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Free Digital Services: TANSTAAFL? Not Exactly

For the last two decades, we’ve been in an era of free services: internet searches, social media, email, storage. Free, free, free. My parsimonious head spins thinking of all that free stuff.

Social and technical tectonic plates are moving. New continents are forming, old continents are breaking up. Driven by the pandemic and our tumultuous politics, we all sense that our world is changing. 2025 will not return to 2015. Free services will change. In this post, I explain that one reason free digital services have been possible is they are cheap to provide.

I’m tempted to bring up Robert Heinlein, the science fiction author, and his motto, TANSTAAFL (There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch), as a principle behind dwindling free services, but his motto does not exactly apply.

Heinlein’s point was that free sandwiches at a saloon are not free lunches because customers pay for the sandwiches in the price of the drinks. This is not exactly the case with digital free lunches. Digital services can be free because they cost so little, they appear to be free. Yes, you pay for them, but you pay so little they may as well be free.

A sandwich sitting beside a glass of beer costs the tavern as much as a sandwich in a diner, but a service delivered digitally costs far less than a physical service. Digital services are free like dirt, which also appears to be free, but it looks free because it is abundant and easily obtained, not because we are surreptitiously charged for it.

Each physical service sale has a fixed cost for reproduction and delivery. Digital services have almost no cost per sale for reproduction and delivery, until they have invest in expanded infrastructure.

Free open source software and digital services

One factor behind free digital services is the free software movement which began in the mid -1980s with the formation of the Free Software Foundation. The “free” in Free Software Foundation refers more to software that can be freely modified rather than to products freely given away, but most software under the Free Software Foundation and related organizations is available without charge. Much open source software is written by paid programmers, and is therefore paid for by someone, but not in ways that TANSTAAFL might predict.

The workhorse utilities of the internet are open source. Most internet traffic is Hyper Text Transmission Protocol (HTTP) packets transmitted and received by HTTP server software. The majority of this traffic is driven by open source Apache HTTP servers running on open source Linux operating systems. Anyone can get a free copy of Linux or Apache. Quite often, servers in data centers run only open source software. (Support for the software is not free, but that’s another story.)

So who pays for developing and updating these utilities? Some of the code is volunteer written, but a large share is developed on company time by programmers and administrators working for corporations like IBM, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Cisco, coordinated by foundations supported by these same corporations. The list of contributors is long. Most large, and many small, computer companies contribute to open source software utilities.

Why? Because they have determined that their best interest is to develop these utilities through foundations like the Linux Foundation, The Apache Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Free Software Foundation, and others, instead of building their own competing utilities.

By collaborating, they avoid wasting money when each company researches and writes similar code or places themselves in a vulnerable business position by using utilities built by present or potential competitors. It’s a little like the interstate highway system. Trucking companies don’t build their own highways, and, with the exception of Microsoft, computer companies don’t build their own operating systems.

Digital services are cheap

Digital services are cheap, cheaper than most people imagine. Free utilities contribute to the cheapness, but more because they contribute to the efficiency of service delivery. The companies that use the open source utilities the most pay for them in contributed code and expertise that amounts to millions of dollars per year, but they make it all back because the investment gives them an efficient standardized infrastructure which they use to build and deliver services that compete on user visible features that yield market advantages. They don’t have to compete on utilities that their customers only care about when they fail.

Value and cost of digital services are disconnected

We usually think that the cost of a service is in some way related to the value of the service. Digital services break that relationship.

Often, digital services deliver enormous value at minuscule cost, much lower cost than comparable physical services. Consider physical Encyclopedia Britannica versus digital Wikipedia, two products which offer similar value and functionality. A paper copy of Britannica could be obtained for about $1400 in 1998 ($2260 in 2021 dollars). Today, Wikipedia is a pay-what-you-want service, suggested contribution around $5 a month, but only a small percentage of Wikipedia users actually donate into project.

Therefore, the average cost for using Wikipedia is microscopic compared to a paper Britannica. You can argue that Encyclopedia Britannica has higher quality information than Wikipedia (although that point is disputable) but you have to admit that the Wikipedia service delivers a convenient and comparable service whose value is not at all proportional to its price.

