Panic buying, staff shortages and a lack of raw materials – these problems have led to a current shortage of tampons in US drugstores.
After baby milk powder, tampons have now also become scarce on the shelves of some stores in the USA. The pharmacy chains CVS and Walgreens confirmed to the news agency AFP on Tuesday that some brands are temporarily unavailable in certain regions. Republicans blamed US President Joe Biden.
The manufacturer Procter & Gamble admitted that customers in the USA might not be able to fall back on their usual hygiene products. The group assured “that it was a temporary situation”. The factories produced “tampons around the clock to meet the increased demand for our products”.
Shortage of tampons and pads in the US
The manufacturer Edgewell referred to the cause of the shortage of tampons and pads as “long labor shortages due to two outbreaks of the omicron variant” of the corona virus in a US factory in late 2021 and at a Canadian supplier in early 2022. The group expected that the situation will return to normal in the next few weeks.
According to supply chain expert Patrick Penfield from Syracuse University in upstate New York, the bottlenecks are due to panic buying “like toilet paper at the beginning of the pandemic”. There is also a shortage of certain commodities, including cotton and plastic. A lack of staff due to the pandemic is another reason for the production problems. In his estimation, the situation will normalize again in the next six months.
Recently, a shortage of baby milk powder in the USA caused a political stir. US President Biden therefore ordered an airlift in mid-May to bring the infant formula from abroad by military aircraft. The opposition Republicans used the renewed bottlenecks for further attacks on the government. It was a “war that Biden started against women,” the party said on Twitter.
Source: Stern
