The Requisite COVID-19 & Coffee Post
Friday the 13th seems a fine day to finish this post up as any. First of all, the BBotE order slots are now up on the website for the production window ending March 28th. Order away at your pleasure.
The second, more complicated part is continuity planning. As things currently stand, I am fairly well stocked with supplies to make BBotE and steins with for a while. Based on typical burn rates, probably a month or two, but that’s where complex Just-In-Time (JIT) management supply chains start coming into play. Personally, I loathe JIT inventory management because I usually translate “efficiency” in my head as “fragile”. The more slack you take out of your systems, they less resilient they are. While I don’t play silly JIT inventory management games, some of my suppliers do, and so do their logistics companies for shipping everything around, i.e. if there isn’t a full container ship headed to $DESTINATION, that ship isn’t going to sail at all. This means that over time, the number of supply shipments to my suppliers, and in general, drops and if they hadn’t built in an inventory cushion for resilience, things will start to disappear from the market.
I’ve spoken about this before and the effects of blight, climate change, and agronomy on coffee with respect to the price of the American cup of coffee. The beans are usually the smallest part of the price you’re paying at the counter, it’s mostly the rent for the cafe itself and the logistics of getting the beans to you. So, when a certain coffee varietal becomes rare it doesn’t usually get more expensive in the American market, it usually just disappears entirely. What this means is that even if COVID-19 vanished with a Q-like snap of the fingers today, a bit over two months of shipping disruption are still going to ripple through the global trade system for the rest of the year. This is the very long way of saying the number of selections of BBotE available in the store may shrink with time or become only intermittently available. Also, bottle & shipper styles may change as those supply chains are impacted too.
Third is the logistics from me to you. I depend on the USPS and their international partners for shipping BBotE and Steins of Science everywhere and that only works for as long as the postal service does. Even in the 1918 Flu Pandemic, the mail always went through and the USPS prides itself on that. It did, however, get juuuuuust a titch slower because postal carriers and sorters were either ill/dying or caring for loved ones that were. If the postal service starts having to slow down service, I will not be surprised but they’ll also be likely to make an announcement about that. The good news there is that I’ve built a bit of a time cushion into BBotE shipments. Priority Mail slowing down from 1 to 3 days to 5 is reasonable and fine. 10+ would be bad and a very serious indicator of systemic breakdown.
The last and somewhat grim point is the Funranium Labs is just me. In all the contingency planning, it is inescapable that I constitute a critical, single point of failure situation. If I get sick, production and shipping grind to a halt. I will suspend the store if I need to do that or if, heaven forbid, I’m not capable of doing that I’ll have My Lovely Assistant take care of suspension for me.
So, go forth (or don’t if you’re quarantined), take care of each other, and live well.