or can I get toilet paper in the future.
It appears we are moving out of the great toilet paper apocolypse. The question is how did we get here. Interestingly it is not about hoarding it is more about supply chain disruption. Last weeks On The Media had a good take on it. You can listen here.
So the bottom line is we live in a world with complicated supply chains. Who knew that toilet paper is one of them. Its very nature shows why it is a prime candidate for disruption. The prime issue is it takes up a lot of space for not a lot of value. So it is interest of the stores and manufacturers to use a just in time method of logistics. Fortunately we know roughly how full of crap the average person is. So the shelves stay stocked.
The Tale of Two Supply Chains
Turns out toilet paper actually runs on two different supply chains, one for consumers and one for business. The expectation is we do our business both at home and away. The lockdowns have changed that. The amount we are using hasn’t changed but where we are has. This is the actually problem. The very rational choice of, “Oh, I am going to be at home more I should pick up a little extra,” makes a big deal. It suddenly increased the demand on the consumer side that for the moment can’t keep up. The commercial side probably has plenty, but its supply chain is not geared to getting toilet paper to retailers, and not in a format the average consumer would use. A quick search on commercial toilet paper shows must of the typical rolls out of stock and then plenty of the large commercial formats that most of use don’t use available.
So more would be available but manufacturers would have change processes and logistics and once that happens most likely the crisis is over and a supply chain problem in the other direction starts.
The Supply Chain of the K2 Society
So how will our future society deal with supply chains and disruptions due to a crisis? Future technology changes things. There are four items you have to think about in your supply chain.
- Labor – who you need in your factory to make the products
- Energy to power everything
- Raw materials
- Logistics – really the intelligence to mange your supply chain.
So how do these shake out. Energy and materials become the easy parts. We now have either space based solar arrays or fusion so energy stops being as much of a factor. Raw materials become less of an issue. The future society has built orbital industries for asteroid mining and refining massively increasing access to raw materials. The amount of energy available also takes away some of the constraints from recycling as energy ceases to be a major cost.
Labor is more of a factor, but everything that can be automated has been automated. Technology also has enable most remote work. Disruptions for human labor are massively reduced. We are discovering this today. People who can work remote are probably as productive as people who don’t.
The most critical factor is logistics. This is where all the automation and artificial intelligence come together. We can now assume driverless vehicles and networks of expert systems coordinating traffic and shipping between each other. The ability to pivot and change disruptions is now massively reduced.
So does this mean we have toilet paper in future moments of crisis. We would but we are all just using the three seashells.
