In a humorous moment from Steve Martin’s comedy Father of the Bride, there’s a scene where George Banks (Martin) argues with a store clerk that the number of buns in a package is mismatched with the packaged number of hot dogs: “I wanna buy eight hot dogs and eight hot dog buns to go with them. But since no one sells eight hot dog buns, I’m removing the superfluous buns from the package.”

According to Banks, the mismatch is caused by some “big shot at the wiener company colluding with a big shot at the hot company.” Perhaps. Or maybe it’s because each of the production processes has been driven independently by local efficiency.

The incident in the supermarket reminds me of a tour some years ago of a golf ball factory to which I invited my teacher, Hajime Ohba. The site had made some nice improvements to reduce overproduction by improving machine setups and converting a system of push production to pull. But they still struggled to keep kanban supermarkets filled.

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