been persistent shortages for months on end, and now fear of Omicron is taking things to an entirely new level once again.  

On Monday, the hashtag #BareShelvesBiden was trending on Twitter, and that is because shelves are alarmingly bare in supermarkets from coast to coast.  We are being told that these shortages are only "temporary", but of course that was what we were told when nationwide shortages first began to pop up all the way back in early 2020.

Unfortunately, food industry experts are warning us that supplies are going to get even tighter in the weeks to come.  For example, the following is what billionaire John Catsimatidis just told Fox News...

"Omicron is taking its toll at different levels of the supply chain, whether it's the warehouses, whether it's the selectors, the drivers the loaders - and as they call in sick there are interruptions in the system," Catsimatidis told Todd Piro during an appearance on "Fox & Friends First."

Catsimatidis went on to say that many of these interruptions will continue over the next 6 weeks as the COVID-19 variant impacts the labor market. The United Refining Company owner added that the Northeast in particular is seeing the price of various products, including eggs, poultry, and beef, go up because of low supply and high demand.

That sounds rather ominous.

Of course he is not alone.  Egg Innovations CEO John Bruunquell is specifically warning that current conditions are likely to prevent his industry from supplying enough eggs to the general population...

Meanwhile, Egg Innovations CEO John Bruunquell, who acquired the first U.S. patent for reduced fat and cholesterol eggs, echoed Catsimatidis' sentiment on "Fox & Friends" with co-host Ainsley Earhardt, warning that an uptick in demand coinciding with labor, freight and vendor issues may soon hamper egg supply.

So if shelves that normally hold meat and eggs are already bare in your area, they may be staying that way for a while.

And if the shelves that normally hold meat and eggs are not bare in your area, you may want to grab what you can while you still have the opportunity to do so.  The shortages are escalating, and shelves appear to be getting emptier with each passing hour.  

If fear of Omicron can do this, what would our country look like during a major long-term national emergency?

You might want to start thinking about that.

In recent months I have been writing a lot of articles about this supply chain crisis, but even I didn't anticipate that things would be this bad in early 2022.

If we simply had enough workers to do all of the jobs that needed to be done, that would go a long way toward resolving this crisis.

In industry after industry, vast numbers of workers seem to have "disappeared" from the system, and this is causing a whole host of problems.  For instance, FedEx is warning that a lack of staff will result in significant delays...

FedEx Corp warned on Friday that rising cases of Omicron variant has caused staff shortage and delay in shipments transported on aircraft.

"The explosive surge of the COVID-19 Omicron variant has caused a temporary shortage of available crew members and operational staff," the company said.

I don't know why FedEx is using the word "temporary", because they have been operating without enough people for many months.

Of course it is just human nature to want to put a positive spin on things.  

Looking ahead, our economy is now the number one thing that Americans are concerned about...

The U.S. economy is the top priority for Americans, with inflation worries rising and pandemic-related fears waning, a poll released Monday showed.

Sixty-eight percent of Americans mention the economy in some way when asked an open-ended question about the top five priorities for the government to work on in 2022, according to a year-end poll taken by the Associated Press. Just 37 percent cited the virus, down from 53 percent a year earlier.

The American people want the supply chain crisis to be resolved, they want inflation to go back down, and they want life to return to the way that it used to be.

Unfortunately, none of those things are going to happen.

The good news is that at least things are better in this country than they are in much of the rest of the globe.

For example, people in Cuba are now waiting up to 11 hours in line just to get some food...

"I spent almost all night here just to buy something. It is not easy, it is a big sacrifice just to be able to eat," shopper Edelvis Miranda, 47, told AFP at a market in Havana last week.

The homemaker had taken her place in the queue at about 1:00 am, and finally left around 11 hours later, just before noon.

So be thankful for the blessings that we still have.

Hopefully we will get some short-term relief and store shelves will start to look better once this wave of Omicron fades and warmer temperatures arrive.

But nothing is going to keep inflation from continuing to spiral out of control.  According to CNBC, the median income in this country has actually fallen over the past two years even as the cost of living has risen substantially...

As consumers pay more for everything from groceries to gasoline, household income is failing to keep pace with a higher overall cost of living, according to recent reports.

Over the past two years, median income fell 3% while the cost of living rose nearly 7%, due, in part, to rising housing and medical costs.

In an attempt to keep making ends meet, U.S. consumers have now gone into more debt than ever before...

The average U.S. household with debt now owes $155,622, or more than $15 trillion altogether, including debt from credit cards, mortgages, home equity lines of credit, auto loans, student loans and other household obligations -- up 6.2% from a year ago.

In America today, most people are just barely scraping by from month to month.

Living paycheck to paycheck is not a good place to be, but that is reality for the vast majority of our population.

So when economic conditions get extremely bad in this country, most Americans are not going to have any sort of a financial cushion to fall back on.

It has become exceedingly clear that our health authorities are completely incapable of defeating the pandemic, and it has also become exceedingly clear that our leaders in Washington are completely incapable of fixing the economy.

And if you think that things are bad now, just wait until we get a few more years down the road.  Virtually everything that Joe Biden and his minions do makes things even worse, and we still have at least three more years of either him or Kamala Harris in the White House.

If you are waiting for the government to pull us out of this mess, you are going to be waiting an awfully long time.

Decades of very foolish decisions have brought us to this point, and it would take a miracle of epic proportions to turn things around now.

Originally published at Economic Collapse Blog - reposted with permission.