Consumer Alert: Bare shelves Biden is trending. Is the White House to blame for empty store shelves?

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WHEC) — Bare shelves Biden. It’s trending on social media right now, and of course, that made me very curious.

Across the country, folks are tweeting pictures of empty store shelves with the hashtag, bare shelves Biden. From Texas to Maryland to New Jersey, the frustration is mounting. And some say Biden’s Build Back Better policies are to blame. Is that true?

I researched what some of the academic brainiacs in New York are saying. Vishal Gaur is a professor at Cornell. He wrote this in an email to USA Today. "I’d consider this claim to be false. The shortages we are experiencing are due to supply chain backlog and linkages."

Nallan Suresh at the University at Buffalo agrees. He told USA Today, "The current supply problems are due to disruptions in all segments of global supply chains."

Business writers for the Washington Post go a step further. They point to three other factors exacerbating current conditions.

• Omicron. Food manufacturing leaders say so many of their employees are sick, they don’t have enough folks to do the work. The CEO of Consumer Brands told the Post that in the last two weeks he’s had more employees call in sick than in all of 2020.
• More of us are eating at home. Because of Omicron, we’re eating at restaurants less often and that means we’re doing more grocery shopping.
• Wicked winter weather. Across the Mid-Atlantic frigid weather clogged highways. That, coupled with a national shortage of truck drivers, slowed delivery to grocery stores.

While some might argue the White House hasn’t done enough to ease supply chain pressures through onshoring and deregulation, you can’t blame Build Back Better.

That bill is still a dream deferred.

On this all seem to agree, this mess isn’t going away any time soon. We’ll have to live with supply chain snarls and empty store shelves for a while.