This Side of the Pond

Spare a thought for my homeland this week, which is quickly running out of… well, everything. From chicken wings to home heating, my countrymen are lacking in even the most basic of commodities thanks to a comedy of errors.

If you thought we had it bad here during ToiletpaperGate, you should see the state of the supermarket shelves in Britain. The temptation is to look for a single issue that’s causing the scarcity, but it’s actually down to a long list of smaller issues adding up into one giant problem.

For instance, a bunch of foods and drinks are difficult to find in the supermarkets because we’ve got nobody to drive them there. At this time, there’s an estimated shortage of 100,000 drivers in the trucking industry.

This is partly due to the poor conditions of the job and partly because we decided Brexit was a good idea, which means tougher migration rules, which means all the truckers who originated in other European countries have buggered off back home. The pandemic then twisted the knife by making it difficult to train and test new drivers.

Meanwhile, a lot of Brits are crossing their fingers for a warm winter, because a surge in the price of natural gas has sent energy suppliers bust across the nation. We do produce our own gas, but we import half of what we need from Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Unfortunately, last year’s cold winter had a huge impact on demand and reserves were not replenished over the summer because many of the big producers were catching up on the maintenance that had to be postponed due to pandemic lockdowns. This may mean serious shortages in the coming months and is almost certain to cause household bills to skyrocket.

Someone should probably alert the research center in Gillette, because another of the things we’re running out of is carbon dioxide. You wouldn’t have thought that would be a problem, considering that we’ve heard for so many years about the evils of carbon, but that’s only because most of us don’t spend our days brewing fizzy drinks.

The Soft Drinks Association put out a warning last week that it was reaching the end of its supplies and would soon not be able to make any more soda. The CO2 is necessary both to extend the shelf life and add those all-important bubbles. I suppose the clue was in the name, but I’ll admit I’d never really given the process of “carbonation” much thought until now.

Why is this happening? Because most of the CO2 used in the UK is a by-product of making fertilizer, which is itself in trouble because of that gas shortage I mentioned earlier. In this instance, a wholesale supplier of gas from this side of the pond has cut back supply to two of our biggest fertilizer factories.

If you’re quietly dismissing a bubble shortage as no big deal because you don’t drink soda, you should probably know that we’re having a beer crisis too. The truck driver shortage is again part of the problem, but it’s also down to the trade barriers we created by going through with Brexit, which means we’ve messed with our own supply of beloved European beers.

You’re not going to be able to replace your soda with a milkshake from McDonald’s, either, because we’ve also run out of those. And don’t bother heading for popular chain restaurant Nando’s, because even if they can hand you a cola drink, they’ll still have to admit that they haven’t got any chicken.

This is partly due to the delivery problems, partly an issue of low staff numbers and also connects back to the CO2 issue (because it’s used to stun poultry and pigs before slaughter), but the upshot is that they don’t have the main ingredient for a menu entirely based on poultry.

The same thing happened to the world’s favorite chicken-based fast food joint not long ago, and there was a collective gasp of horror across the nation. Apparently, the police of East London were forced to issue a statement that there is no point calling to report an emergency when KFC runs out of wings.

Just to keep the spiral spinning, fresh foods are in scarce supply not because our British farmers took the year off, but because they can’t find enough people to pick their crops. This is another side effect of the Brexit exodus, which has led to labor shortages in the meat packing and fruit picking jobs.

The crops that do get picked are often not getting to stores, again because of the truck driver problem. One Sussex grower has reported throwing away up to 600 tons of zucchini because of all the vacancies in its workforce.

Many of these issues are also due to the “pingdemic,” in which the government attempted to notify people via text message when they needed to quarantine, but got a little carried away and ended up telling almost 700,000 people to self-isolate in a single week. You can imagine the impact on businesses, with some retailers reporting one in five staff members were absent at any one time.

Now we have a fuel shortage, too, which apparently has come about because we all decided there might be a fuel shortage and panicked our way to the nearest gas station. It’s like the toilet paper woes of yore, only the lines are longer.

The UK’s biggest dairy supplier said recently that a quarter of its supermarket milk deliveries aren’t getting through because of the lack of drivers. Doctors are rationing blood test vials, Coca Cola is having issues because of a shortage of – of all things – aluminum cans and the UK’s largest retailer of bicycles is having trouble with its supply chain. Worst of all, there is now talk of there not being enough turkeys for the holidays.

I could go on, and it’s nothing short of a catastrophe. A perfect storm of problems has led to thousands of empty shelves and chilly living rooms. The nation has been warned not to panic buy, but I think we can all guess how well that’s going.

I know we all prefer to put the simplest possible spin on things to make the deluge of daily news a little easier to digest, but in this case there’s no single entity available to take the blame. If there’s a lesson we can all learn from those empty supermarket shelves, it’s that the truth is often the polar opposite of obvious.