[glenjamin]

I chatted to a staff member on the checkout of my local coop supermarket

She said that every shelf item is ordered on a JIT basis as the store stock levels require them - there are no standing orders to a store

Based on that, I presume they didn’t really know what any store would need

Even when they were struggling my local store still had a decent stock of lots of stuff - just some shelves were empty

[bobthepanda]

You could (and people did) run this in the pre-internet days with basically just phone calls and a desk to receive them. The problem is that by now this represents an incredible increase in manpower required overnight.

[grues-dinner]

And you need a process to follow. You can't just have nearly 4000 supermarkets ringing up HQ at random and reading out lists of 1000 items each. Then what? Back when a supermarket chain did operate like that, the processes like "fill in form ABC in triplicate, forward two to department DEF for batching and then the forward one to department GHI for supplier orders and they produce forms XYZ to send to department JKL for turning into orders for dispatch from warehouses". And so on and so on. You can't just magic up that entire infrastructure and knowledge even if you could get the warm bodies to implement it. Everyone who remembers how to operate a system like that is retired or has forgotten the details, all the forms were destroyed years ago and even the buildings with the phones and vacuum tubes and mail rooms don't exist.

Of course you could stand up a whole new system like that eventually, but you could also use the time to fix the computers and get back to business probably sooner.

But I imagine during those 3 weeks, there were a lot of phone calls, ad-hoc processes being invented and general chaos to get some minimal level of service limping along.

[chatmasta]

I remember when I was a teenager working the register at a local store. The power went out one day, and we processed credit cards with a device that imprinted the embossed card number onto a paper for later reconciliation.

That wouldn’t work today for a number of reasons but it was cool to see that kind of backup plan in place.

[chatmasta]

In my case all the perishable shelves were empty - no fruit, no vegetables, no meat, no dairy. I checked every few days for multiple weeks and it wasn’t until three weeks after the incident I was able to buy chicken again.

It’s possible they were ordering some default level of stock and I just didn’t go at the right time to see it, but it sure looked like they were missing the inventory… when I first asked the lady “is the food missing because of the bank holiday?” and she said “no because of the cyber attack” I thought she was joking! It reminded me of the March 2020 shelves.