This Mothers’ Day, Parents are Struggling to Find Baby Formula
Clearly, the #BareShelvesBiden legacy continues.
I have been monitoring food scarcity, fertilizer shortages, and the supply chain crisis.
Now, in related news, parents are struggling to find baby formula.
Parents of infants across the U.S. are taking to social media pleading for media coverage and political action while posting pictures of empty store shelves, as the country’s baby formula shortage continues to get worse.
“If the [mainstream media] can talk about the toilet paper shortage ever (sic) hour, they should be talking about the baby formula shortage at least,” one new mom tweeted last week. “We ended [up] finding the Amazon brand online but not everyone is so lucky to be able to feed that. Please share. This is every store!”
Is everyone aware of the critical shortage of baby formula right now? I just about had a meltdown while hunting all over this morning for some. She’s having tummy issues,can’t find anything. This is all I had to choose from. I’ve had to switch her formula every time. pic.twitter.com/CN1W8NllV8
— Jamies4OU (@Jamies4OU) May 4, 2022
This is a truly chilling development. As an older mother, I absolutely relied on baby formula to feed my son 20 years ago. I cannot imagine the fear, anxiety, and panic being experienced across the country by parents desperate to find formula, especially specialty types that their babies may need.
This caught my eye earlier in the day.
Moms are facing a “terrifying” shortage of baby formula, which has “become impossible to find” as Biden’s supply chain crisis persists pic.twitter.com/vOsypBfN0u
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 6, 2022
Curious, I went to the baby food section of our local market (which is close to a Marine Air Station and home to many young service families). Every single one of the baby formulas was “out of stock.”
It turns out, the supply of formula has dropped off suddenly.
At retailers across the U.S., 40% of the top-selling baby formula products were out of stock as of the week ending April 24, a new analysis from Datasembly, which tracked baby formula stock at more than 11,000 stores, shows. National out-of-stock levels jumped nine percentage points, from 31% to 40% between April 3 and April 24. That’s up sharply from 11% in November.
“This is a shocking number that you don’t see for other categories,” Ben Reich, CEO of Datasembly told CBS MoneyWatch.
The strained supply has driven-up prices for what formula is available.
‘An entire month [there] was nothing… nothing online, nothing in stores nearby,’ Nicole Brown, the mother of a 5-month-old told News 4 Jacksonville in Florida.
‘I can get Amazon delivered to my door, but I can’t feed my son. It’s absolutely heartbreaking.’
And in Virginia, Jill Bradford, a foster mom to a 5-month-old baby girl with medical needs, says she has less than two days of the special amino acid-based formula the baby needs.
‘We’ve called the WIC office,’ Bradford told WTVR. ‘We’ve called Thrive, which is a supply company. We’ve called every hospital system in the state. I’ve contacted personally, every Kroger, Walgreens, Walmart and CVS within the tri-cities area.’
She noted she found eight cans of the formula the child needs on eBay, but it’s being sold for $800. The cans typically cost between $43 and $47.
Additionally, major chains are limiting how much formula can be bought at one time.
We’re continuing to work with our baby formula vendors to address this issue, and we regret any inconvenience this causes our customers,” a company spokesperson said.
Walgreens issued a similar statement:
“Due to increased demand and various supplier challenges, infant and toddler formulas are seeing constraint across the country,” the the Illinois-based company said. “Similar to other retailers, we put into effect purchase limits of three per transaction on all infant and toddler formula to help improve inventory. We continue to work diligently with our supplier partners to best meet customer demands.”
Other media outlets reported that Target and Walmart were also limiting purchases. Representatives for those companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Clearly, the #BareShelvesBiden legacy continues.
Bare shelves Biden. https://t.co/7oH77YGuwZ
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) May 6, 2022
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There is only one thing that stops this…
SC State motto, Dum Spiro Spero.
While I breathe, I hope.
The hope of breath needs to be taken from those responsible for doing this.
As I said two years ago when the covidiocy started.
You CANNOT simply shut down so-called ‘non-essential’ parts of the economy without dramatic and far reaching effects. Companies stopped investing in upgrades and growth and simply tried to survive.
The biggest component of all of this is transportation. The insane backup in LA port didn’t get better – they just forced the ships to anchor further off the coast and further apart so there were no more dramatic pictures of them waiting. The trucker shortage is real, the cost of fuel has hit the stratosphere, and a huge number of companies simply CANNOT afford the increased cost to do business.
Buckle up, it’s only going to get worse.
This is what can happen when items like this become sourced from some huge corporation that mass produces it and it requires a long supply chain with long lead times. If items like this were more locally sourced , by smaller producers that can be much more flexible these problems might not exist to the same extent. While the system does work very well most of the time, when it cracks or breaks the outcome leads to situations like the one we are experiencing now. You may have to pay more as will probably cost more to produce but security comes at a price.
Instead we have huge manufacturers shipping containers loads at a time to huge distribution centers because people want cheap and available in large quantities at all times.
Not sure why somebody downvoted you.
