Are We About to Have a National Dish Soap Shortage?

By Daisy Luther

For some reason, multiple stores have warned employees of an upcoming shortage of dish soap. A source at Walmart went to work the other day and received this notice.

Huh. Dish soap.

My contact said that although the employees asked why there was going to be a shortage of dishwashing liquid, no explanation whatsoever was provided.

I’m personally not sure why this, of all products, should fall short, but it would be a good idea to pick some up. You can order a couple of jumbo jugs of Dawn or 4 bottles of Palmolive, and Amazon isn’t showing any messages to say “only 3 left, order soon.” But if everything is fine with the dish soap supply, you won’t have spent a lot of money on some otherwise useless item. Dish soap isn’t an expensive item and it’s not like you won’t use it up.

(The FTC wants you to know that this website contains affiliate links. That means if you make a purchase from a link you click on, I might receive a small commission. This does not increase the price you’ll pay for that item.)

Despite that, if Walmart is putting out such an oddly specific alert to employees, I would suggest stocking up either on Amazon or at your local stores. It also might make one curious whether we’ll soon see shortages of other cleaning supplies, as many ingredients would probably be the same.

Why on earth is there going to be a dish soap shortage?

The only other information I could find about this was on Reddit, which of course, is a forum with people’s opinions, so I can’t vouch for the veracity of these claims. The people commenting seem to have some ties to retail.

haras718

I’m not a Walmart emp. But anyway…the dishsoap shortage, to my understanding, is mostly Dawn and P&G products. It has something to do with plastic, bottles, and tariffs. At least that is what I got out of the oddly worded message from our distributor.

AquaMarsh

Former Hellmart employee here and now truck driver. I pulled 2 P&G loads last week that were nothing but empty plastic bottles. The plant I got them from seemed super busy and more disorganized than usual.

Rybread1428

I had to put a sign up yesterday about it as I filled my shelves with dish soap. I’m curious to see how bad it actually gets because so far it I don’t see a shortage.

fidgit17

Same. That’s why I’m monitoring the situation. The letter says it could last til December 1st, so I guess we’ll see as time goes on. (source)

There are no substantiating press releases on the Proctor & Gamble website at the time of this publication.

You can also make your own dish soap.

The internet abounds with instructions to DIY just about anything. If you can’t find dish soap or just want to have the supplies on hand to make your own, here are some how-tos.

• You can make something similar to your homemade laundry soap and toss it into the sink before filling it with hot water. I would leave out the Borax and Oxyclean, and consider using Castille soap instead of Zote.
• Here are instructions for grease-cutting dish soap.
• Here’s an all-natural essential-oil-based one from Wellness Mama. (That could get pricey in a hurry.)
• Here is another natural one that’s pretty close to what I recommended above with the alterations to homemade laundry soap.
• And here’s one with just 3 ingredients.

If you don’t already do this, add a splash of white vinegar to your rinse water to get things squeaky clean.

Have you heard anything about a dish soap shortage?

Why do you think we could be looking at a shortage of dish-washing liquid? Do you think this will carry over to other cleaning supplies?

Will you be stocking up on more liquid dish soap? I know we have quite a bit but I’m going to add more because who knows if this potential shortage will actually be over when it’s predicted to be?

Daisy Luther is a coffee-swigging, globe-trotting blogger who writes about current events, preparedness, frugality, voluntaryism, and the pursuit of liberty on her website, The Organic Prepper, where this article first appeared. She is widely republished across alternative media and she curates all the most important news links on her aggregate site, PreppersDailyNews.com. Daisy is the best-selling author of 4 books and runs a small digital publishing company. You can find her on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.

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