Washington Post: You Spoiled Americans Need To Stop Complaining About Supply Shortages

Does the Washington Post and opinion writer Micheline Maynard think this really helps their case in protecting Let’s Go Brandon? Especially when those in the news media really didn’t suffer much through COVID

Opinion: Don’t rant about short-staffed stores and supply chain woes

Across the country, Americans’ expectations of speedy service and easy access to consumer products have been crushed like a Styrofoam container in a trash compactor. Time for some new, more realistic expectations.

Fast food is less fast. A huge flotilla of container ships is stuck offshore in California, waiting to unload. Shelves normally stocked with Halloween candy this time of year are empty, as I saw the other day at a Target here in Ann Arbor, Mich.

The issue has become so troublesome — with alarming economic and political ramifications — that the White House is stepping in, urging unions, port operators and big consumer-goods companies to work around the clock (if they aren’t already) to unclog supply pipelines.

American consumers, their expectations pampered and catered to for decades, are not accustomed to inconvenience.

How dare you pampered consumers expect things to appear to be getting back to normal!! Yes, most foresaw there would be problems, and there are problems around the world. We did expect that they would start getting better, not worse, because demand is not above.

Customers’ persistent whine, “Why don’t they just hire more people?,” sounds feeble in this era of the Great Resignation, especially in industries, such as food service, with reputations for being tough places to work.

Rather than living constantly on the verge of throwing a fit, and risking taking it out on overwhelmed servers, struggling shop owners or late-arriving delivery people, we’d do ourselves a favor by consciously lowering expectations.

Yes, it would be too much to expect to be able to get my cheese bagels or white fish at the supermarket when I go in to get them, and they are out at least half the time. As The Right Scoop notes

Notice how the author doesn’t put any blame on Biden for this, instead casting the Biden White House in the role of simply trying to solve the problem and telling Americans that they’re the ones who need to adjust their spoiled expectations.

And highlights a tweet from Joe Concha, where he writes “This absolutely would have been published if the same crisis occurred under the previous administration, right? Silly, greedy citizens. Your expectations are too high.” Yes, how would this be portrayed in the press if Trump were still president? Yeah, we all know they would be Blaming him, blasting him, demanding to know what he is going to do. Back to the WP

The other day I found myself carrying home a loaf of bread in my bare hands because the bakery had run out of bags. Back when we didn’t know how good we had it — circa 2019 — I might have been annoyed by the inconvenience. Now I was just glad the bakery was still in business.

Yes, because it totally makes sense that we can’t get bags to put bread in. I can understand the cars, TVs, laptops, big ticket items and such. Bags? We just didn’t know how good we had it!

American consumers might have been spoiled, but generations of them have also dealt with shortages of some kind — gasoline in the 1970s, food rationing in the 1940s, housing in the 1920s when cities such as Detroit were booming. Now it’s our turn to make adjustments.

Bread bags are luxuries now.