I shop HEB and I noticed they were ahead of this thing weeks ago. Their delivery service is terrific and, though quantities are limited and deliveries have to be scheduled several days in advance, you can still buy everything.
The article doesn't mention the huge food bank donations the company has made during the crisis. HEB is a good corporate citizen and a great place to shop. As the story says, thank an HEB employee for everything they're doing right now.
The interesting bit here: this is a company that has a full-time Director of Emergency Preparedness. They've had plans for dealing with a pandemic flu outbreak on the books since the bird flu outbreak of 2005. So when it actually happened, they could just pick up those plans and run with them.
This is remarkable because it's hard to imagine most American companies, which are always looking to squeeze out a little more profit to juice the quarterly report, keeping someone on staff whose full-time job is to plan for what seem in good times like extremely remote contingencies. H-E-B, notably, is privately held.
I dig this. If I were ever blessed with the opportunity to run a private, profitable company these are the types of people I would want to hire and retain. Building a company with a slice of my citizens. My local food distribution company had the volunteer fire chief on payroll in a town that couldn't afford to pay a salary for a full time chief. I think it was a great civic service to let him leave work when we had calls during the day.
Everyone operating at scale in the food supply chain needs an executive with medical/scientific expertise. The risks from foodborne illnesses are real.
It feels like an eternity ago but there were several major food scares, recalls, and deaths, from contaminated vegetables last year.
It probably doesn't hurt that the Texas coast regularly gets hit by hurricanes, so they deal with emergencies (albeit on a smaller scale than this) somewhat frequently.
> This is remarkable because it's hard to imagine most American companies, which are always looking to squeeze out a little more profit to juice the quarterly report
HEB is privately owned and run by the owners. Those are very different incentives than public or VC-backed ventures.
You're still guided by a number. But you've got a different cost of capital, risk profile, and time horizon, as well as room for more stuff in your utility curve. So you will behave differently.
I don't think contingency planning is actually that unusual for large companies. I did Google searches for "$groceryChain director of contingency planning" and found that many major chains have them (via LinkedIn). Also found some for hotel chains, etc.
Emergency preparedness is a tiny subset of contingency planning since real emergencies are so rare compared to mundane day to day problems like a truck breaking down or too many people in operations calling in sick during flu season. The less glamorous parts of the job mostly include calling alternative vendors in a rush trying to get something or someone replaced without making it appear like they're desperate.
Another thing worth noting: HEB is privately (family, I believe) owned. The difference is night and day between their stores/employees and those of the competing grocer in my area that is owned by private equity.
Which could explain the lack of interest in squeezing every bit of profit out of it. For them their name is literally on the business so being prepared to do the right thing is important to them.
I enjoyed watching the video just because it gives an idea how big one of these company's warehouses is. (Best view starts about 0m55s.) Those are some tall shelves, and there are a lot of rows of them.
They're supplying probably millions of people with food, so it makes sense, but I still found the visual impact interesting.
If the st really hits the fan you won't be able to run that freezer for long unless you also have sufficient solar and an ability to run it without grid tie.
There is shelf stable milk. Buying a sensible amount of that in normal times is probably the way to go.
I haven't tried it, but my understanding is that it has the same caramel-sweet flavor that most lactose free milk has, because of the higher heat during pasteurization (UHT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-temperature_process... ). I think the shelf stable is heated more than the lactose milk, which the lactose milk is still plenty noticeable.
Having tried both I would disagree. Shelf stable UHT milk doesn't taste sweet to me at all. That is likely because lactose free milk is made by adding a lactase and then using UHT pasteurization to stop the chemical reaction (and extend the shelf life). This means the lactose is already pre-converted into glucose (and galactose) in this milk. Shelf-stable UHT milk doesn't have lactase added and isn't sweeter than normal milk. At least in my experience.
You can just shake it vigorously to reconstitute it. More places than you may think freeze their milk until they are ready to use it. I personally find that low fat or skim milk takes to unfreezing better.
Eggs last quite a long time. Not that it worries me, my hens laid their first egg today! Believe it or not, people in the Uk actually panic purchased chickens this week.
American eggs have a relatively short shelflife. In order to make it look more marketable they wash and bleach the protective coating. A natural egg should be brown but in America they are all white. If you buy your eggs from a farm you're fine to leave it in the pantry. If you buy it from an American supermarket you'll need to keep it in the fridge.
That is true. Eggshells are fairly porous, otherwise the developing embryo would suffocate. The exterior of the shells are coated with a water soluble film which allows gasses to diffuse through it, but not microbes. When the eggs are washed, this coating is remoevd and shelf life is dramatically reduced. I have kept hens for decades and even done a few tests to confirm.
Just the usual. Make sure they have food, fresh water, grit, calcium and a dust wallow. Sometimes, they can bully each other; I set up coves made from pallets in my chicken pen for them to duck into to avoid line of sight. If you plan to keep roosters, make sure there is plenty of room for them to roam and around five hens each, else they will tend to fight each other. Use square material for the perches, not round. Much easier for them to grip. I ripped 2x4 studs and sanded them smooth. If you can free range the birds, they really like it. Not only will it reduce your garden of weeds and bugs, but they hens lay better.
The washing of American eggs does not affect shelf life. The difference between the European and American approach is just a choice with little to no effect on food safety or shelf life.
Putting aside the awful human toll... I’m looking forward to reading and hearing from demand planners/time series forecasters about how they responded. Both in terms of updating models as well and how they communicated within their companies. One idea to alleviate the future forecasting challenges raise from this would be to add an explanatory variable/flag this time period. Another challenge will be if there are aftershocks and waves of social distancing required which could lead to more panic buying.
Check out the city-oriented forums around the Net for Texas cities. I just sampled cities as diverse as El Paso, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, and Austin, and the article doesn't do justice to how fervently Texans appreciate H-E-B, and how much the company shows its appreciation to its customers. Some quick Googling around in past disasters shows this is a love story that stretches back decades. Costco and H-E-B are possibly this generation's Nordstrom's story.
