Author of Be Ready for Anything and Bloom Where You’re Planted online course
For some reason, multiple stores have warned employees of an upcoming shortage of dish soap. A source at Wal-Mart 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.
(Psst: The FTC wants me to remind you 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 nor does it decrease the awesomeness of the item. ~ Daisy)
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?
About Daisy
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. 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.
During the summer, I couldn’t get my regular dish soap at Walmart. One out of town had it. I am wondering if that fire at the Texas refinery could be part of the story. I believe someone reported they produce some chemicals there. I could be way off. Just a thought.
You can wash dishes with any Castile soap, liquid or bar. BUT, if you, like most of the country, have hard water, it’s likely to leave a whitish film. To counteract that, add 1-2 tablespoons of baking soda to your dishwater to soften it. Be careful — dishes may get more slippery than usual.
Castile Soap has another interesting use as well. Mixed with gasoline and a small amount of alcohol, it forms into an incendiary gel similar to napalm. RE: Dept. of the Army, TM-31-210 Section V.
Probably pick up one or two bottles, it’s useful enough
Can’t wait till this is a common occurrence all over the states…
Fun times coming, but when ?
Anyone who is interested in preparedness stores “beans, bullets, and Band-aids.” Something that it is often overlooked is soap in general. That would include bars and liquid soap for personal hygiene, shampoo, wash detergent, and dish soap.
If the bowel exudate ever hits the oscillator, it is quite likely that the amount of soaps of all types will be reduced. Municipal water will stop flowing, and this will reduce the number of showers most people take because taking baths and showers will become more burdensome. Simply packing water to a bath tub will be a burden. Of course, even this assumes that water accessibility is not limited.
Yet, it is exactly during a crisis like this that maintaining good personal cleanliness is more important. A simple cut can result in the onset of sepsis, and modern medical treatment may be simply a fond memory. Access to antibiotics may be a fond memory, too. A large percentage of deaths during wars prior to World War II could have been avoided if it were not for wound infections.
While not perfect, one way to store large amounts of soap at a modest price is to go to a beauty salon supply. Sally’s, for example, a national salon supply chain, sells a gallon of shampoo for around $12.00-$13.00. Each gallon of this shampoo concentrate should be mixed in a 1:8 ratio with water. So that is about $1.50 for a gallon of salon shampoo. that is a “whole lotta” shampoo.
Is this shampoo going to handle all of your soap needs? No. I would rather be washing dishes with shampoo (perhaps with a somewhat stronger mix ratio), than using a primitive recourse such as scrubbing a dish with dirt and rinsing in a running stream.
As for other uses, I, for one, have used shampoo for more years than I want to count instead of bar soap or body wash.
Bogus. Just another attempt to raise prices, and the sheeple will go right along with it.
I worked for United Groceries in 1973. Came to work one morning and my boss told me to “put all the toilet paper in the back room and lock the doors”. I, being a good little, non-thinking drone, did as I was told.
All that day and the next few days, I listened while the boss told all the buyers “there’s a shortage of TP due to massive forest fires and we don’t have any now.” TP isn’t from “the forest”. (The trees for TP are raised on farms, as they are fast growing.)
The next week, after we received many more secret deliveries of TP, the boss started selling TP on a “restricted” basis. Price went from 4 rolls for $1.00 to $4.00 per 4 roll pack. It was all “fake news” and created by the industry, just like this soap shortage is.
http://baypaper.com/toiletpaper.html
I have two gallons of shampoo from Sally’s.
Haven’t see a lack of liquid soap, but have noticed reduced quantity of cat litter at wally world. There also seems to be a reduced or unavailability of packets of dried vegetable soup mix.
Maybe there’s a need for a huge amount of Napalm?
Dish soup is used to make the gasoline sticky.
Well, that is a horrifying concept. You just never know. My, something to think about.
So far, we haven’t seen that here in our part of South Carolina. But what the heck, why wait? So yeah, I’ll be picking up five or six, just to be on the safe side.
btw, have ya’ll heard anything about dishwasher packs? Because with all the cooking we do, that would be an even bigger issue.
I don’t know about DW liquid shortage but I do know the best one I tried is Dawn. Tried a lot of the others but they don’t suds as much or last as long and you find yourself using more of it.
With Dawn, you don’t need so much of it to get the job done. Heck, I use drops of it at a time in small loads it’s so concentrated and not watered down and was surprised how sudsy it still is after awhile.
We use Dawn because it seems the best one for cutting grease. This is a good way to keep the septic more free of grease build up.
I once stumped the customer service at Dawn. (Actually I called at lunch). I asked them if I premix it with water was the effectiveness diminished over time and at what rate? The service rep did not know and neither did her supervisor.
Apparently, nobody ever asked them this question and looks like they did not do lab work research on what a lot of people might be doing with DW liquid in the real world.
Dish soap and soap in general is usually made from petroleum. As another poster pointed out, the Texas fire and the unstable Middle East situation could be behind a general shortage of petroleum and petroleum by products. I would not be surprised if it expands into a shortage of other products. If you can, stock up on any similar petroleum based items, including gasoline if you have safe storage facilities and kerosene/heating oil. Propane too; even if it’s not petroleum derived, there will be an increase in demand as people look for alternatives heading into the winter months.
This is just a trial run with something fairly inconsequential, to see how people react. The big stuff is coming.
Dish soap is one of my prep items. We have a yrs supply on hand. 🙂
Grandee, So do I.
If this is just one or two companies, it may be of no consequence. You don’t need a complicated recipe to clean your dishes. Baking soda does a great job, as do store brand detergents. Course salt is the best thing I’ve found to scrub pots. If you have the space and money to stock up on dish detergent, though, there’s no harm in it. If nothing else, you save yourself from having to pick it up for a few months.
how is dish soap really any different than other liquid soap? therefore, why no warnings about liquid hand or body soap?
THis may be a scam. I was in japan in the 1970s when the toilet paper “shortage” occured. It turned out later, that there was really a huge overstock in the warehouses. The manufacturer just wanted to move his TP instead of paying warehouse fees.
Has everyone already forgotten the WM signs from earlier this summer about shortages of canned vegetables? How serious was the problem? I never saw evidence of a shortage such as bare shelves, did anyone? Are the vegetables still missing? More nonsense.
Saw the sign at our Walmart in Moscow Idaho today.