Or maybe you didn’t. Maybe the things you need have always been in-stock so who really cares what the rest of the shelves look like. Or YOUR store is stocked. Who cares what the next county over looks like.
And to be fair, outside of the crazy panic during the initial shut down, the large majority of the shortages have varied ALOT from region to region and brand to brand.
So one store will have mass empty shelves. And practically next door another will be well enough stocked to appear fine.
Please note I said “appear fine”.
Cause they’re not. Some stores and companies are just better at improv stocking than others, happen to be lucky trucking wise, happen to be closer to a hub, or other such reasons why they’re doing better.
The Wegmans I usually shop at next to my work. Located on a busy shopping thruway in a reasonably affluent city. At 6pm on a Friday. Right off a major interstate for easy transport of product.
While these two sets of shelves were by far the worst in the store, there wasn’t a single set of shelves without multiple holes. And in most cases what they DID have was only enough for one or two deep.
And some of the shortages have been like that for weeks. Cereal hasn’t been fully stocked in at least 3 weeks. Peanut butter has looked like locusts hit those shelves for over a month. Pet food? Well, if you haven’t noticed the pet food shortage you probly don’t have a pet, cause THATS been just getting shorter and shorter for over a year now. Feminine sanitary supplies never did really recover from the shut down. Neither did vitamins and assorted similar type pills. The facial care aisle is starting to look seriously picked over, and hasn’t been fully stocked in a while. Canned soup actually looked pretty good yesterday, till I actually looked closer. The shelves had about 5 flavors of soup on them, a ton of cans of each, but I hope you’re not to picky about which kind. Milk, and milk products (including cream, half and half, and the like) have been short stocked every time I’ve been in there for the last 3 weeks, enough on the shelves that I didn’t have to walk away empty handed, but no where near as full as normal. Last week when I got my order of meat from the local wholesaler they warned me that the price list for the next week had some major price increases on it, and they’ve been warned that more things are going to be out of stock and short.
And its about to get worse.
Cross Border Trucker Protest Continues, LINK, LINK, there’s been remarkably little major media attention to this inside the USA, but a few are starting to notice.
BNSF Railway workers, from the SMART-TD and BLET Unions may be about to strike. LINK, LINK, Newsweek actually picked that one up, but the general public doesn’t seem to have noticed it yet.
Take a deep breath and hold on tight folks.