@ADuvsLife He's ignoring everything, essentially. In the sh…

@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

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 ...

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