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 ...

@ADuvsLife 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
@ADuvsLife 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
@ADuvsLife 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)
@ADuvsLife 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
@ADuvsLife But think of bananas, for instance. These are all imported and have a shelf-life of only a few days. Now imagine 1 truck of bananas getting stuck at Calais or Dover. 1 missed delivery slot at a Tesco DC. 100 stores that don't receive their daily banana delivery
@ADuvsLife In the meantime, the truckload of bananas goes bad and half of it has to be binned, so it never even gets to shops, not even a few days late. Now imagine it's not 1 banana truck but 100. And it's not just banana deliveries but apples, potatoes, spag bols for one etc etc
@ADuvsLife Now imagine it doesn't just affect food but also every other time-critical delivery that comes through the ports - say, cancer treatment drugs, some of which have shelf-lives measured in days rather than months. Now what? You either have to fly them in - very expensive
@ADuvsLife Or prioritise life-saving medicines at the ports over food, which is 100% understandable but creates even more of a logjam. In the meantime, everyone is panic-buying like it's late March all over again
@ADuvsLife *This* is what Raab says he's not concerned about. I get that they are desperate that people don't panic - because that will make everything 10 times worse - but we are being systematically lied to here
@ADuvsLife The problem is that the average man in the street assumes that delays at the ports just means a couple of days' disruption and maybe you can't buy eggs for a few days. And that's fair enough - 99% of people don't know how logistics works, and why should they?
@ADuvsLife But the knock-on effect is huge and more wide-reaching than people realise. The chaos at the ports will most likely last for weeks, not days. And once resolved, it will take supply chains at least a couple of weeks to get fully back to 'normal' because they'll be in recovery mode
@ADuvsLife Worst-case - and let's pray it isn't that - we could be looking at half-empty shelves for 6-8 weeks after Jan 1. But even optimistically we'd be looking at the kind of thing we saw in late March/early April, where it took supermarkets 3-4 weeks to re-establish normality
@ADuvsLife And that was with supply chains working effectively without border delays. It's certainly hard to see how it will be a minor blip
@ADuvsLife I'll stop now!
@ADuvsLife @threadreaderapp unroll, please

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The first likely historical reference to Ethiopia is ancient Egyptian records of trade expeditions to the "Land of Punt" in search of gold, ebony, ivory, incense, and wild animals, starting in c 2500 BC 🇪🇹


Ethiopians themselves believe that the Queen of Sheba, who visited Israel's King Solomon in the Bible (c 950 BC), came from Ethiopia (not Yemen, as others believe). Here she is meeting Solomon in a stain-glassed window in Addis Ababa's Holy Trinity Church. 🇪🇹


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