Free Republic

When you think of a fast food chain, the usual suspects come to mind: McDonald's, Chick-fil-A, KFC, Burger King. In recent years, the restaurant industry has changed to referring to fast food places as quick-service restaurants (QSR), and the new-ish hybrid of fast food and casual-dining restaurants (like Applebee's) is called fast casual. Where the definitions blur is with regional fast food chains, meaning a QSR that usually started out in a particular state as a mom-and-pop shop and gained a devoted following thus enabling them to grow. Sometimes it's a few stores that don't cross state lines. Other times,...

McDonald's has revealed its futuristic kid sibling: CosMc's. The first of what is expected to be many new stores opens in December to serve anyone looking for a quick energy hit. McDonald's officially revealed CosMc's in a press release at its website on Wednesday. The CEO also spoke to media to explain a new beverage-led concept designed to "boost your mood into the stratosphere." The fast-food chain also announced they wanted to add 10,000 namesake stores by 2027. What Is CosMc's? CosMc's isn't a restaurant, per se. It's more of a pit stop for a quick sip of something sugary...

It’s Valentine’s Day morning, and the height of the breakfast rush at the Pismo Beach Coco’s is overwhelming the small but nimble staff. At the center of the flurry is the ringmaster, the restaurant’s longtime owner and general manager, Larry Puder. Puder, 66, is simultaneously ringing up tabs, handing menus to a large party walking in, gesturing for a server to put a new pot of decaf on and attempting to explain to an anxious customer why there are no more banana cream pies. “Jesus Christ, I’m so glad I’m getting out of this business,” Puder says under his breath...

I've noticed that the price of paper towels has jumped up about 60+% over the last four months. Wondering if there will soon be another run on paper products like there was during the Plandemic? Or just plain old Bidenflation?

Slump in imports, cargo diversions to other ports help shrink queue of dozens of vessels The backup of container ships off Southern California’s coast that was at the heart of U.S. supply chain congestion during the Covid-19 pandemic has effectively disappeared. The queue of ships waiting to unload at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach fell from a peak of 109 ships in January to four vessels this week ... . U.S. import volumes are declining ... The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach together handled 686,133 loaded import containers in September, down 18% from a year...

President Joe Biden is hoping to boost “chain migration” — whereby naturalized citizens can sponsor an unlimited number of foreign relatives for green cards — from Afghanistan even as he is accused of resettling unvetted Afghans across the United States. Following the U.S. Armed Forces’ withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, Biden opened a “humanitarian parole” pipeline that has resettled more than 86,000 Afghans in American communities without being screened or interviewed in person beforehand.

⁣In November 2015, sixty-five international public and private sectors leaders participated in Food Chain Reaction, a simulation and role-playing exercise to improve our understanding of how governments, institutions, and private sector interests might interact to address a crisis in the global food system. Over the course of two days, the players reacted to a scenario set five years in the future in a world where population growth, rapid urbanization, extreme weather and political crises combine to threaten global food security. By collaborating, negotiating, and confronting tradeoffs, they offered new insights into our food future. Findings from game will be announced...

Factory Fires, Mergers & Acquisitions, Business Sales, Factory Disruptions, Leadership Transitions, and Supply Shortages ranked as the top 6 supply chain disruptions in 2021, according to data released from Resilinc, the world’s leading supply chain risk monitoring and mapping solution. The exclusive data, compiled from Resilinc’s EventWatch monitoring database reveals that supply chain disruptions were up 88% year-over-year, with 90% of disruptive events being human-caused. 2021 saw the most factory fires ever recorded in a single year. Resilinc sent out 1,946 Factory Fire alerts, an increase of 129% year-over-year. The uptick is due mostly to gaps in regulatory and process...

What’s at the root of the supply chain breakdown? That’s a critical question but the answer is almost irrelevant. The supply chain is a complex dynamic system of immense scale. It is of a complexity comparable to the climate as a system. This means that exact cause and effect cannot be computed because the processing power needed exceeds the combined processing power of every computer in the world. Most people have some notion of how supply chains work, but few understand how extensive, complex and vulnerable they are. If you go to the store to buy a loaf of bread,...

​Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg warned that the ​devastating ​global supply chain troubles that continue to be a drag on the economy and threaten gift giving during the holiday season could continue as long as the coronavirus pandemic. “There are definitely going to continue to be issues, especially as long as the pandemic continues, right? If you have, for example, the third largest container port in the world in China shutting down because of a COVID outbreak in late summer, you’ll feel that in the fall here on the West Coast,” Buttigieg told host Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.”​

Food shortages were reported to be spiking across the country Tuesday as President Joe Biden struggles to resolve the supply chain crises crippling the nation. “People are hoarding [food],” CEO and founder of Saffron Road, a producer of frozen and shelf-stable meals, Adnan Durrani told the Seattle Times. “What I think you’ll see over the next six months, all prices will go higher.”

Ace Hardware is reportedly finding it difficult to keep shelves full due to the supply chain crisis threatening grocers, emergency medical services, and holiday shoppers. Operations manager John Ketels told thechroniclesonline.com his store in St. Helens, Washington, is having difficulty stocking items due to lack of warehouse inventory.

President Joe Biden and his administration have not taken responsibility for the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and the resulting supply chain crisis, including Vice President Kamala Harris, who said on Wednesday that workers not making enough money is partly to blame. “Empty shelves for consumers and missing parts for local manufacturers — it all adds up to inconvenience and now an inflation rate of 5.4 percent in September,” the CBS station in western Pennsylvania said ahead of its interview with Harris. “On Wednesday, President Joe Biden said the delays in unloading ships with products at America’s ports require a 24/7 approach,...

The Port of Los Angeles will move to service 24 hours a day, seven days a week in order to try to address global supply chain bottlenecks, the White House announced on Wednesday. “The Port of Los Angeles is announcing 24/7 service. We have the CEO-level business commitments to back that up. And these commitments are critical. The supply chain is essentially in the hands of the private sector, so we need the private sector to up to help solve these problems,” a senior administration official said. The White House also announced on Wednesday that major goods carriers Walmart, FedEx...

Maricopa County NEVER provided chain of custody required by law "That should be created when the ballots are delivered to the county by their vendors than are processed in the election through the election...We never received that chain of custody." https://twitter.com/realLizUSA/status/1446199794570047497

"Hey, everybody- this is Shad Sullivan coming to you from the headwaters of Bitter Creek, Archer County, North Texas. We have to talk! "State officials will be assisting to help identify potential alternative markets, if a producer is unable to move animals, and if neccessary advise and assist on depopulation and disposal methods." L&G.we are plowing under vegetable crops from coast to coast euthanizing millions of chickens. We are aborting sows and burying feeder pigs. We are dumping milk by the hundreds of thousands of gallons. Now they are preparing us to depopulate the fat cattle ready to harvest, because...

New York (CNN Business)Tyson Foods (TSN) is warning that "millions of pounds of meat" will disappear from the supply chain as the coronavirus pandemic pushes food processing plants to close, leading to product shortages in grocery stores across the country. "The food supply chain is breaking," wrote board chairman John Tyson in a full-page advertisement published Sunday in The New York Times, Washington Post and Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. US farmers don't have anywhere to sell their livestock, he said, adding that "millions of animals — chickens, pigs and cattle — will be depopulated because of the closure of our processing facilities."...

WASHINGTON — In early March, Joe Biden’s presidential campaign unfurled a public health advisory committee composed of half a dozen heavyweight experts to advise on how best to operate a campaign on a trail that was becoming increasingly dangerous as coronavirus infections spread across the country. The announcement was seemingly designed to, as the New York Times characterized it, “project calm and competence” less than a week after the Trump White House began its chaotic and often antagonistic daily briefings. There was a perception that Biden, in contrast, would have a foil group - a former surgeon general for every...

The man arrested and accused of using a chainsaw to attack his wife had been removed from the U.S. 11 times since 2005, immigration officials confirmed Friday. Alejandro Alvarez Villegas, 32, was arrested in Chula Vista, California on allegations he tried to kill his wife with a chainsaw in front of their three children at the couple's home in Whittier. "Department of Homeland Security databases indicate Mr. Alvarez-Villegas is a serial immigration violator who has been removed from the United States 11 times since 2005," a spokesperson for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said. ... Alvarez was found...

The Department of Homeland Security said chain migration is the common element in two cases allegedly tied to terrorism activities, according to a statement released Saturday. In the statement on Twitter, Acting Press Secretary Tyler Houlton said DHS “can confirm the suspect involved in a terror attack in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and another suspect arrested on terror-related money laundering charges were both beneficiaries of extended family chain migration.” The memo referred to Ahmed Aminamin El-Mofty, 51, who it said was a naturalized U.S. citizen admitted to the U.S. from Egypt on a family-based visa. El-Mofty went on a shooting spree Friday...