Nordstrom a decade ago was very well-publicized for its customer service. Example write-up [1]. Could all be PR-drummed-up. But from first-hand experience, at least in my experience they were customer-focused.
Nordstrom was (still is?) notorious for their customer service. Taking anything back, helping customers with whatever requests they had, and generally going much further than a reasonable company would.
(The tire story is half-true it turns out. Nordstrom didn't just occupy a former tire store location, they bought out the company that sold the tires.)
Oh man, that location at 1604 and Bulverde has a legit Texas BBQ attached; you can smell the wood smoke when you get out of your car in the parking lot. Amazing.
On Monday I realized we needed to restock our own shelves for this week. Nothing in large quantities, just trying to be a good citizen. I went to Tom Thumb and they were sold out of most necessity items. Same at Wal Mart. Same at Kroger. I went to HEB and bought a week's worth of everything I needed except eggs which they were sold out of.
HEB, Dr. Pepper and Whataburger are Texas treasures as far as I'm concerned.
Or shiner which made a reasonable beer when everyone else was trying to be bud. I thought they had gotten absorbed, but no they are apparently still independent.
What sucks is the last two aren't "Texan" and haven't been for a while. The original Dr Pepper company hasn't been owned by a Texas firm for decades and Dr Pepper Snapple sued their last iconic bottler, Dublin Dr Pepper, nearly out of existence, but definitely out of bottling cane sugar Dr Pepper, eight years ago. And two years back, the Hobson family cashed in and sold a majority of Whataburger to a private equity firm out of Illinois.
I wonder how much longer the Butt (yes, really) family will keep hold of H-E-B.
If you feel like you need to de-Texas DP and Whataburger, you can replace one of them with Titos which is one of the most incredible growth stories of the last two decades.
Same with YETI and Epic meats. Texas has had incredible success in creating ascendant consumer goods businesses for some time.
If you're ever looking for a cherry cola replacement, Cheerwine in glass bottles is delicious. I have no idea how widely distributed it is outside of NC.
Great rec. I always joke with folks that NC has great food and drinks, it's just that they might end up killing you - Krispy Kreme, Bojangles, Cheerwine, and barbecue. I guess Texas Pete wouldn't really hurt anyone :)
I've just got back from doing an HEB shop about 10 minutes ago, our first shop since the crisis full hit the USA. It was surprisingly pleasant!
There was a short queue to get in (~5 people stood 6 feet apart), but once inside there were very few customers compared to any other time I've been in the store. I got everything that was on my shopping list.
Of the things that I saw labelled as limited to a certain number per transaction, toilet paper was the only one that was completely out of stock (I didn't check hand sanitizer, but assume it was too). I got eggs, milk etc with no problems.
I spoke to the cashier and they said toilet paper sells out by 10am most days.
I'm in Seattle, and the grocery stores here are almost exactly in the same state. 90% back to normal. Just no one's posting on social media the full shelves now.
I just shopped at my local Trader Joe’s here in Utah and they had pretty much everything back in normal stock amounts. Costco though still was out of 5 or 6 staples
"Justen Noakes: So when did we start looking at the coronavirus? Probably the second week in January, when it started popping up in China as an issue. We’ve got interests in the global sourcing world, and we started getting reports on how it was impacting things in China, so we started watching it closely at that point. We decided to take a harder look at how to implement the plan we developed in 2009 into a tabletop exercise. On February 2, we dusted it off and compared the plan we had versus what we were seeing in China, and started working on step one pretty heavily."
Read the article. It is rage-inducing how much better a single grocer did than the federal government with all of its resources. January. Talking with counterparts in China. Executing on existing disaster plans (federal response had one, but ignored it https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/25/trump-coronavirus-n...).
Italy has a per capita figure six times higher than the US. Spain is five times higher. Switzerland is four to five times higher. France and Germany have per capita rates about twice as high (the French figure is much higher in reality, they're not testing anywhere near as well as Germany).
Let me know when the US has six times the per capita cases of Italy, then we'll talk.
Italy currently has a death figure roughly 40 times higher per capita than the US. If you scaled it to the US population, it'd be around 50,000 dead.
Let me know when the US has a per capita death figure 40 times higher than Italy.
Of course nobody wants to look at the disaster going on in the EU. The way the EU has entirely let Italy and Spain down. How Spain is having to beg NATO for supplies because their EU friends are leaving them to fend for themselves. The way China has helped Italy more than the EU. Some more things nobody wants to talk about: the extremely high mortality rates in Italy, Spain, France; the lack of testing in Britain; the lack of basic medical supplies across Western Europe, leaving doctors in Spain and Italy to work with bare hands and without masks; the hyper infection rates among healthcare workers in Western Europe due to poor practices and lack of medical gear; the shift to leaving patients over 60 to die because they can't help them any longer, producing the terrifying death rates in Italy and Spain.
"Spanish army finds care home residents 'dead and abandoned'"
"Israeli doctor in Italy: We no longer help those over 60. Dr. Gai Peleg told Israeli television that in northern Italy, the orders are not to allow those over 60 access to respiratory machines."
> Italy currently has a death figure roughly 40 times higher per capita than the US.
You're off by an order of magnitude. The US has 260/million and Italy has 1275/million. That's 4.9 times higher, not 40.
US cases are currently doubling every 4 days. New cases in Italy have dropped, and they are no longer experiencing exponential growth. If that continues, we'll catch them in about a week.
By "worst" I am assuming per-capita figures. Obviously the US has a larger population than Spain and Italy, so comparing the raw number of cases isn't a fair comparison. On a per capita basis, we're not quite up there with some of Europe yet, but we will be.
But most of the US didn't really get their act together with testing until this week. We're a little delayed both in transmission and in testing, and the US is not showing any deviance from exponential growth at the moment.
NY has done more widespread testing than most states, but lost a lot of time ramping up its hospital capacity (beds, staffing, and equipment). Cuomo issued an order to do that only on Feburary 26. I could imagine not wanting to preemptively take stronger measures like turning convention centers into makeshift hospitals, but not clear why they weren't at least increasing stocks of PPE and generally getting better prepared for a possible influx of cases.
