Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020 and still today we face a severe food shortage in America. At the beginning of the pandemic, people were hoarding toilet paper, canned foods, and medicine causing stores to run out of a variety of products. As a result, certain stores were limiting products such as toilet paper to one package per household. Sometimes, people would walk into Ralphs in the morning to a completely empty store.
As a result, many started buying supplies online in order to fulfill their basic needs and stocks like Amazon went through the roof. According to Joe Tenebruso, a stock broker, " if you purchased Amazon on Jan. 1, 2020, you'd be up a sizzling 78% today. That's a $7,800 profit on a $10,000 investment. But if you'd invested in Amazon while the stock market was crashing in March, you'd have even more." The reason that Amazon was able to avoid these extreme supply shortages which normal convenience stores were experiencing was their staff. According to Forbes, "instead of cutting pays and jobs, they raised the pay and hired more than 100k warehouse and delivery workers to keep up with the demand."
Still today, two years after the beginning of the pandemic, we are still facing food shortages. Restraunts cannot get the ingredients to make the foods on their menu, causing less traffic and sometimes a full shutdown of restraunts. In addition, grocery and convenience stores cannot get a variety of supplies including toilet paper, canned foods, etc.
But now, the food shortage is not due to panicking hoarders but rather due to the labor shortage. There is a lack of employees due to the lack of desire to work. I believe that people became lazy during the "stay at home orders" and got used to remaining home doing absolutely nothing all day everyday. Therefore, less people have the desire to work now that life is back to normal. Few people want to live the reality of the fast paced world we lived in before March 2020, but rather they want to live the slow paced world which existed after March 2020. People in America cannot be forced to work, after all it is a free country. So, until we change our mentality, we will continue to face severe food shortages. I pray that we can turn this around for the sake of the businesses, children, and homeless.
I think that COVID made some people complacent with staying at home, however I think that there is a larger issue of wages for unskilled labor. As society continues to make more physically demanding jobs obsolete with innovation, people are less likely to exert their bodies for less than they collect with unemployment. I think these issues were made prevalent by the pandemic but will continue to become exacerbated by innovation and lack of sufficient compensation.
I think that this is a little harsh. Yes, there is a food shortage and supply issues across the country, but you have to keep in mind the conditions these people were working in before the pandemic. Not every industry (especially the supply channel industries) are good to work for--a lot of these industries have terrible working conditions and long days with less than minimum wage paid under the table so the C-suites can earn a large profit. Covid was a big eye opener for a lot of individuals and a lot of them are standing up for what they deserve. I believe people need to get paid more or have better working conditions.
I would argue that the so called "Great Resignation" is less a result of people becoming lazy due to the stimulus check and stay at home orders, and more a result of people being pushed to their limit by an exploitative system. If minimum wage can't earn you a place to live, and it puts you at risk of a virus that can have lasting and debilitating effects, why should someone bother? The system we live in continuously funnels money upwards in society, so as the minimum wage struggles to be pushed a cent higher, inflation has already rendered the struggle useless for working people. CEO's are incentivized to produce ever growing profits for shareholders, so forget the concept that…