Statewide Iowa — Some listeners might have thought she was crying wolf, when they heard a logistics and supply chain expert from the University of Iowa say to buy their Christmas gifts back in July. The predictions were correct from Jen Blackhurst, a U of I professor of business analytics, and we’re now seeing products ranging from video games to sirloin steaks have vanished from store shelves.
Many retailers still haven’t recovered from the complications of the pandemic and she says the perfect storm she warned about four months ago is hitting us now, and hard. Plus, it’s not just products we wanted to put under the tree that are hard to find.
If you ignored the warnings and still haven’t completed — or even started — your Christmas shopping, never fear, there’s still plenty of products out there to buy, however…
She implores shoppers -not- to resort to panic buying, like happened in recent months with essentials from cleaning products to hand sanitizer.
So just when will things be “back to normal” for us? Blackhurst predicts it will be “at least well into 2022” before the supply chain again has its many links aligned.