The rate of infectivity here is also reported to be far higher than elsewhere with really fast doubling rates, and early on we had no idea how much it had already spread because of the underdiagnosis and lack of tests. I think Cuomo just had no idea it was actually that bad.
Good response now but slow to pull the trigger on the lockdown. People seem to have forgotten that already! Precious days were wasted before Cuomo finally called a lockdown.
Try winding down a city of 8 million in one day without instilling fear, panic, a run on groceries, etc. Taking three days to slowly get everyone working from home is sound especially when you're just starting to get a grip on the situation. I'm biased though, living in Queens.
Yep. Just a week ago Cuomo was shut down the idea of shelter in place when de Blasio (who had been dragging his feet as well) was suggesting it[1]. This was a day after the Bay Area health officers announced a shelter in place order. He only relented when things really spun out of control.
The fact that people like Cuomo are now being praised for the way they handled this suggests that we aren't going to learn the lessons we need to.
In some respects, China's initial response was poor. The government in Wuhan forced the doctor who was warning about the virus on social media to shut up, and it did not ban large public events quickly enough.
In other respects, China's initial response was excellent. Immediately after the first suspicious cases of pneumonia were reported by local doctors in Wuhan, the Chinese CDC sent a team to Wuhan to investigate. China alerted the WHO just two days later. It then announced the discovery of a new coronavirus about a week after alerting the WHO. It published the genetic sequence of the virus two days after that. Two weeks later, it quarantined Wuhan, a city of over 10 million people. Two weeks may seem like a long time, but compare that to how long it's taken for governments in Western countries to take similarly drastic actions.
Italy and Spain have had far worse responses. Italy's mortality rate is over 10% right now, Spain's is at 7.5% and France's is at 5.7%. These are atrocious outcomes.
Several Western European nations are seeing far higher per capita case loads and death rates.
Several prominent healthcare systems across Europe have proven wildly incompetent so far, including Spain, Italy and Britain (which is barely doing any testing). The famed French healthcare system is proving barely able to handle what's going on there, thus their very high mortality rate.
The U.S. Federal government's response is better characterized as willful incompetence bordering on maliciousness, than a misstep. NY Governor Cuomo and NYC Mayor De Blasio deserve special mention for cynically playing a game of chicken with each other, together with Trump, and the three of them with COVID-19; the losers are the poor people of NYC.
I think the San Francisco Bay Area counties did a pretty decent job (not S. Korea or Singapore, but that's a high bar) and I'm optimistic that they've significantly bent the curve (that's what I see plotting the data), but can't be very confident until after this weekend.
Cuomo's doing fine. He didn't have the data to know how bad it was because the CDC test crapped out, but once it became clear his leadership has been pretty good. No clue what deblasio is smoking though, going to the gym the day before quarantine etc. Never thought the governor would be more popular than the mayor in this state, especially governor Cuomo, but he's stepped up to the challenge
South Korea, Germany and Taiwan have done well. Most other countries really mishandled it. Denial until the last minute with no preparedness even when neighbour countries were already in dire situations.
Given the scale of difficulty, the country has moved swiftly.
It is yet to be seen if it is even possible to organize a shutdown the solve this problem, at India's scale. But, even the naysayers have acknowledged that in this case Modi made good decisions.
Na, they're reacting too late. Given India's size and lack of healthcare infrastructure, they should have shutdown international travel and tested exhaustively early on. They let it get out of control and now are imposing a haphazard shutdown. The shutdown is needed, but there are too many reports of poor people going hungry for days.
South Korea, Taiwan and ... uh, China have done relatively well. They each have the virus under relative control.
I don't see Germany doing anything well except testing. IE, they haven't controlled infecting, which is increasing exponentially[1]. Germany originally had an ideal seeming death rate of only 0.2%.
But that was a rather illusory achievement that could be explained by finding all the infection but not stopping them (they're at 0.6% now, a significant increase and this will naturally continue increasing). By Tomas Pueyo's important calculation, one death implies up to 800 infections (1% death rate plus three weeks of doubling from when the patient contradicted the disease)[2]. So if you did find all those infections, you can see a very low apparent death rate but you wouldn't have reduced the actual death rate or the infection rate and you'd still be hurdling towards the situation of having so many cases your health system is overwhelmed and your death rate shoots up.
Angel Merkel said 30-70% of the country might catch the virus, which is pretty much poisonous "herd immunity" Koolaid that Boris Johnson spouted (now that fatalities have spiked in the UK, he's singing a different tune and I hope Merkel will also).
There's absolutely zero evidence to support that China did well.
What are their real case and death numbers? We'll never know, because they've lied about everything from day one. They have been the exact opposite of transparent about anything.
China only had ~82,000 cases, but Italy, Germany and Spain are all going to surpass that? Yeah right. Inflate China's numbers by 10x and you might be close. In late January / early February they magically changed which cases they were counting toward their official figures, intentionally excluding mild cases that tested positive. That's what produced the instant tapering you see in their case numbers from that date in time forward. It's also why their case growth graph looks so unique - bizarre - compared to everyone else that has had a bad outbreak.
> There's absolutely zero evidence to support that China did well.
There's supply chain evidence that things are going back to normal on China side. They wouldn't be able to hide all these deaths that would happen if they just told the sick people to go back to work.
Meanwhile, there's very little evidence that would suggest their numbers are lies. Sure, they weren't exactly forthcoming at the beginning - but then again, until few days ago, US government was lying even more than they did, and yet we don't assume this means today's numbers are bullshit (as opposed to being limited by still-lacking testing capability).
Sure, Singapore is small, but that’s not the main reason they’ve done so well.
Singapore experienced SARS, which also took the lives of doctors and nurses in addition to their patients. That country’s healthcare system has been stress-tested in a way that most haven’t.
I feel that the successes in those countries result more from their cultures than their governments.
One of the common criticisms of those countries is the singular culture that creates social pressure. Social pressure can go a long way in these sorts of events.
Taking these tiny, mono-cultural, rich countries and comparing them to the world's leading superpower does not make a strong argument.
