A lot of that cash has flowed to hard goods, especially home goods such as furniture and home-improvement materials. Pandemic checks sent hundreds of billions of dollars to cabin-fevered Americans during a fallow period in the service sector. The coronavirus pandemic has snarled global supply chains in several ways. Read: Americans have no idea what the supply chain really is We are running low on supplies of all kinds due to a veritable hydra of bottlenecks. The Everything Shortage is not the result of one big bottleneck in, say, Vietnamese factories or the American trucking industry. Americans are settling into a new phase of the pandemic economy, in which GDP is growing but we’re also suffering from a dearth of a shocking array of things-test kits, car parts, semiconductors, ships, shipping containers, workers. This is something different, and quite strange. economy isn’t yet experiencing a downturn akin to the 1970s period of stagflation. Eyeing a new home-improvement job that requires several construction workers? Haha, pray for 2022. The baby crib you bought? Make it December. The book you were looking for? Come back in November. That car part you need? It’ll take an extra week, sorry. Next-day deliveries are becoming day-after-next deliveries.

One-hour errands are now multi-hour odysseys. Target’s pharmacy had the meds, but its front area was alarmingly barren, like the canned-food section of a grocery store one hour before a hurricane makes landfall. “Try the Target up the road,” he suggested. But when I asked a pharmacist to fill some very common prescriptions, he told me the store had run out. “Try Walgreens.” I drove to a Walgreens that had paper towels. They’d been sold out for a week, an employee told me. I visited CVS last week to pick up some at-home COVID-19 tests. I s it just me, or does it feel like America is running out of everything?

Sims 3 fill empty worlds