My grocery store has had shortages lately in the meat department. Prices at the gas pump have risen from under $2/gallon to over $3. The news reports that product delivery is backed up in our ports, across the country and globally. The city swimming pools have been running reduced hours due to lifeguard shortages. Many local stores, restaurants and service providers have “Help Wanted” signs posted and warn of delays due to staffing shortages.
Nobody should be surprised by this.
In response to Covid, we shut down the US economy for over a year. In some places and situations, the shutdown was quite severe. Stores and restaurants were closed for months. Then, once reopened, there were significant limitations on what they could offer, to who and when. Then, even worse, reopening and closings under different rules kept happening, making it impossible for businesses to run.
As soon as businesses closed, orders stopped being placed. Workers were furloughed (aka fired). Factories stopped production.
Even if everyone wanted to society to “go back to normal” it’s going to take time to ramp up.
Back when I managed sales teams, I would allocate 3-9 months to “ramp up” a new hire. This meant, when I hired a new rep, I didn’t expect them to be up to speed until they had that much time in the job. My old boss, Scott Henderson had a great one liner about this.
Nine women can’t make a baby in a month.
– Scott Henderson
And so, as the world gradually reopens because Covid is under control or because we’ve decided to live with it, we can expect it will take months, and in some cases years, for business and society to get back to “normal”.
Some things may be changed forever. I suspect most will return to some sort of baseline like we had before.
In the meantime, there’s no need for panic.