Today, Explained - Joe Biden’s tampon shortage

Episode Date: July 11, 2022

No, President Biden didn’t cause the tampon shortage — or any of the recent shortages. But that won’t stop him from taking the blame.  This episode was produced by Victoria Dominguez and Haleema Shah, edited by Amina Al-Sadi and Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Victoria Dominguez, engineered by Paul Mounsey, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. The title of today's show is Joe Biden's tampon shortage. Come on, man. We are kidding. We're kidding. Not about shortages. There is a tampon shortage in the U.S. right now. There is no shortage of shortages. You've heard us talk about the baby formula. There's a sriracha shortage. There's a worker shortage. President Biden didn't do the tampon shortage, but that hasn't mattered for his job approval rating, which is around 33 percent. And according to a new poll from The New York Times, 64 percent of Democrats say they would prefer a different candidate next

time around. Nothing is built, nothing is back and nothing is better with this administration. This tampon shortage is impacting 34 million women across this country, and the prices are up at least 10% so far. Coming up, why you can't find tampons, and why the president will take the blame. Give me a little break here. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points.

Visit superstore.ca to get started. Is literally everyone on their period or what's going on here? Everyone isn't literally on their period. What's going on here is a tampon shortage so conspicuous that a question about it recently made the White House press briefing. There is a shortage of tampons and just wondering if that is on the White House press briefing. There is a shortage of tampons and just wondering if that is on the White House's radar. I mean, is that something that the White House is concerned could turn into a full-blown crisis? And are there any other sort of essential products that the administration is watching closely that could come down the pipeline as

another shortage crisis? That's a great question. I would have to check in with the team on what they're tracking. I don't have a list for you right now, but I would just have to track with the team. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Sharon Turlep of The Wall Street Journal covers consumer products, including tampons, easy to underestimate until they're hard to find, and a perfect avatar for our supply chain crises. Well, tampons, it's kind of important to know they're a simple product, they're a small product, but they're actually a somewhat high-tech product. They're made from something called a nonwoven, which is layers of material that are bound together by a more complicated kind of substance than just, you know, clothes or toilet paper. More complicated than

clothes? They're complicated and they require both plastics and cotton and they need to be put together. So they require labor. So, you know, I'm not sure that the tampon shortage is much different from a lot of the other shortages that we've seen in terms of the causes. The plants all over are struggling to find labor. There's holdups getting raw materials. There was some kind of specific issues with one of the big tampon making factories. But largely, this stands out because it's a product that a lot of people need. And that's very personal and very important, as opposed to, you know, say, sriracha or Gatorade. I wonder if you could tell me a little

bit more about the holdups getting raw materials, what's going on there. Throughout the supply chain, there's this confluence of both extreme demand. I mean, all throughout the pandemic, we all bought a lot in America, all over the world. So we just bought more stuff. Retail sales jumped unexpectedly in August as the Delta variant caused Americans to once again change where they spend their money. And while we're buying more stuff, all the plants that are producing raw materials, sending things, there's these huge log jams in shipping. Containers aren't moving. Things are more expensive. And so you have both a huge increase in demand coupled with more complications making things. Can you explain the story of how the supply chain broke during the pandemic? So much of what we buy and the things that we use to make what we buy are based in countries that were just hit incredibly hard by COVID early on.

Lines snake outside Beijing supermarkets as residents snap up groceries. Panic buying over fears of a lockdown. In China, particularly, both obviously early in the pandemic, but just recently with the shutdown of Shanghai to try to contain COVID, there was just major disruptions. And that was kind of the start of things. And then along with these disruptions and the influx of demand, it's now harder to get things out of countries. And we see, you know, the cost of shipping in a shipping container go from $2,000 to $10,000. Higher costs also leads to supply

shortages. So there's really been this domino effect that really started with COVID and then just got worse. For example, the diaper shortage. So any type of disruption to a plant can lead to a shortage. And a lot of that goes back to how our manufacturing systems work, particularly in America. What else are we seeing shortages of in the U.S. right now? I could give you a couple of examples that seem like shortages to me, but you're the expert. What's actually in short supply? So microchips. So anything that requires a microchip, which is almost any electrical device these days. There's clearly been a big shortage in that. In the world of consumer goods, there's the shortage in baby formula, which is quite severe. Also, because it's a very essential product, there is a shortage in sriracha. iPhone Food says it has temporarily halted sriracha production and the shortage could last through the summer.

Here's something you don't see in many Colorado spring stores lately, a decent supply of Gatorade. There's just shortages kind of sporadically in a lot of products. And so as a consumer, I'm tempted to stamp my foot and say, you know, it's been two and a half years. Why aren't we closer to normal? We have what I think a lot of supply chain experts have said and believe is a very brittle supply chain. You've probably heard the term just-in-time or lean manufacturing. An analogy that's frequently used with just-in-time involves water and rocks in a lake.

Water represents inventory and the rocks represent problems. What we are to do is to drain the inventory until we expose a rock. And then we are to fix the problem. That really started decades ago, initially in the auto industry, it was kind of popularized. One of the easiest and most common ways for companies to improve their profitability is to cut out waste.

