the second wave of ppe

Get ready, the shit’s going to hit the fan. Again!

In June of 2020 it appears as if we are slowly getting back to “normal”. States are opening up and businesses are getting “back at it” albeit in a “new normal kinda way”. This is the calm before the storm.

Call me a geek but I like to read and I specifically read history. For the longest time I had this book (shown below) on my shelf. It is a best seller from 2010 on the Influenza pandemic of 1918-1920. Not only does it cover this world wide event where an estimated 50-100 million people died, at a time when our population was 1.8 Billion compared to today’s 7.7 billion it was also at a time when international air travel did not exist.

Lessons learned.

The lessons learned from the 1918 flu pandemic and a series of other subsequent pandemics such as the Swine Flu and Hong Kong Flu and a number of other pandemics throughout the past centuries is that these diseases do not simply vanish, they repeat until the community has achieved “herd immunity” or an effective vaccine or cure is obtained. In short, expect Covid-19 to be around for at least the next year or 2!

How does this affect the promotional products business, specifically PPE. Watch & Learn!

Here’s the short strokes!

The current oversupply of masks and hand sanitizer is temporary. The huge supplies we currently see are a result of Chinese and Offshore factories bringing inventory into the USA and warehousing it.
As prices are quickly dropping on these masks and hand sanitizer these factories are not realizing the profits they envisioned. They are either breaking even or losing money!
After speaking with 5 different factory warehouses of PPE all said that “once this supply is gone, they will not replenish!”
This means that the current “oversupply” is likely to return to the same situation as we had April and May 2020.
As these are consumables this means that your customers will likely run out of their current stock at about the same time as the current USA inventory is gone.