The Fragile Nature Of Supply Chains And Why Even Dave Lewis Will Struggle With This Hospital Pass
Today marks the day when former Tesco boss Dave Lewis gets behind his new desk and begins the unenviable task of advising the government on how to fix the supply chain crisis which is engulfing the whole country.
It’s a bit like saying, “oh and Dave, whilst you’re at it, could you have a word with the Taliban?”
Time was when supply chains meant trucks and sheds and we never gave it a second thought. But for those of us old enough to remember, it’s all a grim reminder of growing up in the seventies.
Because over the years we’ve become accustomed to energy, produce and just about anything being on tap and in seemingly limitless supply. There will be many who have never lived through a fuel crisis or seen so many empty shelves.
Now, it would be easy to blame it all on Covid, or Brexit, or the mainstream media, or on pretty much anything but our own behaviour. But what remains a truth is that low cost, just in time supply chains are, by their very nature, fragile, and easily broken. They’re as good as the strength of the weakest link, and it doesn’t take much to upset the ecosystem.
Fruit pickers, lorry drivers, the price of gas, power cuts in China — almost anything you care to think of is connected in one way or other. Who would have made the link between the cost of gas, the manufacture of fertiliser and it’s byproduct carbon dioxide, with an imminent threat to the supply of fresh and packaged food produce?
Like a lazily looped ball being tossed to him in front of a marauding pack of snarling forwards, Dave Lewis has just been delivered a hospital pass of epic proportions.
That he has accepted the challenge is testament to the man who saved Tesco, but, short of reversing decades of decline, building a couple of dozen nuclear power stations, and persuading millennials that driving a lorry for a living is a great career move, he’s up against it a little.
And whilst he’s still figuring out who’s going to pluck turkeys this year, we’ll all be out stockpiling everything we can lay our hands on.
Because the notion that we’re somehow better off on our own and that we’re collectively going to put the ‘great’ back into Great Britain is beginning to wear a little thin. Three month visa Pierre? ‘Non!’
Add to the mix that the Met police can’t be asked to do anything about our wayward Prince with dodgy friends, or people who insist on gluing themselves to motorways and holding the country to ransom.
It’s the perfect storm to beat all perfect storms and the timing couldn’t be worse. At the worst possible time, we have the worst possible government and a prime minister who displays a remarkable penchant for taking a break just at the wrong time, and it all starts to become overwhelmingly depressing.
Perhaps he’s plotting on how to ‘save’ Christmas? And the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Because, deny your average Brit their God given right to exist in a self-induced alcoholic haze for two weeks every year, and Insulate Britain will seem like a toddler having a tantrum in the frozen food aisle.
Let’s just hope there are enough candles to go round.