How do you explain the early government-enforced shutdowns, and expansive testing programs? I think the response from the general population has also been better in some of these countries, but there is a marked difference in the government responses.
Comparing a large multicultural richer country does seem weird.
Indeed a tiny 126 million soul tiny country can not be compared with a country of 330 million souls. Also the USA having 1.5x the GDP / Capita does make Japan the richer country.
These countries unlike the USA have more economically and socially interventionist governments. I do wonder if the culture of Germany is closer to Japan or USA. To tackle a pandemic do you need more leadership or culture?
I mean beyond national security where is USA leadership?
I'd guess they made a mistake in thinking that because the population ratio is greater than 1.5 (it's 2.6), therefore the GDP / Capita ratio they reference is then favoring Japan. That of course would need to be run against actual national GDP, not per capita. US per capita GDP was about 60% higher than Japan as of the end of 2019.
Japan has high population density but a small piece of land, and it is probably the most mono-cultural population of it's size in the world.
I agree that we need in America is stronger leadership. But we shouldn't be looking to the government for leadership. The government should follow the will of the people, not lead it.
Democratic governments act when they feel the people want them to act. The reason the US government didn't act early is because the majority of Americans were not yet concerned about the coronavirus until recently, and it would have been unpopular.
Japan would not have acted so strictly and so early if their culture and respect for community weren't strong. It would have been unpopular and ineffective.
What's needed for Americans to tackle these types of issues better is more trust in the community and stronger citizen leadership.
The social difference is only relevant in that it results in a different governing style. US style lock-downs have so far been very voluntary in nature compared to what several other countries are doing.
Singapore is anything but a mono-cultural country and is only recently rich. Basically through extreme government competence they made themselves rich and yes, their society definitely has Chinese at the top but unlike the US, the society is not completely riven by racial strife.
Singapore has been in the 'first-world' economic tier for at least 30 years. Their economic success is not recent. 30 years ago their GDP per capita was on par with Hong Kong and Spain, ahead of Greece, and far ahead of Portugal or South Korea (and it was nearly 40 times higher than China).
China is a legitimate story of recent economic success. China is only now at a stage of median development that Singapore reached in the 1970s and 1980s.
> Those don't count because otherwise I'd have to retire my tired old screed from the 90's that the government can't do anything right. The government should be run like a business, dagnabit.
You get what you pay for, basically. If governments were to pay top dollar and actually fire incompetent people, I'm sure our world would be a much better place.
> The competence of private companies shouldn't enrage you, that's one of the their strengths.
When you have to compete, you have to develop competence to survive. Only those that don't have to compete (monopolies) or those that survive despite incompetence (bailouts) are the exceptions.
This seems like a bit of an odd concession, considering the businesses that are being impacted the most by the coronavirus are smaller, local businesses which run on thin margins. These local businesses are also often the most competitive because of having to compete with both other local businesses and larger ones.
The competence of private companies only really applies to a very narrow subset of corporations.
> The competence of private companies in the U.S. shouldn't enrage you, that's one of the U.S.'s strengths.
That's a misleading and false generalization. You can't cherrypick one of the better prepared companies to make a statement about companies in general. Especially when there's nonsense all over the news about other companies like GameStop and Guitar Center claiming to be essential retail against all reason: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/business/coronavirus-esse....
How is finding an anecdote a invalidate a generalization? The majority of the most powerful global corporations are US companies. They don’t (in general) get that way by being incompetent.
I'd argue that once you reach a certain level of size, it's very easy to fail upwards.
See: Amazon. They are incompetent in many aspects of their business, but due to their sheer size that incompetence is shielded by their other investments.
This is interesting because the GP, I think, didn't intend to say "private" to mean "privately held", but I think it's worthwhile to note that GameStop and Guitar Center are publicly traded while H-E-B is still family owned.
H-E-B does a lot of things that are more benevolent than the kind of behavior that we're used to seeing from publicly-traded organizations and I can't help but wonder if the private ownership (truly private, as opposed to publicly-traded) has something to do with that.
H-E-B is one of the things I will really miss if I ever have to leave Texas. They're always there any time there is any kind of disaster, to provide relief. I've even heard that they treat their software engineers well (they bought Favor). They're really a one-of-a-kind company. I hope they never IPO.
> H-E-B does a lot of things that are more benevolent than the kind of behavior that we're used to seeing from publicly-traded organizations and I can't help but wonder if the private ownership (truly private, as opposed to publicly-traded) has something to do with that.
I think I tentatively agree with you. I work for a company that was once privately held by a small number of owners who were primarily invested in that company. The impression I got from the old-timers was that management was a lot more generous back then. However, once they sold to a publicly traded firm, the squeeze started and it's never really stopped.
Sometimes an individual person can be satisfied with their wealth and position and focus on other things, and individuals can be influenced by moral and ethical ideas. The market, on the other hand, is like an amoral monster that's always eating but never satisfied.
I don't think the GP is enraged that there are competent private sector actors. I'd guess they're enraged that this competence can't be transferred to the places where it could matter 10x or 100x more. I feel kind of similarly.
An obvious example is that the president could have picked a highly competent, non-partisan manager as the head of his coronavirus team. Regardless of his competence, Vice President Pence is clearly a polarizing figure without a track record of dealing with crises of this scale.
This crisis could really benefit from a highly competent manager who could bust heads and sweep away bureaucratic hurdles. But that person would need to be someone honestly trusted by all stakeholders. We're seeing lots of actors maneuvering to gain ideological advantage even in the midst of these terrible events (shame on them). I don't even know if such a person exists any more but their non-existence would mean the US is in for serious trouble.
The problem is, if that competent manager existed, Americans would never elect them or trust them. Americans have been taught to trust in the benevolence and competence of corporations, and that government is incapable of anything but cruelty and incompetence.
You can never have a truly functional government in a country with an amendment to their Constitution that guarantees its people the opportunity to shoot it dead if they want. As soon as it even began to coalesce, Americans would hamstring it, strip it down and try to starve it to the point that it could be drowned in a bathtub.
The failure goes well beyond just the federal government too.
