Post #G21-009: Canning lid shortage revisited. See post #G21-013. Looks like seasonal shipments of canning supplies have begun. In Vienna, VA, lids are back in stock. (Or, at least, were as of 4/18/2021). See Post #G21-003 for the background. In a nutshell, it’s hard to get lids for home canning right now. If you can find them, your choice is between expensive (name-brand) and potentially inferior (foreign-made). (If you doubt that inferior part, read some of the reviews on Amazon.) And, of course, the predators are out in full force, so you will see people offering to sell you lids for more than the cost of a “set” (jar+ring+lid). I’ve now done a little shopping locally, and tracked the trends for on-line sources, and it’s time to update that prior post. It’s clear that the situation is getting worse, but I stand by what I said in my prior post. To me, it looks like the U.S. manufacturer hasn’t yet started shipping to major retailers for the 2021 canning season. And so, I think that most of what we’re seeing right now is still the aftereffect of the 2020 canning season. If that’s true, then things are going to continue to get worst, right on up to the point where the seasonal shipments start for the 2021 canning season. And that that point, I expect to see lids available again. That’s a guess. But that’s still my best guess. Details follow. This turned out to be a long post. I cover the topics listed below. I’ve put the headings in red so you can just scroll down and find them. My local stores. Canning lid arbitrage, or why the local shelves should be empty. Recent changes in on-line sources. A brief note on re-using lids. Only Newell, Inc. knows what’s actually in store for us later this year. Afterword, or why a shortage of canning lids isn’t just some quaint little oddity. Downloaded from www.savemaple.org. | 1 Post #G21-009: Canning lid shortage revisited. Part 1: My local stores. There are a handful of places in this area (Northern Virginia) where I have shopped for canning supplies. I went around and visited them this past week. It was a bit of an education. First up, zero stand-alone lids for sale. So let’s just get that out of the way. At one end of the spectrum was my local grocery store (Giant Food). They had three boxes of bands-and-lids, for a normal price (about 5.50 a box). That same store also had plenty of 12-packs of jars (“sets”) of all sizes. So much so that they had them stacked as excess inventory, way up top where customers couldn’t reach them. Put a pin in that, because I think that last part is a clue. At the other end of the spectrum was my nearby Walmart. That store remained stocked with canning supplies well into the pandemic. But now? Totally denuded. Not a usable item left on the shelf, unless you were in the market for pectin. Here’s a picture. Downloaded from www.savemaple.org. | 2 Post #G21-009: Canning lid shortage revisited. The merchandise was literally dusty, as were the shelves. It certainly looked as if there had been no new merchandise put on those shelves for months. And put a pin in that, because I think that’s another clue. My final observation from local retail is that this isn’t a shortage of food-preservation Downloaded from www.savemaple.org. | 3 Post #G21-009: Canning lid shortage revisited. supplies in general. If I turned around from that last view, here’s what the vacuum-sealer supplies section looked like at that same Walmart: This may be the year when I finally buy a vacuum sealer. Downloaded from www.savemaple.org. | 4 Post #G21-009: Canning lid shortage revisited. How do I interpret all that? Here’s how I see it. I think that in both cases, I’m looking at what was left over from 2020. I’m betting that shipments of canning supplies, to general retailers, are mostly seasonal. I’m betting that the entire supply chain is geared to those shipments being seasonal. So, no matter what, at those retailers, new goods aren’t going to show up until it’s canning season. I think the Vienna, VA Giant Food has an abundance of jars because almost nobody buys their canning supplies there. I don’t really understand why Giant Food even carries canning supplies, let alone year-round. The Town of Vienna, VA is a wealthy white-collar suburb of Washington DC. It’s a pretty good guess that the clientele of that grocery store is not much into canning. Given that, it’s not a surprise that they had plenty of jars left. That Walmart, by contrast, probably attracts canners from a wide area. They were extremely well-stocked prior to the pandemic, and remained stocked even after you couldn’t find jars in other locations. And, again, the result is not a surprise. Looks like all of their 2020 canning season stock got sold out. Walmarts are not known for letting their shelf space stand idle and empty. Let alone idle, empty, and dusty. And yet, there it is, above. I’m guessing they expected to have canning supplies left over from 2020 to continue to fill that space. But they did not. And it makes no sense to get re-label that shelf section for other goods, in the meantime, because they’re going to restock when the shipments start up again, for the 2021 canning season. That’s how I read the tea leaves. In both cases, I think I’m looking at 2020 leftovers. And I bet that’s how it works every year. I bet few-to-no general retailers take big shipments of canning supplies mid-winter, say. That would be inefficient, to say the least. If we learned one thing from the pandemic, it’s that supply lines are inflexible. It’s not like Downloaded from www.savemaple.org. | 5 Post #G21-009: Canning lid shortage revisited. they could flip a switch and delivery a billion extra rolls of toilet paper. And so, if those canning supply shipments normally arrive early-to-mid summer, I’m betting that in 2021, they’re going to arrive in early-to-mid summer. And not one moment sooner, just because the shelves are empty. Total guesswork on my part, again. But still my best guess. Part 2: Canning lid arbitrage, or why you should not see lids on the shelf at Walmart right now. First, a word of caution. I’ve never actually looked for canning lids, locally, at this time of the year. It’s possible that my local suppliers look like this every year, but I just never noticed. I don’t think that’s true, but I can’t directly rule that out, either. Sometimes you only see something if you look for it, and you can jump to the wrong conclusion. But the main point here is that basic economic theory dictates that I shouldn’t see lids on the shelf at Walmart now. Full stop. That’s because bricks-and-mortar retailers have inflexible pricing rules for manufactured goods. They can’t (or maybe won’t) jack up their prices for hard goods in response to a shortage. If the sticker on the shelf at Walmart says that a 12-pack of lids is $2.40, then by gosh, that’s the price Walmmart sells them for. They aren’t going to re-sticker their shelf in response to a lid shortage. The result is exactly what economic theory would predict: They’ve got a sticker on the shelf, but no lids to sell. And it has to be like that. Think about it. If you can buy lids at Walmart for $0.20 each, and sell them on Ebay for $0.75 each, what do you think would happen to those lids, if they had any? Lid arbitrage. Some sharp cookie would be buying them at Walmart and selling them on Ebay. Downloaded from www.savemaple.org. | 6 Post #G21-009: Canning lid shortage revisited. So, given current conditions, not only are the shelves bare of lids, the shelves should be bare of lids. So it’s not as if high on-line prices and empty local shelves are two independent sets of signs. If local retailers won’t raise the prices, common sense tells you that those are two sides of the same coin. Part 3: Two changes in on-line sources. This is just a quick recap. Looking at Amazon, it still appears that the market-clearing price for name-brand (American-made) lids is about $0.70 per lid, in quantity. (That’s for wide- mouth, which is what I use). And it still appears that foreign-made lids are available for around $0.30 per lid, with widely varying quality. That’s all unchanged from the last time I looked. So you can still get American-made lids, for something over twice the pre-shortage price. Or take a gamble on foreign-made lids. One change I note is that on-line sites for many reputable bricks-and-mortar retailers no longer even have a listing for lids. They have simply taken their listings for lids off-line, as if they don’t offer them or never offered them.