So that means they're not keeping things in inventory, which means their suppliers don't have big inventories. They don't have big warehouses full of stuff that's waiting to be used. So when there's a spike in demand, there's not all this excess kind of capacity and material around. And so if you have this happening for 20 years, one of the things companies are trying to do is make sure that they're not relying on just one supplier. When I covered the auto industry more than 10 years ago, there was a tsunami in Japan that affected a company that made a certain color of paint. And it led to like a global auto shortage because nobody could make cars of this paint color because of this one plant. And so when you are really reliant on a small number of suppliers and when those suppliers have to keep inventory and capacity low, it's

not easy to bulk up when that's needed. Is there an argument that the United States being a big country that is full of resources, that we should just start relying on ourselves and less on other countries so that we don't have to worry about supply chains? There are certainly people making that argument. Certainly, there are companies that are doing that. If you look at numbers on what they would call reshoring, so that would be companies that had operations or factories overseas, bringing them back to the U.S. or even North America. That is definitely on the

rise. There's a lot of advocates for that, a lot of manufacturing advocates. And I think it widely varies by industry, by company, how realistic that actually is. I said someday we're going to see Apple building plants in our country, not in China. The consumer electronics world was really never here. And so it's not a matter of bringing it back. It's a matter of starting it here. We've definitely seen the chip companies bring operations back here because that's a case where there's high margin products and the stakes are very high when there's supply chain issues.

So we've seen that in the consumer products world. We're seeing some particularly in the area of fragrances and perfumes, some of that business being brought back here. So there's definitely pockets where that's happening. There are a lot of states that are really trying to position themselves. Ohio is a state that has a whole initiative designed to try to bring back suppliers and manufacturers to the U.S. There's a lot of manufacturing, on-shoring or re-shoring. And then there's economic development activity. We've never seen this level of activity here in central Ohio.

Ohio is better for businesses and employees because we're not built for followers. We're building for leaders. Are we going to get better at predicting the next shortage? Why haven't we, after two and a half years, gotten any better at predicting what's going to be the next thing that's difficult to find? I think part of it is that this is uncharted territory. I mean, certainly there's been pandemics and there's been weather disasters and inflation has happened before, but all at once, these are dynamics that haven't been seen. And I think like, you know, a lot of the forecasting is just, it's gotten very hard to forecast and predict and also difficult to respond quickly.

And so if I ask you, when will the shortages end? Are you just going to laugh at me? Early in the pandemic, I cover Clorox. And Clorox would say, you know, we think wipes will be in better supply. And they give a date and that date would come. And I think companies very quickly learned that you really can't predict, partly because there's so many things disrupting the supply chain. So you can have a plan to bring extra suppliers online. You can have a plan to hire X workers in X amount of time, but it's almost impossible to predict when that will happen.

Who is going to get blamed for all of this, for the shortages of tampons and other things? It seems like politically, who's ever in charge, just as kind of the rule of human behavior will be who gets blamed. Let's get this straight. And, you know, I think it'll be interesting to see how long consumer memories are on this stuff. I mean, certainly with toilet paper and paper towel, I don't think consumers held a grudge against the companies that make those. I think they see these circumstances as really unusual. It'll be interesting to see how long this stays in the mind of consumers.

And possibly good for President Biden if all of our memories are just a little bit shorter on this one. Yes. yeah. 525,600 tampons, everybody. 525,000 tampons in space. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time

at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, R-A-M-P dot com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank. Member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. Bet MGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style,

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So easy to use, it'll get you off pads forever. Today Explained, we're back. Robert S. McElvain is a professor of history at Millsaps College in Mississippi. He's a historian of the Great Depression. And right after the Great Recession, he wrote a piece in Politico that included this crisp observation. When there is an economic collapse in the United States, the main factor that determines who Americans blame is timing, meaning the person who is unlucky enough in that moment to be the president is going to take the hit. Have you seen anything down there in Mississippi that you think personally blames

Joe Biden for what's happening with the economy and the state of the country right now? Well, in Mississippi, the vast majority of white people would blame Joe Biden for anything at any time, so that's probably not a very good gauge. The president still tries to spin it as the economy is doing good. Mississippians aren't buying that. It is not doing good in Mississippi or anywhere else in the country. But certainly, people blaming Biden seems to be spreading across the country.

The person who's in charge is kind of the easiest target, regardless of whether the president at a given time has that much to do with it. He seems the one in charge of the economy. Joe Biden gave a talk this morning, blamed everybody else on inflation. He took no responsibility and has no plan. Presidents certainly have something to do with the economy, but usually not all that much. What they do is create the conditions in which the market can operate and the economy can grow. But a lot of other things intervene and sometimes when something goes wrong, it is the president's fault, sometimes it isn't.

Does an American president have any control over a globalized economy in which we rely on very long supply chains for very basic things. Not that much. This is, of course, something that's been developing over decades of much more globalization, depending on manufacturers and other parts of the world. And the pandemic disrupted that enormously. Good afternoon, and we're coming on the air because right now, President Biden is set to sign his landmark $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill.