One example being NYC leaders and even health officials encouraging New Yorkers go participate in parades and other large gatherings through Feb and even into March, with messages of defiance against Coronavirus concerns:
Edit: Removed ventilator comment as that specific claim seems to be misleading, and it's not something particular to NY. Many governments weren't prepared for a surge.
The U.S. as a whole had plenty of advanced warning about ventilator[1] and pandemic preparedness[2].
> A 2015 New York state report said that in the case of a “severe” pandemic, the state would be short about 16,000 ventilators during the peak week. But the report did not recommend buying 16,000 ventilators [emphasis mine], and did not indicate whether the state was at a fiscal position to purchase them.
> The state did not plan to increase its ventilator stockpile because it anticipated that in the event of a severe crisis, there would be shortage of trained staff to operate them and demand would outweigh any emergency stockpile.
> The report said the state had to balance the likely ventilator shortage with the need for adequate funding for current and ongoing health care expenses.
> I'm sure there are 16,000 people that would be thankful that you were 14,000 ventilators short instead of 30,000.
Yeah, but that's with the benefit of hindsight. And ultimately, the idea that NY should have bought those ventilators back then is a deeply political cheap shot indented to distract people from the current administration's own lack of preparedness.
The Health Commissioner on Feb 9 was still pretty early. That's 8 weeks ago, ancient history in this pandemic.
On Feb 25, over 2 weeks CDC said covid-19 was detected in the US (from travelers back from Wuhan) and wasn't a risk for
spreading among the general public.
The flu is here every year but we don't cancel parades.
I'm glad they took this seriously. I live in San Antonio and there are few options other that H-E-B for groceries so if they hadn't prepared this city would be in a world of hurt.
To be fair, H-E-B is the best grocery chain in the whole country.
Their produce is top quality, they don't use shopper loyalty cards at checkout, their prices are fair, and their selection of cheese and wine is simply wonderful. I've been to epicurean groceries and Whole Foods and Wegmans and all of them, H-E-B is simply the consistent winner every time.
I make sense of inexplicable government slowness as: avoiding panic (worse than a pandemic), yet OTOH most people needing tangible evidence before they'll take it seriously.
Yeah, people don't get this fundamental aspect of governments vs. companies.
China is a company who's CEO is Xi Jingpin and it has 1.4 billion employees.
US Government (and all other democratic governments) have to show and to convince the rest of the Congress that we need to shut America down. Not saying that US gov did stellar in this pandemic, but its harder than it seems. It is also unfair to compare governments to private companies with 5-10 magnitude of order difference in every aspect from finances to number of people.
Previous article about how Waffle House handles supply chain issues in the face of disasters. It's practices are so good, the federal government uses the Waffle House Index to help gauge impact of disasters.
My best understanding is that current Waffle House closures have nothing to do with supply chain problems and are mostly due to state or local restrictions on venues like restaurants. Many places are insisting that takeout is fine, but dine in is unacceptable (and I don't disagree with that).
Complying with the law to contain the pandemic in no way tarnishes their track record for having an amazingly robust supply chain system.
Made the same move in '18, and noped right back to Austin late last year. HEB was way up there on our list of things we just had to have back. You have my sympathies.
We went to HEB a couple of days ago. There was no toilet paper, but plenty of meat, milk, eggs, etc. A trip to Target a few days prior found a store deplete of all of the above.
In general, I think stores are getting better at handling the demand, and most people have stocked up at this point. I went to Kroger last night, and they were low on chicken, but had plenty of everything else I was looking for. In fact, they had more than normal of some items.
> Craig Boyan: We’ve been working very hard right now to deliver meat and poultry and eggs to our stores. We’re accelerating opening a new warehouse in Houston that was due a few months later. We’re taking some of our warehouses in the state and transitioning them over to serving just meat, because we’re seeing such significant demand for meat, poultry, and eggs. We’re still having a real hard time sourcing eggs. We had big loads in the last few days, and they’ve been scooped up as soon as they hit the shelves, so we’re working very hard with egg suppliers to see where we can get additional eggs. But our meat plant is running 24/7—we have our own meat plants here. They normally don’t go 24/7, but we’ve focused them down to serving the top fifty items out of our meat plants; they normally carry several hundreds. [Focusing on top items] means fewer changeover delays, and it allows us to ship significantly more meat. We’re seeing those kinds of moves across the board as we look to ramp up volume in a rapid way.
One interesting thing about disasters and wars is the ways in which they point out (if only by subtraction) how the world spends its capabilities and resources during peacetime. In this case, what HEB is pointing out is 'the cost of variety': by offering hundreds of slightly different meat products, HEB is able to manufacture a lot less total than it would if it focused on a few products and could scale them & get economies of scale / experience curves (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/02/what-cost-variety.html). Similarly, one can see this with any retailer like Aldi or Apple which makes a point of having as few distinct units as possible.
This massive societal loss is particularly disconcerting when you note how rarely the different varieties ever actually differ in a noticeable way (I've done this with many food staples), and in some cases are literally the same product in different labeling (for price discrimination); they don't exist because of any actual need for such specialization, but because they can and they are useful for rich First Worlders to help signal & consume an identity. But when the rubber hits the road, no one really needs those hundreds of varieties of slightly different meat products, and 50 works fine.
What's been amazing to me about this shutdown is how little of our population's work is actually required. We have key workers only working and... we still have everything we really need.
Ok, so some of that work would be missed over longer timescales, but I still feel like there's a lot of wasted busywork.
Are even basic needs met...? To put it a little acerbically: what is more valuable, global ventilator & mask stockpiles - or having in your grocery store 6 varieties of applesauce (which all taste the same) instead of 5 varieties (which all taste the same)?
I moved back to North Carolina after 10 years in Austin, and I miss H-E-B as well. Harris Teeter used to be the "high end" store here (before Whole Foods arrived) and while I was gone they were bought by Kroger. The customer experience has gotten significantly worse. I'd love it if H-E-B could expand to the Carolinas and bring good tortillas here.
