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A comment on The Great Toilet Paper Scare of 1973 (2014). Parent comment

Re:The Great Toilet Paper Scare of 1973 (2014) by megous on Monday March 23, 2020 @09:44PM (#22670961)
For example here, a large rice "manufacturer" (distributor?) at normal times has pre-orders from asia for deliveries 3 months in advance for typical amounts that are sold. If people start buying at 5-10x the normal rate, it will deplete the current stock quickly and it will take time to ramp up the deliveries and packaging. Also intermediate storage facilities and silos/packaging lines are not inflatable. So it's not all that easy to ramp up distribution 3x.
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Re:The Great Toilet Paper Scare of 1973 (2014) by ClumsyPilot on Tuesday March 24, 2020 @12:02AM (#22671758)
In most if the world there had been a reduction in grain storage capacity, and may stores were knocked down and repurposed. We optimised into 'Just-in-time' supply chain so hard, there is no slack in the system to handle a crysis, it's too fragile.
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Re:The Great Toilet Paper Scare of 1973 (2014) by thaumasiotes on Monday March 23, 2020 @10:32PM (#22671283)
> a large rice "manufacturer" (distributor?)

Both concepts would seem to apply, and to be different people, but a rice manufacturer would usually be called a farmer.

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Re:The Great Toilet Paper Scare of 1973 (2014) by rsynnott on Tuesday March 24, 2020 @07:01AM (#22673776)
Eh, nearly all rice that people buy is post-processed to various degrees (brown rice has the outer husk removed, white rice also has an inner layer removed), so manufacturing capacity is also a real concern.
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Re:The Great Toilet Paper Scare of 1973 (2014) by lonelappde on Monday March 23, 2020 @11:12PM (#22671516)
Most rice farmers don't order their rice delivered from a different continent.
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Re:The Great Toilet Paper Scare of 1973 (2014) by thaumasiotes on Tuesday March 24, 2020 @12:07AM (#22671802)
Well, they might, but they wouldn't be reselling rice they'd ordered. That would tend to defeat the idea of making your own rice.

More relevantly, it's not at all implausible for a farming operation to be selling rice on another continent, and to schedule shipments several months in advance.

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