@ADuvsLife He's ignoring everything, essentially. In the short-term, we're already seeing delays at the ports, which has a very basic impact on getting stuff into distribution centres in the first place. Every DC has a limited number of loading bays for in & outbound ...

Trucks have defined delivery slots for drop-offs and pick-ups - think of it like a doctor's appointment list - they must be there in their 30-60 minute window, or else the haulier gets fined. And DCs operate 24/7. So if 10 trucks miss their slots because of a logjam at the ports

It's not just a case of squeezing them into another window - there *is* no spare slot (or hardly any). So you can't easily catch up. And once a delivery slot at the DC is missed, that has a knock-effect. A missed inbound delivery means outbound trucks leave without their stock

And stores don't receive their orders (which are placed on a just-in-time basis anyway - your average Tesco actually has a very small warehouse space, as almost all of its stock goes straight to shelves)

Now Tesco can mitigate this for tinned/dry food by forward-ordering stockpiles, but this is a squeeze to fit extra delivery trucks in, and there's only so much extra space in their DCs, so they can only forward-buy so much