This was in today's USA TODAY:

"Hershey is facing a scary situation for Halloween: a potential shortage of kisses and chocolate bars produced by the candy maker. New computer software and insufficient wareshouse space is making it hard for Hershey to meet demand for its products, the company said Monday."

"It will be mid to late October before we are back on schedule, " Hershey CEO Kenneth Wolfe said in a conference call with analysts." "Hershey warned that its earnings could fall 8% to 10% below its expectations of $2.40 per share for the year."

The company is producing and selling plenty of chocolate, but it can't get it sorted and loaded onto trucks quickly enough to meet retailers' orders, so inventory levels at stores are low. ----SNIP-----

"Hershey executives said they want to fix the problems in case consumers stockpile chocolate because of fears the y2k computer bug will hit Jan 1 and disrupt business activity."

-- LindaO (lindaop@hotmail.com), September 14, 1999

Answers

Did Hershey try to implement SAP R3?

-- Bill P (porterwn@one.net), September 14, 1999.

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch- msg.tcl?msg_id=001P9L

-- (just@helping.out), September 15, 1999.

We don't hoard, for starters. We used to stockpile, but everyone who used to hoard started stockpiling instead, and now stockpiling is getting a bad name, so we quit. We have, however, instituted a forward-looking asset-management paradigm, which (we're guessing, here) may be responsible for the magical arrival of a small pre-positioned strategic reserve of chocolate in our pantry. Or meybe elves put it there. Either way, we'll hang on to it in case chocolate becomes scarce due to hoarding by others. Or stockpiling. Drat those doomers.

-- bw (home@puget.sound), September 16, 1999.