I was expecting to see some level of panic buying when I went to my local filling station this afternoon and while you can see that there is a fairly steady use there are no queues to the station and it doesn’t look too bad. I would be pretty sure that the sales are through the roof but this is definitely not the picture that you will see in the south of England.
So what is going one and are we surprised? The rules of Brexit are fairly clear in some respects. Employing people from other countries to provide services that they have done for years was to stop. Presumably someone had thought about who would do these jobs moving forward. Some of these people transport our goods including fuel so what has gone wrong?
Driving a petrol tanker is somewhat more complicated than bringing a few baskets of food to your house. Skill and knowledge is required to transport dangerous substances and although the wages for the drivers are definitely not minimum wage most people would not like the sleeping in the cab overnight and total inability to plan the rest of their lives. So probably not surprise that people have not been training up to take these jobs now that there is a shortage.
The solution probably is to find a way to get the previous drivers to come back and help us out. Empty shelves , fuel shortages , lack of people to harvest food, not a situation that you would have expected in this century amid the further complications of covid19.
What do you think the solution is? Let me know , I will be waiting for your answers.