For your amusement: The Great Ketchup Shortage

[Jenise]

From today's Wall Street Journal:

A ketchup shortage vexing restaurants has fueled a secondary market—an underground trade in coveted ketchup packets.

Diners with the good fortune to have a stash of saved ketchup packets are listing them on eBay Inc. and Facebook Inc.’s Marketplace to make a buck off the pandemic’s latest supply-chain constraint.

Lindsey Cohen, a retiree from Indianapolis, logged onto eBay and posted 20 Heinz ketchup packets for sale for $8 after The Wall Street Journal reported April 5 on restaurants’ squeezed ketchup supplies. Ms. Cohen, who said she amassed her collection during fast-food stops on a recent road trip, typically uses eBay to clear clutter from her house but thought hawking ketchup sounded like fun.

About 12 hours later, the packets sold. “I’ve never gone so far as to sell condiments,” said Ms. Cohen. With ketchup, she said, “I jumped on the bandwagon.”

The ketchup crunch is gripping U.S. restaurants just as they as they are reopening dining rooms closed by Covid-19. Costs for the tomato spread have risen, single-serve packets are in short supply, and restaurant chains are canvassing distributors to locate Heinz, the industry’s top brand.

The pandemic forced full-service restaurants to turn to packets instead of their usual bottles out of sanitary concerns, fueling a spike in demand and straining supplies. Kraft Heinz Co. has put priority on supplying fast-food and drive-through restaurants, whose sales recovered faster than those of sit-down restaurants so far.

Many eBay sellers said they heard news of the shortage and realized they needed to strike while the iron, or grill, was hot. Some recalled how individual squares of toilet paper sold on eBay during the shortage of that staple in the early days of the pandemic; they didn’t want to miss out on a potential ketchup rush.

It’s not exactly an efficient market. The prices in dozens of ketchup-packet listings posted online range all the way from a quarter to $5 each, the latter in a lot of 20 packets for $100. Each has about a third of an ounce of ketchup.

Kent Reining, a Facebook Marketplace seller from Danville, Ill., offered packets for $4 each, or a bargain price of 20 for $50.

“There’s a shortage,” he wrote. “Don’t try to lowball me, I know what I’ve got.”

I'd read about this a week ago. What's hilarious to me, as a practitioner of the IT arts, is the use of billions of dollars worth of computers, bandwidth, and electricity to sport this brief and ridiculous marketplace. Really, nobody has anything better to do?

For the record, I bought a take-out hamburger on Tuesday. It came with two packets of ketchup. No surcharge!

Seems simple enough to me: Just use catsup!

[Jenise]

Isn't it hilarious? Jeff, did you ask for the ketchup or was it just given to you supposing you'd want it?

Not a ketchup user myself, but this reminded me of the day I found out that my younger sister has, or had last I knew, a condiment fetish. She LOVES those little packets--all of them, and probably hasn't bought ketchup or taco sauce in 30 years.

Isn't it hilarious? Jeff, did you ask for the ketchup or was it just given to you supposing you'd want it?

The particular burger I bought was named "The Wrangler" and, as befits its oh-so-Wild-West name, it came with bbq sauce. I didn't think I would need ketchup and did not ask for it.

Not a ketchup user myself, but this reminded me of the day I found out that my younger sister has, or had last I knew, a condiment fetish. She LOVES those little packets--all of them, and probably hasn't bought ketchup or taco sauce in 30 years.

As it happens, I do like and use ketchup on some foods (e.g., burgers, fries, an otherwise-tasteless steak or meatloaf, some fried foods); and there are culinary uses for it, too (e.g., meatloaf, cocktail sauce, bbq sauce). Unlike yer sis, however, I find the packets slightly suspect and prefer a larger jar, where convenient.

Seems simple enough to me: Just use catsup!

Very hard to find catsup nowadays.