Many people going grocery shopping recently have come out empty-handed as the omicron variant of COVID-19 has disrupted food supply chains.
Over the past few weeks and days, photos of empty shelves have popped up on social media.
The new omicron variant of COVID-19 has helped cause the shortages at grocery stores.
When workers at jobs such as meatpacking factories or warehouses are out, products end up being delayed getting onto trucks for delivery. Furthermore, if truckers are out sick, they aren’t able to deliver food products to stores, resulting in empty shelves and unhappy shoppers.
“So what’s changed now in the past couple weeks? Obviously, there’s omicron,” said John Rosen, an adjunct economics professor at the University of New Haven. He noted that the new strain of the virus affects supply chains, and thus grocery stores, in a number of ways.
The first is simply the scale of the virus’s spread. While it is believed to be less severe than other iterations of COVID-19, omicron is thought to be much more contagious than previous variants.
Since its emergence, omicron has exploded across the country while breaking and re-breaking records. Daily cases are about three times what they were during the country’s previous largest spike of the virus about a year ago.
Because so many people are contracting COVID-19, the sheer volume of people out of work has worsened supply chains. Even for those with mild cases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said infected people should stay home from work and isolate for several days so as not to add to the spread.
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Another way omicron is affecting grocery stores is through schools. Some schools have gone back to remote learning, which means that in many cases, parents need to watch their children during the day.
“People who work at grocery stores tend to be part-time people who have young children, so [when] the schools are closed, like they are in Chicago, that has a disproportionate impact on things like retail stores,” Rosen told the Washington Examiner.
Social media users have taken to Twitter to post photos of empty shelves across the country. Some on the Right have placed the blame on President Joe Biden and have promoted the hashtag #BareShelvesBiden, encouraging people to post pictures online from their local grocery stores.
Deric West is the president of Honeoye Falls Marketplace and Mendon Meadows Marketplace, two grocery stores located south of Rochester, New York. West said shortages of meat have been especially pronounced and that recently, items such as chicken breasts and pork, have been harder to get in stock. He attributes these most recent shortages to surging cases of the omicron variant that have “decimated” production plants where the food originates.
West told the Washington Examiner that he has witnessed problems with shortages firsthand throughout most of the pandemic.
One concern when there are visible shortages is panic-buying — when people think there will be a scarcity of an item for a while and rush to the store to purchase that item in bulk. The most obvious recent example was toilet paper at the start of the pandemic. West said he hasn’t yet seen major instances of panic-buying in recent days but did note that his stores have seen an uptick in sales since omicron began surging.
West said his stores have largely been spared the dramatic scenes of emptying grocery stores that have proliferated on social media. He said a major factor that might be insulating his stores from the empty shelves seen across the country is that his business uses multiple vendors. His stores have about half a dozen vendors just for meat products alone, so if one of the vendors has an outbreak and faces supply chain disruptions, there are still products from other vendors that make it to the store.
The Food Industry Association’s vice president of industry relations, Doug Baker, said the pandemic “has transformed almost every aspect of the food retail industry” and that despite the supply chain issues and problems with getting food on shelves, the supply of food is still plentiful.
“A combination of several factors, from labor and transportation shortages to recent extreme weather events, continues to impact the movement of food through the supply chain,” Baker said in a statement. “These issues can be difficult for grocery stores to predict, as they’re often regional and inconsistent.”
While the omicron variant may be exacerbating the supply chain situation recently, the situation was far from good to begin with.
Another cause of shortages is the so-called “great resignation,” named as such because so many people are quitting their jobs, causing labor to be hard to come by for some businesses, particularly in lower-paying industry spaces where grocery stores and warehouses operate.
About 4.5 million workers quit their jobs in November, up from 4.2 million the month before. The number of people quitting is the highest since the country began keeping records of the statistic about two decades ago and is equivalent to about 3% of the workforce.
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“The low-wage sectors directly impacted by the pandemic continued to be the source of much of the elevated quitting,” said Indeed Hiring Lab’s director of research, Nick Bunker. “For example, the quits rate was 6.9% for accommodation and food services.”
It is unclear when the supply chain situation will fully resolve given the uncertainty of the matter and the multiplicity of variables at play. Once omicron begins to peak and new cases fall, however, grocery stores will likely see some improvement.
