That’s an interesting theory, but as someone who has visited 100 assembly plants around the world and written extensively about Toyota, let me offer a little more context. Mr. Ohno actually was inspired by Ford Motor Company to create the Toyota Production System. He came to Dearborn after World War II in an effort to get ideas to restart Toyota’s plants. Ford gave him full run of its factories, but he also visited American grocery stores and watching inventory be replenished from back to front.

The point of TPS wasn’t necessarily to eliminate jobs; it was to eliminate waste. Toyota’s manufacturing complexes still employ thousands of people. But they were able to achieve the same production with 2,000 people, at a place like Georgetown, Kentucky, rather than the 5,000 that GM employed at a place like Willow Run, not far from Ann Arbor, before it closed. Toyota concentrated labor where it is most needed, such as trim and final assembly, and removed it from places where people didn’t want to work anyway, such as welding, and installing heavy parts, like windshields and engines. And, it went back over the production line every shift for ideas on avoiding mistakes and eliminating unnecessary steps.

Just-in-time inventory is only one piece of TPS. The bigger part of it is called kaizen — continuous improvement. If Toyota had screwed up as badly as American grocery stores have screwed up in the COVID-19 crisis, you can bet it would have studied the heck out of why, and instituted changes as soon as it mapped them out. For one thing, American grocery stores allowed hoarding to take place, and if they’d been properly managing inventory, they could have seen that allowing consumers to buy carts full of toilet paper wasn’t workable as a long term solution. That has nothing to do with lean manufacturing, and everything to do with trying to maximize profits.