Restocking The Grocery Stores

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Restocking The
Grocery Stores

North: I think it was last month that two bank robbers, well armed and with body armor, held off a couple of hundred policemen for over an hour. Two of them! You then apply the numbers from a rather old report I have. Los Angeles County has 100,000 gang members. That was in the early 90's. It is probably higher than that now. I doubt they are as well armed as those two bank robbers, but they are probably better armed than most of the police. And the reality is, in a period of calm, when a couple of maniacs want to tie up a police department, you would spread the defensive ability of that law enforcement system very, very thin in a real emergency. You would very quickly have a situation when the grocery stores would not be able to be re-supplied. This is a system which must be restocked every three days. In some cities it is probably less time.

Portela: Absolutely. At least twice a week, Gary.

North: Yes, I would say about twice a week you have to restock the shelves of your supermarkets. We forget how magnificently well organized the free market system is in being able to do this with nobody in charge. One of the true genius and remarkable miracles of the market is there is nobody in charge, and yet those shelves are restocked. But everything depends on social order and the technical ability to get delivery of whatever it is you are trying to get onto those shelves. Everything depends on the reliability of the monetary system, so that a means of payment is there to encourage the suppliers to bring those items into town to place them on the shelves. You could call into question all three factors. The supply system, because of the breakdown of train transportation, the monetary system because of a threat of a run on the banks, and the social order system because of the rise of gang activity. All three factors must be present to restock those shelves. And any of them could be lost literally in a matter of weeks.

Portela: It could happen overnight, Gary. A significant earthquake, if it stopped transportation long enough, would create that. That could happen this moment, anywhere.

The Seriousness Of The Millennium Bug

Dr. North: The year 2000 problem, unlike the earthquake, is magnificently predictable. We know when it's going to happen and we know why it's going to happen. We just don't know the complete fallout from it. We can date it. We can make very reasonable estimates on whether the systems are going to be repaired. The answer is, they aren't going to be repaired. In the United States alone, the estimate is we will need 500,000 to 700,000 new additions to the COBOL programming field at a time when COBOL is no longer taught in most institutions because of the move to micro-computers. So the reality is there is no way we can recruit half a million COBOL programmers in the United States, let alone Germany, England or Japan.

This is going to be a worldwide phenomenon. It's not just going to hit LA County or someplace like LA County; this is going to be a worldwide, same-moment phenomenon. We've never seen this before; we haven't seen it since Noah and the flood. He had 120 years of advance warning, and it only lasted 40 days. With the 2000 year problem we don't have 120 years of warning. The Ark Institute the outfit that is hooked into your web site with the report on the grain supply updates is, I think, pretty well named.

From the point of view of your basic operations, you were seven months behind for a while. Are you caught up now?

Portela: We are totally caught up right now. Our UPS shipments are going out within a ten day period. My truck shipments are going out as soon as we fill up a truck in a general area. [Unfortunately this isn't the case now (Apr 99)]

North: That takes how long?

Portela: It can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to maybe a couple of months. Let's just pick, Norfolk, Virginia. I just had a truck go there to cover all the area. So if I start getting some repeat orders in that area, and if they are large enough so they can't go by UPS because of the cost, they may have to wait several weeks until I have another group of orders in the Norfolk area. That is basically how we try to coordinate orders.

North: That makes sense, but it is another delay factor which is going to create havoc again if there is a huge run on the grain bank.

Portela: This is true. Gary, I have approximately 3,000 key groups around the United States that we send our price list out to. We hope that at least half, and maybe more of them will make group orders with us once or twice a year. If I get an isolated phone call from someone who wants some grains, we can either refer them to my other people or we can try and handle it directly by UPS if they want to give us an individual order. You are right. The system is very slow and cumbersome sometimes. It has worked very effectively the last 34 years. But things are different now. If we started getting, like you said, a few thousand individuals or groups to place orders all at once -- with only about half a dozen companies doing what we are doing, it would quickly clog the system.

North: What year did you start doing this?

Portela: We have been incorporated now for 35 years. I personally have been here for 24 years and the company actually goes back 50 years. Last year was our 50th anniversary.

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