GREENVILLE N.C. (WNCT) – People have been going to stores, grabbing the essentials they need to stay at home and avoid the coronavirus.
It has many people wondering why is it taking stores so long to restock things like toilet paper, wipes, and meat?
Logistics professor Dr. Mark Angolia from East Carolina University says there’s more to it than what’s on or not on the shelf.
“It’s part of the whole supply chain concept. If you think of the supply chain as a series of links, each one of the links represents a store. We only see it at the supermarket level. That supermarket has to get their order from somebody,” said Dr. Mark Angolia, Associate Professor at East Carolina University.
Keeping things in stock is a struggle for stores, especially when staples are flying off the shelves because of panic.
“A lot of people run out and bought more than they needed for normal usage in a given week,” said Angolia.
Dr. Angolia says stores are not prepared to have people come in and buy out their entire inventory of some items.
“The inventory system just isn’t geared to handle that kind of change,” Angolia said.
Stores also have to deal with unpredictable delivery times when they try to restock.
“It is very hard to say the response time for the industry. Really there’s so many variables that go into that, their suppliers, how healthy their people are,” Angolia said.