This is also intimately associated with American industry’s problematic love affair with Japanese “just in time” acquisition techniques. Like the electric grid, it works only so long as the supply chain remains in perfect operation. Let it go out of order temporarily, and the “buffering warehouses” that might have ridden you through the drought are no longer to be found because they have all been turned into corporate daycares.
Japanese “just in time” acquisition techniques.
this was actually a brilliant concept, and very efficient. Anyone else remember the “back room” of the grocery store, where all the “back stock” was shelved> Took up a third of the VERY epensive real estate for the outfit. With JIT delivery, and computerised checkout, when I buy a jug of milk or a jar of peanut butter, the warehouse knows to put one more of each on that trailer being loaded for MY store. Goods are now stocked on the trucks on the road to that store. The “ack room” is now a twentieth of the real estate in use, and only good for storing a few pallets and the pallet jacks to move them about. The whole schtick has signifacanly reduced the overhead for the stores, thus prices to we who need the food to eat.
But, when supplies run short, for whatever reason, those who choose NOT to warehouse their needs at home will often find the “holes” i the supply chain have piled up, and there is no whatever it is I use. I’ve not seen paper bowls in my favourite store for weeks, and have not seen one size for four months. My favourite olive oil (price/quality item) was not available for five months, they finally got some in. I had others I did not like as much, so survived. Pasilla chiles were only off the shelf for three days, so I had to make do with dried red ones. But I’ve yet to starve.
Just wait, communists specialize at starving people.
The insane backups at California ports can be largely laid at the feet of the stupid state itself. Two new laws the dumb voters bought (haing been falsely shoved down their throats for a year or so) were to banish all truck tractors built prior to the 2011 model year.. because global warming or something. That took about 75% of the operating tractors off California’s roads overnight last September. Truck tractors are built SO robustly they last for decades. I met one guy still driving his Dad’s old 1958 Mack, coming up on EIGHT MILLION MILES. Engine never out of the truck, one clutch change. This was back in the early 1980’s. I drove a 1962 Kenworth, the odo had rolled over so many times the numbers no longer lined up straight. Did I care? It still ran perfectly every dayk never missed a load.
Next up, owner operators.. guys who own their own tractor then find a company or agency to hire them and their truck to pull that company’s loads as needed. That used to be arond 60% of all the rigs on the road. Some of us owned our own trailers, too. Term lease or trip lease, I owned the machinery they found the work. I just drove. California, in their desparate dive to rid themselves of tUber and Lyft and the state employment taxes not being paid because they were contract owned, voted to shut down all subleasing, owner operating, independent contractor. This extended to individuals renting a space in a hair salon and working as their own employer. State greed drove that. They wanted all those nasty “independent” self-employed rebels to become full time employees, now bound by collective bargaining (Unions), pension plans, That took 65% of drivers off the road unless they became full time employees of the trucking company. Most sea freight cans were formerly moved by owner-operators.trip leasers, independents, and small “fleets” of five or so rigs. That all ended last september,
Add to that mix the over the top by the books union crane operators at the ports, the guys who pull the cans off the ships and drop them onto the can chassis for the trucks to take wherever. Much of the backup at the LA area ports were in result of these guys slowpoking, scrambling cans, which then had to be moved again, making some “special” drivers (read: non-union fleets) wait for hours, blocking access for other trucks.. just playing nasty nasty cuz they could. Almost like they got a bonus for making the port run slowly to bottleneck things up, maybe gain more overtime and extra pay cause an eight hjour shift no longer produced eight hours worth of EFFICIENT work.
Nope, most of the West Coast shipping mess is thanks to the gummit of California.
Well if you can’t murder them by abortion just starve them to death. It’s all intentional.
Artificial scarcity imposed by the Davos/WEF in pursuit of a Malthusian nightmare used to be considered a loony conspiracy theory. When everyday reality begins to confirm the theory then it’s no longer loony.
Shows you how out of touch with reality the Davos/WEF crowd is. The birth rate of the major countries including the US, China, Japan, all of Europe are below the rate needed to maintain their populations. Yet the are obsessed with population explosion and the need to radically slash the number of people alive. Bill Gates just can’t stop talking about it and yet he is the guy pushing the poison poke the hardest. Yeah, they really care about humanity. They only care about the “special people” who will be allowed to survive their solutions for saving the planet.
Yes, they plan on us scraping out our existence while living as royalty.
I really dislike these people thoroughly!
“US, China, Japan, all of Europe are below the rate needed to maintain their populations. Yet the are obsessed with population explosion and the need to radically slash the number of people alive.”
Whenever I hear about Western civilizations purposely reducing their population numbers below replacement, while other civilizations show no such compulsion, I cannot help but be put in mind of the distressing proposition at the conclusion of the Niven/Barnes short story The Locusts (their very first collaboration), about the dark evolutionary purposes of human cultural and technological advancement.
(The story is available free online here, starting on page 278.)
How did the human race ever survive to this point without infant formula? Especially these days when both parents can breastfeed.
Not every mother can breastfeed. Some don’t have milk come in. Some babies just refuse to latch even with an experienced nurse helping. Formula is a good alternative that provides the right nutrition.
