The next time you’re at your local grocery store or a nearby location of a department store giant, take a close look at the shelves. If you’ve paid attention at all to news headlines over the past week or so, you’ll no doubt have come across coverage of supply chain issues that are manifesting themselves in part in the form of empty store shelves. But it’s not just empty store shelves resulting from the
US supply chain meltdown that includes clogged ports as well as goods sitting unshipped. Retailers are also getting creative (or desperate, depending on who you ask) — to the point that some shoppers say they’ve noticed tactics like stores using single rows of products to fill shelves.
To give the illusion, in other words, of abundance.
People have taken to social media in recent days to share images of this kind of thing, like single rows of chairs arranged bizarrely all along shelves (as you can see below). As if there was nothing else available to put in its place, but the store just wanted to fill the shelves with
something. Rather than make it obvious for customers to see that supply chain shortages are having an impact.