“Topless” cold drink from Elementary Coffee Co.
Cup, meet lid.
Or not. The world’s supply shortage has oozed down to the lowliest essentials at your friendly, albeit slightly frazzled, local business. As the holiday shopping season nears, watch for imaginative workarounds.
“We’ve had to get super creative,” said Andrea Grove, owner of Elementary Coffee Co. in Harrisburg. “For a long time, we couldn’t get cold cup lids. So, on our Twitter posts, we said, ‘Yeah, we’re going topless, and please bear with us.’ People loved that.”
Local business owners are an overworked but agile sort. They tend to tell the same story, managing fairly well in COVID’s first wave, but getting hobnailed by the second.
Diane Krulac, owner of Brittle Bark in Mechanicsburg and Cocoa Creek Chocolates in Camp Hill, first called her bevy of suppliers in March 2020.
“Everybody felt we would be OK, but it slowly degraded,” she said. “By far, it has been the worst impact this year.”
For Krulac, there are the chocolate slowdowns caused by barriers of shipping across borders and the Atlantic Ocean. And then there is packaging. Krulac’s boxes hold truffles in quantities from a few to a few dozen. One supplier has delivered them for years.
“All of a sudden, he’s out of stock and doesn’t know when he’s going to make them,” Krulac said.
What the Heck?
When nationalist trends of, ahem, four or five years ago drove supply chains from global to domestic, the U.S. economy had time to adapt, said Penn State Smeal College of Business economist Fariborz Ghadar. Then came the COVID tsunami. Manufacturers shut down or restricted operations. Customers kept available supplies for themselves.
Things smoothed out, but then COVID returned. The same shortages bedeviling computer chips began haunting supplies of boxes, packaging, whatever. Plus, aging workers in the logistics and other high-risk sectors “basically said, ‘The hell with it, I’m retiring now,’” Ghadar said.
Take away port workers to unload containers and truck drivers to haul the goods, and let the logjam begin.
“To top that off, the big guys have more power to get first in line,” said Ghadar. “If you’re Amazon, you have priority in the eyes of the manufacturer. If you’re poor Joe and Nancy who’s got a shop, you have no priority.”
Those conglomerates further aggravated the supply chain by preordering for the holiday shopping season. Krulac, for one, followed a supplier’s advice to “order big” this fall.
“It puts you at the head of the line,” she said. “That’s just the packaging. That’s not even the chocolate. I order much earlier in anticipation of waiting, and that’s worked really well, too.”
A Stinking Lid
Grove has built her business on a philosophy of sustainability.
She seeks out higher-end, compostable or recyclable to-go supplies. When her regular line of cold cups, lids and combos petered out, she found a substitute—at about four times the price. To fill the gap, she was ordering two boxes at a time, “which lasts about a week and a half.”
“Oh, my goodness, we’re already struggling for funds,” she would think. “This is going to run us into the ground.”
Talking with her team, they agreed to impose a 35-cent cup charge, while encouraging customers to bring reusable cups because, after all, “COVID’s not really spread that way.”
In Linglestown, St. Thomas Roasters also struggles to find matching lids and, in the words of owner Geof Smith, “gosh-darn cups.”
“The customers have been very understanding,” Smith said. “They all get it. Whatever job they do is probably affected. But you want to put a stinking lid on somebody’s drink cup so they don’t spill it on their lap in the car.”
Coffee supplies have been only minimally problematic for Smith, but in packaging, food and shipping, he confronts one snafu after another. Unsealed packages of gluten-free cookies that had to be returned. Sara Lee running out of cinnamon buns. The shipment of products mistakenly sent to Florida, turning a two-day delivery timeline into two weeks.
“And then, two shipments later, they sent it to Maryland,” he said. He attributes that little “fubar” to untrained newbies called up to fill staffing shortages.
And here in the age of store signs declaring, “Due to a shortage of . . .”, Smith posted a sign of his own, along the lines of, “If you’re staying in the shop, please don’t take a lid. We’d like to give the lids to people in their cars.”
Not every small business is feeling the pinch, so far. You can still get your sugar fix with a red velvet or Georgia peach cobbler cupcake in a jar from Alisha Perry, aka That Cupcake Lady. She finds her ingredients online or at local grocery and restaurant supply stores.
“I’m grateful that I’m not in that boat,” she said.
Night Owls
The search for alternatives, plus the brain-wracking accounting needed to avoid price hikes for customers, drain time that small business owners can’t delegate to their nonexistent underlings.
“It’s a huge mess of energy that gets expended,” said Grove.
Krulac’s husband wondered why she was on the computer until midnight. Her challenge, she said, is finding supplies that mirror those pictured on her website, for online orders. A change in packaging would require new photos. Even a search for 1-inch red ribbon demanded finding a supplier with a quality product.
“Invariably, and I’m sure it happened to other businesses like me, you don’t have a relationship with those suppliers,” she said. “You’re not buying in volume because you don’t know what your volume might be, because you might not be getting your original stuff from your original people.”
It’s all for the customers.
“You don’t want to disappoint them,” Krulac said. “They’re going through this whole pandemic, too. They want some normalcy. They want a good-quality product in a beautiful box for the price they’ve been paying all along. They want everything to be the way it was. We’ve tried to do that and have been pretty close to accomplishing that.”
Early Birds
Ghadar sees an end in spring 2022, when businesses adjust to their workforce challenges and the ports clear up. But he has advice for 2021’s holiday shoppers.
“Do your Christmas shopping early, and get whatever is there,” he said. “If you want something, you better not wait for a price change. If you don’t like this color, and you want another color—well, that other color is just not going to come.”
Krulac recently bought 50 cases of chocolate, saving more than $1,000, and prompting groupthink on finding storage in every nook and cranny. She is now committed to building her arsenal of supplier relationships.
“Absolutely!” she said. “Absolutely! We have great relationships with multiple suppliers that we never had before. That’s good because we have a backup. Every single thing we use, I now have a backup, and that took hours and hours of time, but that’s OK, because I have a backup.”
Grove, of the topless cold cups, sees a societal wake-up call. In this idyll, consumers bring their own cups, and businesses dream up incentives for BYO cups and bags.
“Maybe it’s getting people to plan more about what to do with their day, ideally,” she said. “It’s hard. It’s a struggle like everything else. In a world based on single-use products, it’s not easy to change that mentality overnight.”
In the meantime, she’s smiling through.
“Now,” she said, “there are shortages in hot cups.”
Learn More
To find out more about the businesses in this story, visit the following websites:
Brittle Bark Co.: www.brittlebark.com
Cocoa Creek Chocolates: www.cocoacreekchocolates.com
The Cupcake Lady: www.thatcupcakelady.com
Elementary Coffee Co.: www.elementarycoffee.co
St. Thomas Roasters: www.stthomasroasters.com
If you like what we do, please support our work. Become a Friend of TheBurg!
