Two thirds of my tenants never ate at home before Covid. With Starbucks down the street, some did not have coffee makers. About half of the restaurants converted to take-out but many including Starbucks are closed. For many restaurants, food is a loss-leader for profitable alcohol sales. It wasn't until yesterday that our state revised the order to allow them to sell alcohol to-go. Too late, everyone stocked up.bostonimproper wrote: ↑Mon Mar 30, 2020 8:32 amIs there a particular reason folks expect food shortages or is everyone just limiting number of grocery visits and deliveries due to fomites?
So, the shift from empty kitchen cabinets to two month supply for a whole class of people who never required anything from that supply chain put a stress on it that has still not recovered and will continue to be overwhelmed.
On the supply side, food has to be grown, picked and processed. The State Department shut down visa processing at the beginning of the crisis but just waived a bunch of requirements for processing H-2A visas including waiving interviews for returning guest workers.
But legal guest workers are a drop in the bucket of workers needed. I don't know the percentage who are illegal but I believe it is pretty high. They have to get across the border and up to the fields at a time when border enforcement is high and there is nobody on public transit to blend in with. If you were a migrant worker somewhere in central Mexico and the government is not preaching how Covid will kill millions of people, would you leave your family behind and set out on a perilous journey like that?
Maybe if this gets bad enough we will begin to see American field workers.
It definitely calmed me down considering other grocery stores have been picked dry.
