The owner of that company has previously caused significant controversy about his treatment of workers. It's probably safer to not go into too much detail but e.g. insisting that they submit to intrusive searches carried out in their own time when they leave work didn't win him any popularity contests. And a huge problem we're now seeing with business is this just-in-time logistics fad that was one of the Gordon Gecko-era management idiocies which I knew at the time (I learnt about it as part of my IT diploma) was way too fragile and a problem waiting to happen. And now it has happened. The problem isn't panic-buying but a system that is so precarious that it took almost nothing to topple it over.
Added to that the austerity programme inflicted on the country by the UK's worst ever comedy double-act, Porky & Cokey. It snuffed out the slight recovery in the economy it was supposed to save and made the problem much worse than it already was, and pretty much every area of support and infrastructure was trashed and left in a dysfunctional condition even without an additional crisis to test it.
If anything good comes out of this, I hope it's the end of that particular era. 40 years was too long and I want to see my country rebuilt.