Digital reproduction and distribution is cheap

The cost of digital services behaves differently than the cost of physical goods and services we are accustomed to. Compare a digital national news service to a physical national newspaper.

The up-front costs of acquiring, composing, and editing news reports are the same for both, but after a news item is ready for consumption, the cost differs enormously. A physical newspaper must be printed. Ink and paper must be bought. The printed items must be loaded on trucks, then transferred to local delivery, and hand carried to readers’ doorsteps. Often printed material has to be stored in warehouses waiting for delivery. The actual cost of physical manufacture and delivery varies widely based on scale, the delivery area, and operational efficiency, but there is a clear and substantial cost for each item delivered to a reader.

A digital news item is available on readers’ computing devices within milliseconds of the editor’s keystroke of approval. Even if the item is scheduled for later delivery, the process is entirely automatic from then on. No manpower costs, no materials cost, minuscule network delivery costs.

The reproduction and network delivery part of the cost of an instance of service is often too small to be worth the trouble to calculate.

My experience with network delivery of software is that the cost of reproducing and delivering a single instance of a product is so low, the finance people don’t want to bother to calculate it. They prefer to lump it into corporate overhead, which is spread across products and is the same whether one item or a million items are delivered. The cost is also the same whether the item is delivered across the hall or across the globe. Physical items are often sit in expensive rented warehouses after they are reproduced. Digital products are reproduced on demand and never stored in bulk.

Stepwise network costs

Network costs are usually stepwise, not linear, and not easily allocated to the number of customers served. Stepwise costs means that when the network infrastructure is built to deliver news items to 1000 simultaneous users, the cost stays the about same for one or 1000 users because much of the cost is a capital investment. Unused capacity costs about the same as used capacity— the capacity for the 1000th user must be paid for even though 1000th user will not sign on for months.

The 1001st user will cost a great deal, but after paying out to scale the system up to, say, 10,000 users, costs won’t rise much until the 10,001st user signs on, at which point another network investment is required. Typically, the cost increment for each step gets proportionally less as efficiencies of scale kick in.

After a level of infrastructure is implemented and paid for, increasing readership of digital news service does not increase costs until the next step is encountered. Consequently, the service can add readers for free without affecting adversely affecting profits or cash flow, although each free reader brings them closer to a doomsday when they have to invest to expand capacity.

Compare this to a physical newspaper. As volume increases, the cost per reader goes down as efficiency increases, but unlike a digital service, each and every new reader increases the overall cost of the service as the cost of manufacturing and distribution increases with each added reader. The rate of overall increase may go done as scale increases, but the increment is always there.

Combine the fundamental low cost of digital reproduction and distribution with the stepwise nature of digital infrastructure costs and digital service operators can offer free services much easily and more profitably than physical service providers.

The future

I predict enormous changes in free services in approaching months and years, but I don’t expect a TANSTAAFL day of reckoning because providing digital services is fundamentally much cheaper than physical services.

I have intentionally not discussed the ways in which service providers get revenues from their services, although I suspect most readers have thought about revenue as they read. The point here is that digital services are surprisingly cheap and their economic dynamics are not at all like that of physical goods and services.

As digital continents collide, I expect significant changes in free digital services, changes that will come mainly from the revenue side and our evolving attitudes toward privacy and fairness in commerce. These are a subjects for future posts.

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How the Network Works: Routing

In a comment on a previous post, Steve Stroh suggested explaining the nuances of routable and non-routable addresses. This distinction is important for home network security, but without a little background in computer networking, the concept doesn’t mean much. This post explains a little about how the global computer network operates.

Traditional telephone service

I’ll begin with traditional telephone service works because, without realizing it, most people have it tucked away somewhere in their brain that computer networks work like an old telephone system.

Circuits

Traditional telephones are based on circuits. Imagine an old-fashioned switch board with a bunch of incoming wires and outgoing sockets. When an incoming wire from your phone is plugged into an outgoing socket a circuit is completed and you can speak to and hear a person on a telephone at the other end of the circuit.

In a simple time, when Fred and Ethel were struggling performers, they both roomed at The Algonquin. Its switch board could manage the handful of telephones in the hotel. Fred could pick up his phone, tell the switch board operator to connect him to Ethel, a circuit between Fred’s phone and Ethel’s phone was made and Fred and Ethel could plan, dream, and toss whoopie.

