The supply chain drives households, economy
In the real time world of household logistics and divisions of labor, I’m the one who takes stuff out, cleans it off or puts it away. My wife is head of procurement, supply, and production. In short, she’s the chief cook. I’m a bottle washer.
One of the benefits of reaching the middle-age decades of life and being empty nesters is a mastery of the daily dance of household supply chains where goods come in, meals are produced, dishes get washed and empty boxes, containers and garbage moves out.
My wife, Lynn, is a great cook. Kids come home and guests come over just for one of her meals. I am a daily beneficiary. That is if everyone shows up for their shift. Lynn recently had to call in sick at the last minute. For dinner that night I had a small bowl of potato chips, some peanuts and a leftover half of a sandwich.
Supply chains can break down quickly when illness hits. The world learned that during the pandemic.
The first time most people heard the term supply chain was when it stopped working.
What economists broadly refer to as the supply chain is a big part of the American and world economies. It’s the production and movement of goods and products across continents, oceans, and states so the Pringles can and Pepto Bismol bottle are on the Walgreens shelf when you arrive and the Amazon package on the doorstep two days after its ordered.
Ours is a consumer-driven economy. And consumers today have little tolerance for products not being available when they want them. They also have little to no tolerance for the trucks that deliver them or the facilities that move them either to a store or their house. The much-dreaded warehouse. More hated in the Lehigh Valley than New Jersey license plates But that’s nothing new.
People have limited patience for the electricity shutting off, but they don’t like power lines. They want the trash picked up on time and hauled away but don’t want any landfills nearby. The demand of consumers is simple: make sure the product is on the shelf or at the door but keep the trucks and power lines off the roads and take the trash away but don’t dump it here. It’s okay if it’s somewhere else. Now, go and figure it out.
There’s a term in the semiconductor industry called Moore’s law. It’s really an observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, a co-founder and former chairman of Intel Corp., that the number of transistors on a microchip would double every two years. It was that exponential growth of technology that made possible the internet, the mobile phone, the personal computer, streaming and artificial intelligence.
All of this forever changed the speed of things — and consumer habits and expectations. Long forgotten was that somehow America won its independence just two centuries earlier when it took a few months to get a letter to England and armies walked from Massachusetts to Virginia.
While it was possible to telephone long distance in the ‘70s and ‘80s, according to my father, that was only meant for the wealthy unless it took less than one minute. Telephones apparently weren’t there to order take-out food. If you ordered a pizza, you drove and picked it up. I didn’t know about Chinese food until I was away at college. Food was something you made and ate at home. Thanks to my wife, that’s still the case for us.
When we do dine out, I’m amazed at who is out there. Pretty much everyone. Teenagers, young families with kids, senior citizens and everyone in between. Often at restaurants that are far from cheap.
Dining in requires someone to cook and shop. It’s not quick or convenient but it’s less expensive. Even with inflation on groceries, the fastest way to reduce household costs is to eat more meals at home. Approach dining out as a treat and eating at home as the norm. That includes fast food.
Along with Grubhub and other services providing the convenience of food cooked by someone else delivered to the door there is the exploding phenomenon of people not leaving the car to pick up fast food and coffee. The pandemic and technology have increased both. Three years after the arrival of COVID, drive-thru traffic was up 30% from 2019 to 2022, leading many chain restaurants to redesign buildings. A Chick-fil-A in Atlanta will open soon that can handle 75 cars at
once with drivers passing under the kitchen and the food moving by conveyor belt.
Until this design arrives in the Lehigh Valley, I plan to continue skipping the drive through line of 20 cars at Dunkin’ to walk in and grab a coffee.
Maybe it’s easier for us empty nesters to cook at home. For Lynn and me, it’s an alignment of our interests. Lynn loves to shop. I hate it. She thinks first of the product. I think first of the price. In the kitchen, we’re a well-oiled supply chain machine.
I don’t interfere when she cooks. She knows not to get in the way when I clean up.
In his classic letters published as “The Miracle of Mindfulness,” the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn writes of finding gratitude and mindfulness in life’s simple acts, such as washing dishes and cooking.
“The fact that I’m standing there and washing these bowls is a wondrous reality,” Hahn writes. “If we’re only thinking of other things … we are sucked away into the future — and incapable of actually living one minute of life.”
Not to mention it’s a lot cheaper.