A Fun Look at Some of Our Best Supply Chain Cartoon Caption Contest Winners

Haven't done this in a while.

It's the so-called dog days of August, though it's cooled down here in Ohio and much of the rest of the country.

Still, lots of folk on vacation, others getting ready for the start of school. So how about a little fun this week?

So among all the serious materials we have here at SCDigest, I must say the idea to have a supply chain cartoon caption contest to lighten things up a bit was among our better initiatives.

Except it wasn't really my idea. The illustrator who draws our cartoons actually reached out to me many years ago, seeing if I would be interested in such an idea. He was doing a caption contest for a web site that focused on industrial automation equipment (PLCs and such), and decided to look around for similar opportunities.

He was actually concepting and illustrating each cartoon for this other publication, but I didn't think that work for us - you have to have the domain knowledge. So I said "We'll create concept, you draw" and that's how we got started.

It has been a big hit since its inception. We regularly receive emails from readers saying the cartoon captions bring some laughs that help a bit with the near constant stress that can be part of supply chain.

So this week, once again here are some of the best cartoon/caption combinations we have received over the past few year. We've done this just a handful of times before, and received some very positive feedback on the effort, so let's give it another go.

I don't think there has been a contest where we didn't have at least one very good submission, usually more, but here are some of the best, all from the past few years. Name and companies of the submitters are obviously what was sent at the time and may have changed since then.

Let's start with one of the recent winners from the Feb. 2, 2022 contest, with this great caption from Chuck Peters of Atlanta relative to a new kind of warehouse worker:

Next, we always do a Christmas related cartoon at the end of each year, and for 2019 received this excellent caption from frequent contributor Jeff Gilbert of Hallmark:

In May 2020, another frequent contributor, Wil Biscardi of Hall's Warehouse Corp., won with this great caption:

Finally, in 2020 we received this winning entry from Gene Edmiston of Emerson:

So there you have it. Hope you enjoyed these, and had a least a few chuckles. We've had just a handful of cartoons that were close to repeats over these many years of doing this, starting in 2009, but that's it. It's challenging to keep coming up with new ideas, but we'll keep doing it as long as we can.

Want to show us your supply chain wit? Send an entry for the current contest (click on the cartoon):

Do you enjoy the caption cartoon contests? Any ideas for a cartoonLet us know your thoughts at the Feedback section below.