Quote:
Originally Posted by SiMor29
You would have thought healthcare providers would get their supplies from the manufacturer, not amazon.
Uh... they do, or more likely, they get supplies from a distributor.
The distributors on Amazon also get their supplies from the same manufacturers.
The distributors that supply whatever drug store and public medical supply store buys from the same set of manufacturers.
If you have 10 manufacturers, and now 1000 distributors are all increasing their orders by an order of magnitude, the manufacturers can't keep up with the new demand. They can't add tooling and keep a profit, nor can they find a tooling manufacturer that can build new machines soon enough to matter.
Even if they could, they would have to get the materials from somewhere. The cloth and bands have to come from somewhere, and those somewhere manufacturers have to get their raw materials from somewhere else.
That somewhere else has to cut down trees, dig holes, do chemistry, or whatever, to get the raw materials. They can't magically increase their supply with zero notice either.
Over-simplistic description of supply chains, but the buck stops somewhere.