Famine, Then Feast (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

I picked up a prescription at my regular pharmacy early last month, and my medicine and receipt came with an extra bag of goodies: hand sanitizer, sanitizer wipes, disposable masks and even a nice cloth mask. A year earlier, I would have felt like I won the lottery.

My son stopped by the house, saw the swag on the kitchen table and said he got the same when he went to the same pharmacy for his COVID-19 vaccine.

Representatives of a state agency came by the office a couple of weeks ago, and they too left me with pocket-sized bottles of hand sanitizer. It didn’t seem like an attempt to influence me; as with the pharmacy, it seemed like an attempt to get rid of an oversupply. I am still sanitizing my hands regularly, as I did for years before COVID, but I’m not sure I’ll live long enough to use up all the bottles of clear goo that have inexplicably multiplied at my house, on my desk, in my car and in my handbag.

Being devotees of hand sanitizer from way back, my husband and I had a healthy supply before the pandemic and were never in any danger of running out. Still, I confess to buying a couple of spares when the supply finally caught up with demand. When something you depend on becomes scarce, the urge to hoard is powerful — but at least I waited until the shortage was over. It’s easy to understand the “Depression-era mentality” that my parents’ generation retained for the rest of their lives (and passed on to some of us boomers).

Less interesting to me than consumer behavior — which Olivia Farrell, the former CEO of Arkansas Business Publishing Group, concluded that I would never grasp despite her valiant efforts to mentor me — was the response to supply shortages by the business community.

Early in the crisis, we had a shortage of masks so dire that public health authorities discouraged the general public from buying them in order to preserve the limited supply for front-line health care professionals. The airborne mechanism by which the virus spread became apparent pretty quickly, but not immediately. Almost instantly anyone with access to fabric and a sewing machine, from my sister-in-law in Tennessee to Adidas vendor TY Garments at the Port of Little Rock, started turning out masks. (Who ever imagined that we would all develop personal preferences about mask design?)

Lexicon, the Little Rock steel fabricator that’s currently doing a $100 million project for Tesla in Texas, created metal brackets for plastic face shields for use by local health care professionals. “We didn’t make any money on it, but it shows how nimble we are,” CEO Patrick Schueck said recently.

RockTown Distillery in Little Rock similarly augmented production of potent potables with hand sanitizer, and so did a lot of other manufacturers, judging by the glut of sanitizer brands I had never heard of. And some of them smell really bad, like they launched without time for basic market research — or with the confidence that desperate consumers would not be choosy.

The only similarly instantaneous market response I can remember was the “fidget spinner” tsunami of 2017. The buzzword is “pivot,” and the women featured in Sarah Campbell-Miller’s Women’s Stunted Capital Blocks Better Economy use it a lot. The entrepreneurial mindset that can recognize a void in the market and quickly react is something I admire and envy.

But what happens when a void is filled to overflowing? In April, the New York company that makes a Sani Smart hand sanitizer sued Walmart Inc. for $15 million after its Sam’s Club division refused to take delivery of millions of dollars worth of the stuff. Walmart, in its response, denies that Sam’s Club ordered that last shipment and — in a cautionary tale for all vendors — denies “that the referenced emails constitute purchase orders.”

Any glut of disposable masks will undoubtedly be absorbed over time. But hand sanitizer, being regulated by the Food & Drug Administration, carries a mandatory expiration date. The stuff piled up in your glove compartment will never be dangerous to use, although it might eventually lose its germ-killing power. But selling pallets of aging or expired products will require some entrepreneurial genius.

Last week’s COVID count and our state’s embarrassing vaccination statistics suggest that any declaration that masks and hand sanitizers are no longer needed could be tragically premature.

Gwen Moritz is the editor of Arkansas Business.