Me, I had a lot and could pump to bottle so my husband could feed our son from bottled breast milk.
So how did the human race survive? Babies just starved to death? I wasn’t weaned off of either breast milk nor infant formula. We were weaned off of that quickly too. Lots of creamed vegetables and fruit. Even animals force their young off of the teat as soon as they can chew. The idea that a lack of formula will lead to mass starvation of babies is laughable. Maybe we are too dumb to survive as a species.
Forgot to point out that we were fed cow’s whole milk at first. Also juice and teething biscuits. Probably other food too. But we were off the bottle as soon as possible.
Women who couldn’t breastfeed would look for a wetnurse. If they couldn’t find one, or couldn’t afford to pay her, then yes, the baby usually starved. Babies who couldn’t nurse starved. Babies who for some reason couldn’t handle their mother’s milk or that of any wetnurse she could find, starved.
Part of the reason this shortage is a bigger deal than some people seem to realize is that formulas are not all the same. Some babies can handle them all just fine, but some can only use one brand, which the parents find out by experiment, or they just get used to one brand; either way, if that brand is sold out they’re in trouble.
A few years ago the US government banned the importation of baby formula, which caused a huge problem in Jewish neighborhoods where an Israeli brand called Materna had become very popular, and babies were used to that brand and refused any other. When Materna could no longer be legally imported hundreds of parents started depending on private imports; anyone traveling from Israel would be asked to bring as much Materna formula as they could pack into their luggage. I don’t know what eventually happened with the regulation, but Materna reappeared on the shelves.
Exactly! This is exactly when the father should step in and breastfeed! It’s his duty now, according to the Ministry of Truth!
(I was going to append the Pregnant Man emoji here, but apparently my OS is from back before that magnificent evolutionary step, so the code just shows up as a box. Besides, I seem to remember that the LI forum doesn’t display emojis anyway.)
How did we survive without air conditioning, electricity, prescription medication, sewer systems, etc. We are living in a society where bare survival isn’t acceptable any more, nor should it be. We can help along those who might not have made it very far centuries ago. Right now the world is reverting, not progressing.
There’s an “apocryphal” story that 0ur Founders purposely located its seat of government where it is specifically because its climate would make year-round operation impossible except under emergency conditions.
It’s quite possible that DuPont’s Freon is responsible for more human carnage than Krupp’s explosives.
all Freon ever managed to accomplish was to poke holes in the Oh Zone which has since led inexhorably to global smarming of some flavour or other. Its replacement is even worse, as the new molecules are so small they leak where the real stuff was too big to leak…. so refrigeration equipment now has to be junked and replaced about four times as often, leading to even MORE global smarming
Looking at your votes, I think you needed to use a sarc tag.
I’m trying to conserve on ink. At least I know the down twinkle button works.
The worse, the better
Yet, for some reason, Rasmussen Reports’ daily Presidential tracking poll shows Brandon has become a lot less unpopular in the past several weeks. I am truly surprised. Anyone care to speculate?
I look at that pretty much every day, and it seems to bounce around from where it is as of Friday (45% approval, the highest it’s been in weeks) down to 40% approval. I don’t know why it’s 43% one day and 41% the next (or vice versa), but it’s a good gauge for daily shifts. Hopefully, Friday’s poll was an anomaly. I can’t imagine that there are that many people who actually approve of FJB, and I hope it’s not due to the SCOTUS Roe leak. That would be a bad sign for the GOP.
Rasmussen uses a 30 day moving average, so ranges are very narrow. Rasmussen also uses registered and likely to vote. Well we all know the cultist on the left live in an alternated universe and nothing can break through to their fantasy world.
The shortage is reaI and I feel for these parents. However guarantee you that some people figured shortages were in the works and took advantage and hoarded a bunch to resell at flea markets and such. I tell you this because after Hurricane Andrew my husband (who was in Miami for the clean up and restoration) notice quite a few homes with donated baby formula stockpiled. Oh wasn’t it for the baby? What baby?
PS. At one point we were so poor that I either always asked for samples at the pediatrician (this was after my daughter was off the breast) or did the old standby of evaporated milk, water, and karo syrup. Doctors will tell you the latter is a big no-no except for emergencies. Will it did not kill me or many other babies. I think the secret of its success was that Mother’s Magic of my day: Cod liver oil.
It was real two years ago, too. A family we know called enfamil and they sent her a pretty good supply of it. There was no formula of any type in any store around here.
You misspelled ‘well planned capitalist risk taking venture’ as hoarded. Buy low, sell high is the essence of free markets.
Biden and his bumbling fool of a transportation secretary are right on it/. The CDC has published directions to all pediatricians on how to make formula out of both cow milk and goat milk (hint: add one drop of liquid folate per bottle)/
Biden has asked and received expedited truckloads from Canadian and Mexico/ Nestle has shipped in powdered formula from its European and African factories/
I thought he would just sign an EO ordering releases from our National Strategic Baby Formula Stockpile.
Kamala Harris recommends people buy electric baby bottles.
Liberals and Democrats should not be allowed to buy formula. They voted for this business, they should take the brunt of the damage.