When Ethel’s fan dance made headlines, she moved to The Ritz. Fred, who was a baggy pants comic with a fake Yiddish accent, was stuck at the Algonquin. For Fred to call Ethel, the Algonquin operator had to connect to the Ritz operator, who then connected Fred’s line into Ethel’s phone. Unfortunately, Ethel no longer talked to lowlifes like Fred and she immediately hung up. The operators unplugged the lines, and the circuit was gone.

The pattern of connecting switch board to switch board was repeated until the phone network covered the entire U.S. and transoceanic cables extended the network to Europe. Getting a connection could take hours, but the system worked. Over time it was automated, first by mechanical relays, later by transistors and computer chips. Connections became faster. Nonetheless, for most purposes, the circuit system was eventually abandoned in all but metaphor.

Packet switching

Computer networks replaced circuits with an older approach: mail packets.

Mail works differently than the telephone. Writing an address on an envelope is only superficially similar to dialing or asking an operator for a phone number. When you drop an envelope in the mail, you have a promise that the post office will try to deliver it, but that promise is no guarantee and the office that first receives the letter is likely not to have any knowledge of the letter’s destination.

A mailbox will accept a letter addressed to T. H. E. Wiz, 1 Emerald Way, Oz, Kansas without a murmur, although neither T.H.E Wiz, Emerald Way, nor Oz exists in Kansas. You may or may not find out later your letter was undeliverable. It will rattle around the postal system until it is eventually returned or falls into a dead letter bin.

On the other hand, try dialing a stage number, like The Bionic Woman’s number, 311-555-2368. You are told that a connection is impossible as soon as you finish dialing.

The crucial difference is that before your message is transmitted by phone, i.e. you begin to speak, the path you will use to communicate is either is made or fails. The postal system, on the other hand, accepts your message, then passes it on until it lands in an office that recognizes the address and the intended recipient.

Circuits v. packets

Off-hand, the telephone seems like the smarter way. Why go to all the trouble of shipping an envelope around the country when you can decide before sending the message if delivery is possible? Isn’t the post office method a step backward?

Well, no. Circuits may seem more efficient, but they don’t fit well into the reality of the global internet, which is huge, ever changing, and implemented in a patchwork of wildly varying speed and reliability; a salmagundi of large and small, public and private entities that is closer to a frontier pony express than an orderly telephone system.

No single entity understands the complexity of the global network. However, piecing together a workable, let alone optimal, circuit requires just that.

A typical computer message is broken up into a series of independent small packets, each with its own address. These are dumped willy-nilly into the network and each is passed from router (the computer equivalent of a switchboard or a post office) to router until they arrive at their destination and are reassembled. Some will be duplicated to be sent on alternate routes or further broken down into smaller packets to optimize transmission on equipment that can’t handle large packets. The process is messy, but resilient and makes good use of available resources.

Packets in the network hop from router to router approaching light speeds, i.e. almost instantaneously, but then they sit in a buffer while the router decides what to do with it. A packet can hop to another router faster than a router can respond to a query on traffic conditions, so why bother asking? Sending packets to find their own way only requires local knowledge of the condition of the communications infrastructure. With a network as extensive and varied as the global computer network, this is a critical advantage.

Today, most telephone service, including cellphones, travels in switched packets that simulate circuits. We still tend to think of a single wire connection that runs from one phone to the next through a myriad of automated switch boards, but in fact most of the time, our voice is carried in packets drifting through a global network.

Permanent (static) addresses

In the old days, computer addresses, IP addresses, were more or less permanent. Businesses requested and were assigned blocks of addresses. A system administrator had to keep track of those addresses and dole out new addresses from the list as computers were added to the network and return old addresses to the available list as computers were decommissioned.

It was an exacting job. If the list got scrambled and two devices used the same address, the network would behave erratically. Small businesses typically had only a few addresses, which limited the number of computers they could use.

Private non-routable addresses

Giving every computer a public IP address was also a security problem. Each of those publicly addressed computers were vulnerable to direct outside attacks. They had to be managed carefully to prevent intrusion. Individual users seldom had the training and temperament to do that job well.

