I found a Whole Foods out of corn on the cob. Corn stores just fine, so that's quite unusual. But Safeway was out, too. Strange, because the US has a corn glut.
The thin-inventory thing is getting excessive. The local CVS has been out of distilled water twice, and only had one pack of small paper cups. All those things have a very long shelf life; there's no need to maintain tight stock control.
I don't know where you're located, but isn't fresh corn on the cob pretty seasonal? mid-late summer to early fall?
I know commodity corn stores well, but I didn't realize that human consumable sweet corn stored for long period of time.
I've seen my grocery store sell corn from Argentina and other places. So maybe the original commenter is thinking of out of season stuff shipped from other countries?
I disagree about sweet corn storing well. The stuff they truck up from further south early in the season is noticeably lower quality than more local harvests.
(in the Midwest availability is pretty seasonal even)
regular industrial corn is livestock feed, corn-syrup base, plastics feedstock and the like. horrible stuff, grown in gargantuan quantities. you can't eat it without at least some amount of processing. it's just not food.
the stuff you eat off the cob is sweet corn. nobody grows, or eats enough sweet corn for there to be a glut of it.
I live in a pretty large major city, and I recall that during Thanksgiving my responsibility was to get vanilla ice cream to complement the dessert. I was like, no biggie it's the most common boring flavor, shouldn't be hard to find.
Every single supermarket I went to was out of vanilla ice cream.
If you were searching for ice-cream with real vanilla, then its possibly understandable. A cyclone clobbered the Madagascan crop in 2017, multiplying the price. Some gelaterias in London didn't even run vanilla this winter as a result.
>All those things have a very long shelf life; there's no need to maintain tight stock control.
Holding inventory has an economic cost, even if the inventory has infinite shelf life — the money that bought or manufactured the inventory could be used elsewhere.
The thin-inventory thing is getting excessive. The local CVS has been out of distilled water twice, and only had one pack of small paper cups. All those things have a very long shelf life; there's no need to maintain tight stock control.