The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Halloween is a few days away and if you aren’t already frightened out of your wits at the onslaught of Trick or Treat merchandising, hang onto your goblin hat! The soothsayers of Market Street are predicting that this so-called supply chain block — which is not the same as block chain so don’t cash in those bitcoins – will empty store shelves way before Christmas unless Santa and Walmart hire truck drivers, buy containers and unload those anchored cargo ships off shore by hand.

The fear mongers are telling you, the savvy shopper, to SHOP NOW if you want something under your Yuletide tree besides Manchin’s coal. Bleak pickings, kids, backlogged orders, missing supply chain parts, unhappy elves accustomed to working at home virtually, pandemic closures of 3rd world factories, nothing short of a Black Holiday when your usual last minute shopping leaves you with picked-over cheap junk nobody else wanted.

Scrooge himself would weep! What’s a capitalist consumer society to do without consumer goods? You going to tell little Sally and Jimmy their Nintendo wasn’t available? You going to explain the supply chain economics to them, hoping to stop the wailing and the crying? Good luck, pardner. You might as well shoot the Tooth Fairy and serve up the Easter Bunny while you’re at it, nobody wants a Norman Rockwell holiday in post pandemic America, not on your mortgaged life.

So … what choice do you have? Only one, near as I can figure. Get in your SUV and head to the nearest department store. Okay, just kidding. Get on your computer and get to Amazon before all the other paranoid shoppers beat you to the Good Stuff. Sure, it’s not even Halloween, I know that. If you’re smart – and I know you are – you’ll order next year’s presents too.

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