A solution from the mid-1990s was to declare blocks of addresses private or non-routable. The largest private block (10.0.0.0 – 10.255.255.255) has over 17 million individual addresses. The second block (172.16.0.0 – 172.31.255.255) over a million addresses. The smallest block (192.168.0.0 – 192.168.255.255) has over 65 thousand addresses.

This had lots of advantages. System administrators could devise address assignment schemes for the private address blocks that were relatively easy to manage with subsets for buildings, floors, departments, etc. and not worry about clashing with other businesses. Since the addresses were non-routable, computers with private addresses were easier to isolate from intruders.

Dynamic Host Control Protocol (DHCP)

The process of assigning and re-assigning IP addresses was automated with Dynamic Host Control Protocol (DHCP). When a computer connects to a home network, the home router, following DHCP rules, assigns the computer an IP address from one of the private blocks. Which block depends on how DHCP is implemented on the router.

When an Internet service provider connects a home router to the global network, the service provider uses DHCP rules to assign a unique public and global IP address to the home router.

Network Address Translation (NAT)

From the outside, each home network looks like a single computer with one IP address. This presents a problem: how to connect those internal private addresses with the single outward-facing address. Non-routable private IP addresses combine with DHCP and Network Address Translation (NAT) to solve this problem. Network Address Translation (NAT) is a protocol implemented on routers that handles coordinating internal non-routable IP addresses with the single external public IP address that the router presents to the global network.

Without private addresses, DHCP, and NAT, connecting a new computer to a home network would be a tricky and exacting job. I won’t say that connecting a new device is easy today, but I assure you, when I think about managing networks thirty years ago, I am amazed. Our grandsons have our wireless network id and password stored on their phones and laptops. When they walk into our house, their laptop or phone connects with our wireless network, an IP address is assigned, and they connect with the global network without me doing anything. Astounding!

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Safe Home Networks

Building and maintating a safe home network today has become both more difficult and more necessary than ever now that IoT, the Internet of Things, has filled our homes with smart devices that are hackable computers. I’ve talked about the necessity of securing IoT on home networks here and here, but now I’ll get down actions that increase control of your network of screenless computing devices.

I was tempted to begin this post with a shot at shaming folks into home network security: “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” The quote has been attributed at various times to Edward Deming and Peter Drucker, two thinkers who have shaped my notions of management of computer systems.

But, you know, that saying is hogwash and neither Deming nor Drucker said it.

There’s no question that both Drucker and Deming favored measurement and data, but they never fooled themselves into avoiding management when metrics were lacking. You can manage a home network with a reasonable effort to gather data without the tedium that drives you to neglect security. Always shoot for tangible benefits, not perfection.

Network elements and safe home networks

Telecommunications IT uses a technical term: network element, which I like. The term is general enough to capture everything important about your home network. My rough and ready definition of a network element is “anything that matters on a network.”

The apps you have installed on your phones, laptops, and tablets, the services you subscribe to, along with the devices themselves, are network elements. The smart sensors and apps that control your thermostat, your kitchen appliances, and your security system are also network elements. Anything that affects the safety, efficiency, or usefulness of your network is a network element.

Well-managed IT environments maintain something called a configuration management database (CMDB), which is an inventory of network elements. Thousands of entries are common in the CMDB of a medium size business.

CMDBs are, frankly, a pain to maintain. Enterprises invest heavily in automating CMDB creation and maintenance. An accurate CMDB tells technicians where to look to solve problems. More important, they are also a roadmap for heading off issues before they occur.

Whether you solve your own home network issues or call in an expert, the equivalent of a CMDB will help maintain a safe home network.

Home CMDBs

A few years ago, the idea of a home CMDB was preposterous overkill. Typical home networks consisted of some kind of modem for connecting to the Internet, a personal computer, and maybe a printer. That’s all of three network elements. Not even worth entering in a spreadsheet. In the early days of home computing, looking over your desk and glancing at the floppy disks and CDs in the old shoebox next to your PC did as much as you could wish for a CMDB.

That was the old days. As I am writing this, I have 16 devices connected to my home router and an additional 16 that have connected recently, for a total of 32 devices. Worse, when I look at the device list on my router, a few of the entries are familiar, but most of them show as strings of hexadecimal digits (0-9 and A-F).

