Mountain Valley Spring Water is bottled in Arkansas. Roughly two months ago an unexpected snowstorm in the state briefly shut down production. Sufficient inventory meant that the production interruption didn’t initially have an impact on customers, but two months later there’s a very real inventory shortage that has customers experiencing near-term delivery delays.
What’s happening for Mountain Valley customers is useful to think about with the happenings of March 2020 and beyond top of mind. A brief interruption at a water plant is being felt around the U.S. a few months later. In which case, readers might better understand why shortages and higher prices were – and still are – so notable across the U.S. and global economy four years after politicians around the world panicked about the coronavirus, and in panicking, shut down the world economy.
If a brief interruption at a water plant can have such a profound impact on water availability, is it any surprise that all manner of goods and services are still quite a bit more expensive today in the aftermath of a global shutdown that lasted weeks and months? Hopefully the question answers itself, but if not, just stop and think about the remarkable global cooperation that goes into the production of everything that we buy today. That prices are still elevated is a statement of the obvious.
Why all this throat clearing ahead of a piece about gold?
Read the full article at Forbes.
