It's definitely not uniform. Individual shipping, railroad, and trucking companies are prioritising rarer/more expensive containers to areas with driver shortages. Just-in-time logistical practices mean individual supply chains are hit at random with cascading effects when they're components for something else. Raw resources like lumber are fucked which causes construction shortages. Here it's similar to what you're experiencing, also with a lot of impact to the meat supply and random grocery/tradecraft/appliance items. We're also along a major urban corridor with local freight rail so it's probably cheaper to keep this area supplied than one where you're trucking things an hour away from the rail-yards.

We're also dealing with a limited version of them. As far as I know the root cause of the current shockwaves was Chinese manufacturing shutting down during their first COVID outbreaks. That wasn't long. They've already shut down one major port this week that ships a lot of components and consumer goods due to an outbreak and we've got much more infectious varieties that could escape control efforts. If things go offline there for a longer stretch then shortages will be very visible even before the panic buying.

I’ve seen shortages myself for innocuous things I wouldn’t have otherwise noticed if I wasn’t specifically looking for said thing. Like the other day I noticed the entire juice aisle of the grocery store was hollowed out because I was trying to get some pineapple juice, same day they were out of rum at the liquor store. Completely out of it. I’d never seen anything like that before. Felt eerie, like things are getting worse in a way we all know but no one is allowed to acknowledge

Within my industry I'm seeing shortages in ways I didn't expect. I'm in [manufacturing] and recently it's become increasingly difficult to find some of our raw materials. Normally it's an issue of a particular company being out of something but they know when they restock and it could always be found at a different company for slightly more. Now, it's that no one has it and none of them have any idea when it will be back. My boss has been getting increasingly nervous about availability and costs of the other raw materials as well.

Edit: I should add that these raw materials are domestically produced so the issue isn't something like shipping from China/internationally being fucked up.

One factor to watch is companies cutting corners on stocking and variety to save money, but then blaming it on "shortages." They can get away with that now where they couldn't pre-covid.

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