Unless your brain is staggeringly computation oriented, a list like that is meaningless. After fifty years of working with computers, I’m used to reading hexadecimal, but the device list on our home router is still tough.

Nevertheless, that wild list contains all the hardware network elements for effective CMDB and safe home network.

Let’s tame it.

IP and MAC addresses

On current networks, all devices have two addresses, some also have a name. One address is called the IP address. IP stands for “Internet Protocol”. This address shows where the device is connected to the network. If you know the IP address of a device, you can send a message to it. Great. But an IP address is only temporary, changing as devices move around and network conditions change. The IP address of your laptop is one thing when you’re at home, and a different address when you’re at a coffeeshop, school, work, or wherever, as your connection to the network changes.

Every device that connects to the network has a second address called the Medium Access Control address, or MAC. MACs are unique serial numbers that are burned in when a network connection component is manufactured. They appear as a sequence of 12 hexadecimal digits, usually separated into groups of 2 with a hyphen (-) or a colon (:). They are fixed until replaced or physically altered. The MAC can be used to trace the manufacturer of the component.

Well, that used to be true. There are now ways to change MAC addresses in software. But for now, assume MAC addresses never change because it is unlikely in a home network.

The network name of a computer is usually assigned by the user when the operating system, like Windows, is installed. Depending on the imagination of the owner, network names can be mundane like “MyPC” or fanciful, like “SherlocksDamnEggPlant”. These names are seldom seen outside local networks and often go a long way toward making CMDBs comprehensible. Unfortunately, many devices don’t have a network name, or they are hexadecimal gobbledygook, usually the device’s MAC.

Network names are human friendly, IP addresses direct messages, and MAC addresses unambiguously identify devices. In real life, Jim Smith is the equivalent of a network name, his street address is like an IP address, and his social security number is his MAC address. “Jim Smith” is not enough to pick your Jim from the thousands of Jim Smiths out there. With his street address you could send him a letter, but to really nail old Jim, you need his social. It’s the same on a network. But most of the time, for practical home network management, you need a recognizable network name to go with the MAC.

Tracking network elements at home

If your connected device list is all recognizable network names, you’re home free, but that’s not likely. So the first task in taming that connected device list is to figure out some way to make the list from your router understandable.

Finding the MAC of a Windows, Apple, Unix, or Linux computer is easy. On a Windows PC, you can go to the command or the PowerShell window and enter “ipconfig /all”. You’ll get a screenful of information. Look for the “Physical Address”, Microsoft’s term for MAC. On Linux or Unix, on a command line, type “ifconfig -a”. Again, you’ll get a screenful. Find the line that begins “ether”, “HWaddr” or “lladdr”. Look for 12 hexadecimal digits separated by hyphens or colons.

You can find MAC addresses for your phones in the system settings. You may have to poke around. Look for MAC address, physical address, Wi-Fi address, and other variations. It will always be 12 hex digits.

For other devices, finding the MAC is a pain but possible. Frequently, you can go to the settings for the device and find the MAC under network settings. However, it’s not always easy. For example, I could not find a MAC address for the Amazon Firesticks we have on our TVs.

The procedure I followed was to go around the house making a list of all the MACs I could find with descriptions of the devices. That still left me with several unexplained entries on the router list. A network with unknown devices is not a safe home network.

Network scanning apps

My next step was to look for network scanning apps. Several are available for Android, and I assume for iPhones. I tried some. As near as I can see, they all scan local network traffic for MACs, then use the MAC to guess the device. The guesses are not perfect. Fing, the best of the Android scanning apps I tried, told me that my Microsoft Surface Pro tablet was a Lumia smart phone: the correct vendor, but the wrong device. However, Fing did identify the two Amazon Firesticks we have in use and offered clues to other devices on my router’s list.

Dead reckoning

I happened to install a new simple monochrome laser jet printer on our network this week, which illustrated what I consider the proper way to maintain a home CMDB. After connecting the printer to the wireless network, I checked the router device list and noted the MAC of the new entry. Done. Accurate and easy. Do that every time you add a new device and your home CMDB is always right.