It's not. There are some HEB locations that are better outfitted and have lots of ritsy items, but others with more staples and concrete floors that focus on lower-income communities. (The way they adapt to neighborhoods is pretty neat. Their downmarket stores seem utilitarian, not run down.) They are price-competitive with mainstream stores on the whole, not Whole Foods etc.
Staff at HEB have repeatedly told me they're not allowed to wear masks even if they have their own.
HEB has also failed to implement a one person per cart policy like Aldi. The lines out front are dense, like going into a sports arena, not 6' spaced between people [I see the signs painted on the ground in the article, but I haven't seen those at any of the 4 HEB's I go to regularly].
They also don't limit capacity except to the legal fire marshal limit. Some of the other grocery stores around Houston have limited capacity to 25% of normal, so that everyone has plenty of space inside the store.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadThe article doesn't mention the huge food bank donations the company has made during the crisis. HEB is a good corporate citizen and a great place to shop. As the story says, thank an HEB employee for everything they're doing right now.
This is remarkable because it's hard to imagine most American companies, which are always looking to squeeze out a little more profit to juice the quarterly report, keeping someone on staff whose full-time job is to plan for what seem in good times like extremely remote contingencies. H-E-B, notably, is privately held.
Some day...
It feels like an eternity ago but there were several major food scares, recalls, and deaths, from contaminated vegetables last year.
I'm so happy they have my back.
HEB is privately owned and run by the owners. Those are very different incentives than public or VC-backed ventures.
> A contingency plan is a plan devised for an outcome other than in the usual (expected) plan.
That sounds a lot broader than emergency preparedness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7hCw5Q8qGw
I enjoyed watching the video just because it gives an idea how big one of these company's warehouses is. (Best view starts about 0m55s.) Those are some tall shelves, and there are a lot of rows of them.
They're supplying probably millions of people with food, so it makes sense, but I still found the visual impact interesting.
At least TP or water have a long shelflife, but (regular) milk and eggs???
I haven't tried it, but my understanding is that it has the same caramel-sweet flavor that most lactose free milk has, because of the higher heat during pasteurization (UHT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-temperature_process... ). I think the shelf stable is heated more than the lactose milk, which the lactose milk is still plenty noticeable.
That is incorrect. Different hens lay different colored eggs.
Also, the thing farmers do have control over is the colour of the yolk.
You can buy Egg Yolk Color Charts: http://www.robotmation.co.jp/keiranycceng.htm
This article talks about it a bit more: http://blog.chickenwaterer.com/2013/03/influencing-egg-yolk-...
https://food.unl.edu/cracking-date-code-egg-cartons
https://eggsafety.org/understanding-dates-egg-cartons/
Can you elaborate on what this "Nordstrom's story" means? Didn't find anything on a quick search.
[1] https://sharpencx.com/blog/nordstrom-customer-service/
https://www.bizjournals.com/jacksonville/blog/retail_radar/2...
(The tire story is half-true it turns out. Nordstrom didn't just occupy a former tire store location, they bought out the company that sold the tires.)
HEB, Dr. Pepper and Whataburger are Texas treasures as far as I'm concerned.
I wonder how much longer the Butt (yes, really) family will keep hold of H-E-B.
Same with YETI and Epic meats. Texas has had incredible success in creating ascendant consumer goods businesses for some time.
There was a short queue to get in (~5 people stood 6 feet apart), but once inside there were very few customers compared to any other time I've been in the store. I got everything that was on my shopping list.
Of the things that I saw labelled as limited to a certain number per transaction, toilet paper was the only one that was completely out of stock (I didn't check hand sanitizer, but assume it was too). I got eggs, milk etc with no problems.
I spoke to the cashier and they said toilet paper sells out by 10am most days.
Now that they’ve stocked up, they’re not going to the store.
Read the article. It is rage-inducing how much better a single grocer did than the federal government with all of its resources. January. Talking with counterparts in China. Executing on existing disaster plans (federal response had one, but ignored it https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/25/trump-coronavirus-n...).
Singapore has done well, but besides them there have been lots of missteps all over.
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
Let me know when the US has six times the per capita cases of Italy, then we'll talk.
Italy currently has a death figure roughly 40 times higher per capita than the US. If you scaled it to the US population, it'd be around 50,000 dead.
Let me know when the US has a per capita death figure 40 times higher than Italy.
Of course nobody wants to look at the disaster going on in the EU. The way the EU has entirely let Italy and Spain down. How Spain is having to beg NATO for supplies because their EU friends are leaving them to fend for themselves. The way China has helped Italy more than the EU. Some more things nobody wants to talk about: the extremely high mortality rates in Italy, Spain, France; the lack of testing in Britain; the lack of basic medical supplies across Western Europe, leaving doctors in Spain and Italy to work with bare hands and without masks; the hyper infection rates among healthcare workers in Western Europe due to poor practices and lack of medical gear; the shift to leaving patients over 60 to die because they can't help them any longer, producing the terrifying death rates in Italy and Spain.
"Spanish army finds care home residents 'dead and abandoned'"
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52014023
Bloomberg: "Spanish Doctors Are Forced to Choose Who to Let Die"
http://archive.is/Caj7r
"‘We are collapsing’: Virus pummels medics in Spain and Italy"
https://apnews.com/7ec91dc45d8d7c2ea86b0a97446a303a
"Israeli doctor in Italy: We no longer help those over 60. Dr. Gai Peleg told Israeli television that in northern Italy, the orders are not to allow those over 60 access to respiratory machines."
https://www.jpost.com/International/Israeli-doctor-in-Italy-...
Bloomberg: "Europe’s Desperate Doctors Are Shielded by Trash Bags"
http://archive.is/IRwpy
Foreign Policy: "The EU Is Abandoning Italy in Its Hour of Need"
http://archive.is/LXzxB
“Old people [in Spain] have been abandoned in an astonishing way,” said Carmen Flores, head of patient rights group Defensor del Paciente.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-...
You're off by an order of magnitude. The US has 260/million and Italy has 1275/million. That's 4.9 times higher, not 40.
US cases are currently doubling every 4 days. New cases in Italy have dropped, and they are no longer experiencing exponential growth. If that continues, we'll catch them in about a week.
