Patience is certainly needed now

Who would have thought that a virus would disrupt not only our lives but our work as well? We were opened (with shortened hours) during the quarentine part of the pandemic.  We watched as most of our vendors closed for 2 weeks or more as their correlating states shut them down. And as they reopened we were faced with our "new normal"- supply chain disruption.

In the furniture and mattress world, there are many people that make a product.  And when one or more of these essential workers are missing for a long period of time, it can lessen the availability of products that are able to be sold on the retail floor.  And who would have thought a pandemic would (or even could) slow this process down?  Let's take a short lesson on what happens-using one of my FAVORITE subjects: food.

Let's say you owned a pizza shop.  And in this pizza shop you employed:

3 dough makers

3 sauce makers

3 topping creators (yeah, these are the artists :)

These 9 wonderful people make up to 99 pizzas a day (I'm trying to keep the math simple, I'm not sure if this is possible or not so just use your imagination).

All of a sudden, you are forced to shut down. For two weeks.  But not only you, your flour distributor, sauce distributor and topping distributor.

14x99= a loss of 1,386 pizza sales.  And no sales equals no income and no way to pay for those employees, so instead of staying open, you opt to close your store until you are allowed to reopen.

2 weeks later you are allowed to reopen.   HOWEVER, due to new laws, you have to have 6' between each worker, which now narrows you down to:

1 dough maker

1 sauce maker 

1 topping creator

And instead of being able to put out 99 pizzas a day, you are only able to put out 33. 

And the flour distributor, the sauce distributor are also at a third capacity, but the topping distributor isn't open yet because their state isn't opening their business for another week-and when they come back they will also be at a third capacity.But the worse part? The demand for your pizzas hasn't decreased.  You are telling people to call the next day to put an order in, or better yet, order a week in advance to give you time to find a new way to get toppings.

You can't afford to loose business, but you can't afford to not be open.  So you decide to stay open and do the best you can.

And pray.

Right now our industry is experiencing this type of disruption.  We know when you all walk in you are looking for a product to suit your needs almost immediatley and would like to have it in a short period of time.  All we ask is for your patience and understanding during this unsettling time that we are all going through.  We are all learning something really new, and the main attribute is: patience.