And some of the things that the Biden administration did have contributed to inflation. Democrats, independents, or Republican friends have made it clear, the people out there, made it clear they strongly support the American Rescue Plan. Although I think the vast majority of the inflation is from other causes, but the spending programs, they really started under Trump during the pandemic. The single biggest economic relief package in American history, and I must say, or any other package, by the way. But then we're furthered under Biden.

We're essential for people to be able to survive and relatively prosper during those terrible times in the pandemic. But the result of that was a good deal of pent-up demand. President Biden has done some things to deal with supply chain problems. For instance, last year and the latter part of the year with Christmas coming, doing things to allow the ships off California to be unloaded more quickly, getting 24-hour shifts and that sort of thing. President Biden says the deal has been worked out. So not only will the port and unions start operating 24-7, major companies like FedEx and UPS will also expand their hours. But one of the problems there is that in the political situation, his opponents don't really want the problem to be solved. I mean, probably the most striking example of this was Senator

Rick Scott, who was the chairman of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee a few months ago, said inflation is a goldmine for us. He was gleeful about it. People are suffering and paying more, and the senator from Florida says it's a goldmine for the Republicans. So with the Congress as evenly divided as it is, it's very difficult to get things done. When have we seen this before? When have we seen economic turmoil and a president blamed for it? The largest economic collapse occurred under Herbert Hoover back in, starting in 1929 and going into the 1930s. But he came in saying that we are within sight of the day when, with the help of God, poverty will be forever banished from the land. Well, a year later, it was another P word that was banished from the land, prosperity. The stock market crash didn't

cause the Great Depression, but it did signal great weakness in the economy. Hoover tried to deal with it. The federal government is taking its part in the aid to unemployment through the advancement and enlargement of public works in all parts of the nation. But one of the problems with Hoover was that he was a true believer in certain things, in classical economics, in balanced budgets. Hoover didn't actually say this, but what his policy amounted to was take the idea, because he thought there was only one, try it. If it doesn't work, try it again.

If it doesn't work, try it again and again and again. He wouldn't change. Hoover was never willing to spend the way things were needed for the economy. He also believed that any kind of direct relief to people would make them dependent and lazy, and so he didn't want to do that. The Democratic Party has been an effort to implant in the unthinking mind, through deliberate misrepresentation, the colossal falsehood that the Republican Party is responsible for this worldwide catastrophe. By the time the election in 1932 came along,

Hoover had been presiding over an economic disaster for three years, and it was clear to people that he was to blame, if not for the start of it, for not solving it. So first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. FDR wiped the floor with Hoover in that election. And then you zoom ahead a couple decades and President Jimmy Carter dealt with both inflation and shortages, including a gas shortage. Like Joe Biden, he got blamed. Did Carter deal with it well? Well, Carter came in and tried to deal with the inflation in a variety of ways. He gave speeches, but he was not very good in speaking over television.

None of that did that much good. Eventually, in 1979, he gave a televised address, which came to be called the malaise speech, although he never used the word malaise in the speech. Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. He was kind of right about it, that people had gotten selfish and materialistic, but the way it

came across is he was blaming the American people. That is not the way to win in such a situation. Middle-class families had been struggling for a decade before I came into office. I'd like to contrast that with the situation with the collapse in 2008, Obama came in, and even at the time, I was writing about the timing of this is not good because George W. Bush was presiding over it, but it was going to continue into Obama's early term.

For 19 months, what we have done is steadily worked to avoid a depression, to take an economy that was contracting rapidly and making it grow again. People's memories would be that Obama had been president while this was going on. So timing is very important. Okay, so the economy took down Herbert Hoover. It took down Jimmy Carter. What does history suggest will happen to Joe Biden and the Democrats in the 2022 midterms? The situation is not at all good for Democrats. There are several things going on right now that I think give Democrats an opportunity if they could get their message together, which Democrats have a very hard time doing, hardly ever can. In addition to the questions about saving democracy, you have a couple of other really big issues, one being abortion. Abortion has always helped Republicans

in the years, not immediately after the Roe decision, but going a few years after that, because the people who were one-issue voters on abortion were those who wanted to end women's control over their own bodies. And women and men who believe that women own their own bodies are much more likely to vote on that than they have in the past. The gun issue is also going to be something that's very big. There are others as well that I think taken together could counteract the economic difficulties. One of the things about the economic situation itself, things change rapidly, as we've seen, for instance, with Putin's invasion changing a lot of things.

There's still, what is it, about five months, a little less than five months. Inflation is going to still be bad by Election Day, but if it is moving in the right direction, I think it will be a less powerful issue by that time. Professor Robert McIlvain. He has a new book out called The Times They Were a-Changin', 1964, the year the 60s arrived and the battle lines of today were drawn. Today's show was produced by Tori Dominguez and Halima Shah.

It was edited by Amina El-Sadi and Matthew Collette. It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard. It was engineered by Paul Mounsey. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Bye-bye, pads. you