Strawberry Supply Chain

Last weekend we drove up to the Rim, where we spent two nights in a cabin that Ginger rented, as a short getaway in honor of my birthday. The cabin was in the tiny hamlet of Strawberry, which is up the road from the slightest less tiny town of Pine, such that the two of them are often mentioned together.

During the summer, the Rim is a popular getaway for folks in the Valley, escaping the heat at higher altitudes. Even this time of year, when the weather cools, it is hard to get a reservation on weekends. The Strawberry Inn and its cabins were almost booked up by the time Ginger made her reservations.

It was sublime to be up among the pines. Strawberry is not on the top of the Rim, but far enough up the flank to feel that one is "on the Rim." 

Strawberry is mostly a line of businesses on either side of the road, including a few restaurants, in particular one called Mamma Jo's which serves Italian food, where we dined on our first evening, as well as an small hut that serves freshly baked savory and sweet empanadas, where we walked to get our breakfast on Saturday morning. 

We had gotten our coffee at the Windmill, which is a tiny structure that looks like its name, which serves coffee starting at six thirty in the morning. We had walked over there and gotten our morning hot drinks. We had tried to get food there, but the proprietor, speaking through the small window, told us that he nothing of foodstuffs available.

"Normally we have oatmeal," he said. "But we haven't gotten any in a while." He explained that his supplier hadn't been able to deliver certain critical supplies in weeks. Among other things, he was short on plastic lids. When I got a refill, he asked if I wouldn't mind reusing the lid.

It was my first real life encounter to a phenomenon I had been hearing about for weeks on Youtube--empty shelves and failures in the supply chain. It hadn't hit us in Scottsdale, but it had reached Strawberry.

I wondered if this whole episode about the supply chain will fade away and become a memory, or perhaps it will become something serious. I am bad about predicting the future about such things.