Another dead reckoning type solution is to change the password on your home network and force every device to re-register and record the devices as you give them the new password. That’s a sensible step to take occasionally anyway, especially if, like me, you are willing reveal your network password to guests when they want to use your network connection. However, the more people and devices that have your password, the greater the chances of intrusion.

Your guest may not be malicious, but if their device on which your network password has been entered inadvertently falls into bad hands, an intruder may be able to extract the password to your network. If there are teenagers in your house, they are likely to be casual about passing around wireless access, which doesn’t bother me, but they and their guests are also more careless than experienced and wary adults about losing devices.

My approach is to change the network password after I offer access to all but the most trustworthy of guests. In 2020, a year in which we have had few guests, I haven’t changed our password at all.

Record keeping

What do you do with this compiled information? For a list of 30 devices, a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel would work well. But I have a simpler solution. On my home network, I have a Technicolor router-cable modem supplied by Comcast, which is not my favorite corporation, but the fastest and most reliable source for home broadband in my area. I’ve used various modems, routers, Wi-Fi endpoints and other networking gear in the past, and lately have settled on the convenience of a router-modem supplied by my service vendor.

The router management app supplied by Comcast is much better than some I have used. It supports user comments on the device listing, which is a useful feature. Instead of an independent spreadsheet, I’ve added comments explaining each entry exactly. So far, this has been both easy and effective.

In a future posting, I will get more into how you can use this rough and ready CMDB to help solve issues on your home network as they arise.

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Supply Chain Management: Averting a Covid-19 Catastrophe

Yossi Sheffi is a supply chain management expert who moves freely between business and academics. He founded several companies, and he sits on the boards of large corporations. He teaches engineering at MIT and has authored a half-dozen books that are read by engineers, economists, and business people. When I heard about his latest book, The New (Ab)Normal, in which he tackles the covid-19 disruption of the global supply chain, I got a copy as soon as I could, stayed up late reading, and got up early to finish it.

gosling-supply-chain
The gosling supply chain management system

The New (Ab)Normal

New (Ab)Normal was worth it. Sheffi’s insider views are compelling. He has talked with the executives and engineers who struggled to put food and toilet paper on supermarket shelves, produce and distribute medical protective gear, and prevent manufacturing plants from foundering from supply disruption.

Supply chains and the media

Sheffi has harsh words for some media. For example, he says empty supermarket shelves were misunderstood. Food and supplies were never lacking, but they were often in the wrong place. Until the lockdowns in March, a big share of U.S. meals were dispensed in restaurants, schools, and company cafeterias. These businesses purchase the same food as families, but they get it through a different supply network and packaged in different ways.

Cafeterias buy tons of shelled fresh eggs in gallon containers, but consumers buy cartons of eggs in supermarkets for cooking at home. When the eateries shut down or curtailed operations and people began eating at home, plenty of eggs were available, but someone had to redirect them to consumers in a form that was practical for a home kitchen. Sheffi says food shortages appeared in dramatic media video footage and sound bites, but not in supply chains.

Bursty services

Changing buying patterns worsened the appearance of shortages. Supermarket supply chains are adjusted to dispense supplies at a certain rate and level of burstiness. These are terms I know from network and IT service management. A bursty service has bursts of increased of activity followed by relatively quiet periods. At a bursty IT trouble ticket desk, thirty percent of a week’s tickets might be entered in one hour on Monday morning when employees return to work ready to tackle problems that they had put off solving during the previous week. A less bursty business culture might generate the same number of tickets per week, but with a more uniform rate of tickets per hour.

Bursty desks must be managed differently than steady desks. The manager of a bursty service desk must devise a way to deploy extra equipment and hire more staff to deal with peak activity on those hectic Monday mornings. Experienced managers also know that an unpredicted burst in tickets on a desk, say in the aftermath of a hurricane, will cause havoc and shortened tempers as irate customers wait for temporarily scarce resources. The best of them have contingency plans to deal with unanticipated bursts.

Cloud computing to the rescue

The rise of cloud computing architectures in the last decade has yielded increased flexibility for responding to bursts in digital activity. Pre-cloud, managers who had to provide service through activity bursts had to deploy purchased or leased servers with the capacity to handle peak periods of activity. Adding a physical server is a substantial financial investment that requires planning, sometimes changes in the physical plant, often added training and occasionally hiring new personnel.

