Electronics store feels inventory crunch due to COVID-19

As factories across the world shift how they produce during the COVID-19 pandemic, Visions Electronics is one of the stores navigating the new way of getting items in stock.

Joe Buisson, a manager with Visions, said when the pandemic first hit and restrictions were put in place, the store was actually quite busy.

“Everyone was working from home but a lot of people didn’t have home offices set up and if they did, they had kids who were home from school and they wanted to be on the one computer they had so a lot of families were scrambling to get computers and monitors,” Buisson said.

Buisson said Visions sold out of laptops and webcams quickly.

Some of the items on which the store has been able to keep stocked up have been kitchen appliances.

“They’re essential pieces. If someone needs one, anything that they can get shipped, they ship. If your laundry machine breaks and we can’t order one with a guarantee, we don’t want people to be out months at a time without a refrigerator,” Buisson said.

While things have been returning to normal at a slow pace, Buisson said it’s still hard to get some items in store.

“Nowhere on the planet is making the baskets for the speakers right now so what we have and what we had before everything shut down is all we’ve had since it started. We’ve gone from hundreds of pieces of stock for car systems to maybe a couple dozen that we’ve got left now,” Buisson said.

“Things that would have normally taken five to 10 days to get in take two months now.”

He said when the pandemic hit, a lot of factories were either short-staffed or shut down completely.

“Even the ones that are starting to open up, they’ve got back orders from months from not just us but a lot of electronic stores all over the place, so fulfilling all the orders has been very difficult for them,” Buisson said.

He said a lot of items that require microchips are difficult to get manufactured right now.

Buisson said things have been starting to arrive more frequently but it’s still not back to normal.

“We go a couple days when nothing gets shipped to us at all and then we get 60 TVs that we weren’t expecting at all. It’s great to get them but makes it tough to predict what we’re going to have available,” Buisson said.

But he says if a customer wants something, the employees at the store will do their best to get it in, including ordering it from a different location.