But most of the US didn't really get their act together with testing until this week. We're a little delayed both in transmission and in testing, and the US is not showing any deviance from exponential growth at the moment.
A. Doing far more testing
B. Further along the pandemic curve
Give it another week or two and you'll see how bad things are really going to be.
http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/
The fact that people like Cuomo are now being praised for the way they handled this suggests that we aren't going to learn the lessons we need to.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/17/politics/bill-de-blasio-andre...
And Italy, where 1 in 10K have already died?
In some respects, China's initial response was poor. The government in Wuhan forced the doctor who was warning about the virus on social media to shut up, and it did not ban large public events quickly enough.
In other respects, China's initial response was excellent. Immediately after the first suspicious cases of pneumonia were reported by local doctors in Wuhan, the Chinese CDC sent a team to Wuhan to investigate. China alerted the WHO just two days later. It then announced the discovery of a new coronavirus about a week after alerting the WHO. It published the genetic sequence of the virus two days after that. Two weeks later, it quarantined Wuhan, a city of over 10 million people. Two weeks may seem like a long time, but compare that to how long it's taken for governments in Western countries to take similarly drastic actions.
Several Western European nations are seeing far higher per capita case loads and death rates.
Several prominent healthcare systems across Europe have proven wildly incompetent so far, including Spain, Italy and Britain (which is barely doing any testing). The famed French healthcare system is proving barely able to handle what's going on there, thus their very high mortality rate.
I think the San Francisco Bay Area counties did a pretty decent job (not S. Korea or Singapore, but that's a high bar) and I'm optimistic that they've significantly bent the curve (that's what I see plotting the data), but can't be very confident until after this weekend.
Given the scale of difficulty, the country has moved swiftly.
It is yet to be seen if it is even possible to organize a shutdown the solve this problem, at India's scale. But, even the naysayers have acknowledged that in this case Modi made good decisions.
I don't see Germany doing anything well except testing. IE, they haven't controlled infecting, which is increasing exponentially[1]. Germany originally had an ideal seeming death rate of only 0.2%.
But that was a rather illusory achievement that could be explained by finding all the infection but not stopping them (they're at 0.6% now, a significant increase and this will naturally continue increasing). By Tomas Pueyo's important calculation, one death implies up to 800 infections (1% death rate plus three weeks of doubling from when the patient contradicted the disease)[2]. So if you did find all those infections, you can see a very low apparent death rate but you wouldn't have reduced the actual death rate or the infection rate and you'd still be hurdling towards the situation of having so many cases your health system is overwhelmed and your death rate shoots up.
Angel Merkel said 30-70% of the country might catch the virus, which is pretty much poisonous "herd immunity" Koolaid that Boris Johnson spouted (now that fatalities have spiked in the UK, he's singing a different tune and I hope Merkel will also).
[1] https://cv19info.live/germany/ [2] https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...
What are their real case and death numbers? We'll never know, because they've lied about everything from day one. They have been the exact opposite of transparent about anything.
China only had ~82,000 cases, but Italy, Germany and Spain are all going to surpass that? Yeah right. Inflate China's numbers by 10x and you might be close. In late January / early February they magically changed which cases they were counting toward their official figures, intentionally excluding mild cases that tested positive. That's what produced the instant tapering you see in their case numbers from that date in time forward. It's also why their case growth graph looks so unique - bizarre - compared to everyone else that has had a bad outbreak.
There's supply chain evidence that things are going back to normal on China side. They wouldn't be able to hide all these deaths that would happen if they just told the sick people to go back to work.
Meanwhile, there's very little evidence that would suggest their numbers are lies. Sure, they weren't exactly forthcoming at the beginning - but then again, until few days ago, US government was lying even more than they did, and yet we don't assume this means today's numbers are bullshit (as opposed to being limited by still-lacking testing capability).
Singapore experienced SARS, which also took the lives of doctors and nurses in addition to their patients. That country’s healthcare system has been stress-tested in a way that most haven’t.
One of the common criticisms of those countries is the singular culture that creates social pressure. Social pressure can go a long way in these sorts of events.
Taking these tiny, mono-cultural, rich countries and comparing them to the world's leading superpower does not make a strong argument.
The government will generally do what its people want it to do. Americans did not give a damn about corona-virus for a long time.
If the people wanted shutdowns, they would have gotten them.
Indeed a tiny 126 million soul tiny country can not be compared with a country of 330 million souls. Also the USA having 1.5x the GDP / Capita does make Japan the richer country.
These countries unlike the USA have more economically and socially interventionist governments. I do wonder if the culture of Germany is closer to Japan or USA. To tackle a pandemic do you need more leadership or culture?
I mean beyond national security where is USA leadership?
???
I agree that we need in America is stronger leadership. But we shouldn't be looking to the government for leadership. The government should follow the will of the people, not lead it.
Democratic governments act when they feel the people want them to act. The reason the US government didn't act early is because the majority of Americans were not yet concerned about the coronavirus until recently, and it would have been unpopular.
Japan would not have acted so strictly and so early if their culture and respect for community weren't strong. It would have been unpopular and ineffective.
What's needed for Americans to tackle these types of issues better is more trust in the community and stronger citizen leadership.
China is a legitimate story of recent economic success. China is only now at a stage of median development that Singapore reached in the 1970s and 1980s.
> Here are some government's where it worked
> Those don't count because otherwise I'd have to retire my tired old screed from the 90's that the government can't do anything right. The government should be run like a business, dagnabit.
Did my summary miss anything?
Sometimes the great things that a country accomplishes are due to it's great people.
When you have to compete, you have to develop competence to survive. Only those that don't have to compete (monopolies) or those that survive despite incompetence (bailouts) are the exceptions.
The competence of private companies only really applies to a very narrow subset of corporations.
That's a misleading and false generalization. You can't cherrypick one of the better prepared companies to make a statement about companies in general. Especially when there's nonsense all over the news about other companies like GameStop and Guitar Center claiming to be essential retail against all reason: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/business/coronavirus-esse....
See: Amazon. They are incompetent in many aspects of their business, but due to their sheer size that incompetence is shielded by their other investments.