Worse, the new capacity may remain idle during long non-peak periods, which is hard to explain to cost conscious business leaders. Some businesses are able to harvest off-peak capacity for other purposes, but many are not. Cloud computing offers on-demand computing with little upfront investment, greatly reducing the need to pay for unused capacity to improve service during peak periods.

The food supply

Covid-19 caused an unanticipated increase in the burstiness of supermarket sales. Under the threat of the virus, consumers began to shop once a week or less, buying larger quantities. Folks accustomed to picking up a few vegetables and a fresh protein on their way home from work began arriving at the store early in the morning to buy twenty-five-pound sacks of flour and dry beans, cases of canned vegetables, and bulk produce.

On the supply end with the farmers and packers, the quantities sold per month stayed fairly constant because the number of mouths being fed did not change, but in the stores, by afternoon, shelves were bare waiting for shipments arriving in the night because consumers were buying in bursts instead of their “a few items a day” pattern. This made for exciting media coverage of customers squabbling over the products remaining on the shelves. The media seldom pointed out that the shelves were full each morning after the night’s shipments had arrived and were on the shelves.

Toilet paper

The infamous toilet paper shortage was also either illusory or much more nuanced than media portrayals. Like restaurants and cafeterias, public restrooms took a big hit with the lockdowns. Like food, toilet paper consumption is inherently constant, but toilet paper purchasing burstiness and where the product is purchased varies.

Commercial toilet paper consumption plummeted as shoppers began to purchase consumer toilet paper in the same bursts that they were purchasing food supplies. There may have been some hoarding behavior, but many shoppers simply wanted to shrink their dangerous trips to the market by buying in bulk. Consumer toilet paper is not like the commercial toilet paper used in public restrooms, which is coarser and often dispensed in larger rolls from specialized holders. This presented supply problems similar to food supply issues.

Supply disruption

Supply chains had to respond quickly. Unlike digital services, responding to increased burstiness in supermarket sales required changes in physical inventory patterns. Increasing the supply of eggs by the dozen at supermarkets and decreasing eggs by the gallon on kitchen loading docks could not be addressed by dialing up a new batch of virtual cloud computers. New buying patterns had to be analyzed, revised orders had to be placed with packers, and trucks had to roll on highways.

Advances in supply chain management

Fortunately, supply chain reporting and analysis has jumped ahead in the last decade. Consumers see some of these advances on online sales sites like Amazon when they click on “Track package.” Unlike not too long ago when all they were offered was Amazon’s best estimated delivery date, they see the progress of their shipment from warehouse through shipping transfer points to the final delivery. Guesswork is eliminated: arrival and departure is recorded as the package passes barcode scanners.

The movement data is centralized in cloud data centers and dispensed to the consumer on demand. Many people have noted that Amazon shipments are not as reliable as they were pre-covid. However, the impression of unreliability would be much stronger without those “Track package” buttons.

Supply chain managers have access to the same kind of data on their shipments. In untroubled times, a shipping clerk’s educated estimate on an arrival time of a shipment of fresh eggs may have been adequate, but not in post-covid 2020, with its shifting demands and unpredictable delays. Those guesses can’t cope with an egg packing plant shut down for a week when the virus flares up or a shipment delayed by a quarantined truck driver.

Good news

Fortunately, with the data available today, these issues are visible in supply chain tracking systems. Orders can be immediately redirected to a different packing plant that has returned from a shutdown or dispatch a fresh relief driver instead of leaving a shipment to wait in a truck stop parking lot. Issues can be resolved today that would not have been visible as issues a decade ago. Consequently, supply chains have been strikingly resilient to the covid-19 disruption.

Supply chains were much different in my pioneer grandparents’ days. They grew their own meat, poultry, and vegetables, and lived without toilet paper for most of their lives. Although supply was less complicated, the effects of supply disruption, like a punishing thunderstorm destroying a wheat crop, was as significant as today’s disruptions.

In November of 2020 with steeply rising infection counts, predictions of new supply disruption occasionally surface. The response of supply chains so far this year leave me optimistic that we have seen the worst.