It’s an ideal time for glove distributors to highlight the importance of disposable glove use in food service and processing. In 2021, with the Delta variant of the coronavirus widely spreading, it is even more crucial to ensure that restaurant workers are properly gloved up.
On May 13, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that people vaccinated against the coronavirus are safe to go without face masks in most cases. That set off a round of debate: Should we abandon all mask mandates? Is the CDC crazy, especially with the Delta variant spreading?
About six weeks later, the World Health Organization urged even fully vaccinated people to continue wearing masks and practicing COVID-19 safety measures such as social distancing. The debate raged on.
Last week, we examined the current state of the disposable glove market, relative to the continuing COVID-19 crisis and obstacles manufacturers face in Southeast Asia. This week, we look at a problem that has been with us for months and continues to wreak havoc across numerous industries—the global supply chain.
After years of optimizing their supply chains and building around just-in-time inventory across all industries, companies are struggling to keep their products moving around the world at the same pace. As a result, the world is running low on everything.
Folks on the U.S. West Coast, especially in the Pacific Northwest, have been suffering through unprecedented heat. Temperatures are expected to remain somewhere between miserable and dangerous through the week. Triple-digit highs and unusually warm nights have tested everyone’s patience (and the electrical grid as well).
For end users, a lot of that frustration stems from the lack of a consistent brand experience. If you can’t buy the gloves you want from a source you trust, you may have to use less-than-honorable sellers. And that means quality can suffer.
Fifteen months into the coronavirus pandemic, disposable glove distributors and their customers keep coming back to the same question: When can we get more nitrile gloves?
The answer for the most part remains the same: We don’t know for certain. What we do know, though, is that we have a healthy inventory of Gloveworks Black Nitrile Industrial Gloves.
Exam-grade nitrile is the glove material of the moment.
Anyone hoping for a steady stream of nitrile gloves this summer had better expect obstacles. Supply chains are still backed up, which increases the number of backorders. Malaysia’s ongoing coronavirus crisis is putting the country in near total lockdown, causing labor shortages and severely limiting production.
In last week’s blog post, we wrote about disposable glove thickness, which can be a source of confusion for end users (and sometimes even distributors). This week we examine how to choose the right glove material for the job.
When the coronavirus went global in early 2020, the disposable glove market was turned upside down. Inventory of nitrile gloves—far and away the most popular—soon dropped as pricing rose substantially. Now, a year later, nitrile inventory is coming back, prices are coming down, and the amount of available gloves is working its way back to pre-pandemic levels.