H-E-B does a lot of things that are more benevolent than the kind of behavior that we're used to seeing from publicly-traded organizations and I can't help but wonder if the private ownership (truly private, as opposed to publicly-traded) has something to do with that.
H-E-B is one of the things I will really miss if I ever have to leave Texas. They're always there any time there is any kind of disaster, to provide relief. I've even heard that they treat their software engineers well (they bought Favor). They're really a one-of-a-kind company. I hope they never IPO.
I think I tentatively agree with you. I work for a company that was once privately held by a small number of owners who were primarily invested in that company. The impression I got from the old-timers was that management was a lot more generous back then. However, once they sold to a publicly traded firm, the squeeze started and it's never really stopped.
Sometimes an individual person can be satisfied with their wealth and position and focus on other things, and individuals can be influenced by moral and ethical ideas. The market, on the other hand, is like an amoral monster that's always eating but never satisfied.
An obvious example is that the president could have picked a highly competent, non-partisan manager as the head of his coronavirus team. Regardless of his competence, Vice President Pence is clearly a polarizing figure without a track record of dealing with crises of this scale.
This crisis could really benefit from a highly competent manager who could bust heads and sweep away bureaucratic hurdles. But that person would need to be someone honestly trusted by all stakeholders. We're seeing lots of actors maneuvering to gain ideological advantage even in the midst of these terrible events (shame on them). I don't even know if such a person exists any more but their non-existence would mean the US is in for serious trouble.
You can never have a truly functional government in a country with an amendment to their Constitution that guarantees its people the opportunity to shoot it dead if they want. As soon as it even began to coalesce, Americans would hamstring it, strip it down and try to starve it to the point that it could be drowned in a bathtub.
We could pay government employees more, but then voters would complain.
One example being NYC leaders and even health officials encouraging New Yorkers go participate in parades and other large gatherings through Feb and even into March, with messages of defiance against Coronavirus concerns:
https://mobile.twitter.com/wesyang/status/124303311804449997...
Edit: Removed ventilator comment as that specific claim seems to be misleading, and it's not something particular to NY. Many governments weren't prepared for a surge.
The U.S. as a whole had plenty of advanced warning about ventilator[1] and pandemic preparedness[2].
1. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/disaster-medicine-an...
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Af6b_wyiwI
That's misleading.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/25/donald-tru...:
> A 2015 New York state report said that in the case of a “severe” pandemic, the state would be short about 16,000 ventilators during the peak week. But the report did not recommend buying 16,000 ventilators [emphasis mine], and did not indicate whether the state was at a fiscal position to purchase them.
> The state did not plan to increase its ventilator stockpile because it anticipated that in the event of a severe crisis, there would be shortage of trained staff to operate them and demand would outweigh any emergency stockpile.
> The report said the state had to balance the likely ventilator shortage with the need for adequate funding for current and ongoing health care expenses.
And even if New York had bought them, they'd still be significantly short. Apparently current projections say they'll need 30,000 (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/24/gov-cuomo-says-new-york-need...).
Yeah, but that's with the benefit of hindsight. And ultimately, the idea that NY should have bought those ventilators back then is a deeply political cheap shot indented to distract people from the current administration's own lack of preparedness.
On Feb 25, over 2 weeks CDC said covid-19 was detected in the US (from travelers back from Wuhan) and wasn't a risk for spreading among the general public.
The flu is here every year but we don't cancel parades.
De Blasio on Mar 2 was a lot later.
Their produce is top quality, they don't use shopper loyalty cards at checkout, their prices are fair, and their selection of cheese and wine is simply wonderful. I've been to epicurean groceries and Whole Foods and Wegmans and all of them, H-E-B is simply the consistent winner every time.
I make sense of inexplicable government slowness as: avoiding panic (worse than a pandemic), yet OTOH most people needing tangible evidence before they'll take it seriously.
China is a company who's CEO is Xi Jingpin and it has 1.4 billion employees.
US Government (and all other democratic governments) have to show and to convince the rest of the Congress that we need to shut America down. Not saying that US gov did stellar in this pandemic, but its harder than it seems. It is also unfair to compare governments to private companies with 5-10 magnitude of order difference in every aspect from finances to number of people.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15105662
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_House_Index
My best understanding is that current Waffle House closures have nothing to do with supply chain problems and are mostly due to state or local restrictions on venues like restaurants. Many places are insisting that takeout is fine, but dine in is unacceptable (and I don't disagree with that).
Complying with the law to contain the pandemic in no way tarnishes their track record for having an amazingly robust supply chain system.
P.S. Dallas is a shithole.
Agreed. Dallas is a shithole.
One interesting thing about disasters and wars is the ways in which they point out (if only by subtraction) how the world spends its capabilities and resources during peacetime. In this case, what HEB is pointing out is 'the cost of variety': by offering hundreds of slightly different meat products, HEB is able to manufacture a lot less total than it would if it focused on a few products and could scale them & get economies of scale / experience curves (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/02/what-cost-variety.html). Similarly, one can see this with any retailer like Aldi or Apple which makes a point of having as few distinct units as possible.
This massive societal loss is particularly disconcerting when you note how rarely the different varieties ever actually differ in a noticeable way (I've done this with many food staples), and in some cases are literally the same product in different labeling (for price discrimination); they don't exist because of any actual need for such specialization, but because they can and they are useful for rich First Worlders to help signal & consume an identity. But when the rubber hits the road, no one really needs those hundreds of varieties of slightly different meat products, and 50 works fine.
Ok, so some of that work would be missed over longer timescales, but I still feel like there's a lot of wasted busywork.
Places like randall's and whole foods are much more expensive.
HEB has also failed to implement a one person per cart policy like Aldi. The lines out front are dense, like going into a sports arena, not 6' spaced between people [I see the signs painted on the ground in the article, but I haven't seen those at any of the 4 HEB's I go to regularly].
They also don't limit capacity except to the legal fire marshal limit. Some of the other grocery stores around Houston have limited capacity to 25% of normal, so that everyone has plenty of space inside the store.