Nothing Much

At the request of my Husband I have started loading my memes into my Twitter account. For those of you who prefer that medium I am RuthCatrin1 there.

Woke up Saturday to white grass and heavy snow fall. Though the snow melted fairly quickly after that it continued to snow, often this hard or harder, for the rest of the day. Areas north of me got upwards of 4+” of snow from this storm

Welcome to upstate NY!

I ordered an Original Instructor Belt on 4/11/20 from their home website. My current belt having been a cheap belt that fit, and now stretching out in short order, I decided it was worth spending money on a good belt.

Their website says they normally ship fairly quickly, but to give them 7-10 days. On the other hand the current situation isn’t normal, so I waited. On 4/28/20 I emailed them asking if it would be possible to get an update as to how much longer it was likely to be to get the belt. Never got a response. Yes I checked the spam folder. On 5/3/20 I tried messaging them via FB with the same message. FB changed the check mark on the message on 5/4/20 to their profile icon, which usually means that the recipient has read (or at least opened the message screen) the message. But I haven’t gotten a response there either.

My work schedule is such that calling them during their business hours is difficult at best.

I am very aware that the current situation isn’t normal, and based on the reviews I’d really like this belt. But I’d also kinda like an update as to whats going on. Does anyone know of anything about whats going on with them?

I posted most of this in a response to a friend’s post on FB, and then expanded it into the rant you see here.

But before I go any further, DO NOT turn this into a political comment war. I don’t care what your opinion of the shut down is. I don’t care if you think there’s a point to wearing a mask or not. I care about the people like me who’re trying to keep things running on the real life level that the USA is running on right now.

Let me tell you how busy Home Depot is.

We’re open 4 LESS hours each day. (though it’ll be 2 less hours effective Monday)

We’re working with upwards 30% LESS people (due to vulnerable folks not working).

I spent two weeks covering THREE departments by myself for a large portion of each day, and there was one day where a co-worker was covering FOUR BY HERSELF.

We’re limiting how many people can be in the store at a time (my store has a 75 customer limit, larger stores may be up to 150).

The company hasn’t had a single serious sale or promo since this started (by choice).

And despite that my store has MADE SALES PLAN for most of April. The sales plan that was written MONTHS ago before anyone had any idea that this virus was going to cause a shut down like this.

And to top it off, we’re not doing it by selling mulch and garden supplies as we normally would (we’re selling some of those, but not in normal numbers).

Well over half of the current sales are stuff bought online and picked up in stores or delivered from stores. Which, btw, requires a MUCH higher employee participation than if the customer came in and purchased it.

We’ve sold SO MUCH paint that Behr had to send us our own trailer for our order last week. A normal weekly paint shipment is between 4-6 pallets for my store. This week’s truck had 12.

A normal spring busy Saturday has me walking ~5 miles at work. The past three weeks I’ve been averaging over 8 miles, and I hit 10 one day. On a WEEK DAY.

The shut down isn’t going to last the summer. It won’t require a political movement, people are just going to stop listening. They’re already standing in line in the rain to get into Home Depot. To buy a gallon of paint. So stop harping about how horrid all these people are and start figuring out a way to make it work while keeping the vulnerable folks safe. Cause this isn’t stopping any time soon.

Also please keep in mind that ALL “essential” employees, regardless of what store they’re working at, are over-worked and burning out right now.

We’re running our asses off trying to get people the things they want.

And we’re dealing with everything from grandma in a full face mask and gloves (which she’s wearing while rifling through her purse) while mumbling so badly we can’t understand her, to the guy who thinks this is all pointless and is refusing to not only wear a mask but to even back up a few feet to make the lady at the paint counter feel not quite so claustrophobic (protip, she’s already there, between the face mask we’re required to wear, and the plexi shields they put up, so having an asshole insisting on trying to loom over her isn’t helping).

I’ve watched long time employees who normally have all the patience in the world verbally snap at customers.

So before you get snotty because an employee asks you to back up a few feet, before you get offended because an employee isn’t as polite as normal, please remember that we’re all beyond exhausted, we’re all past brain fried, and we’re not any happier with the situation than you are. Take a great big deep breath and sit on your goddammed ego till you’re out of the store.

I don’t care if you’re pissed because you refuse to wear a mask and don’t see the point to the extra spacing between people. I don’t care if you’re pissed because other people aren’t wearing masks. I don’t care if you’re pissed because people are buying something you consider non-essential. I don’t care if you’re pissed because you think it should be business as normal.

Don’t take it out on the people running their asses off trying to make sure you can buy what you want or need. We all have our own opinions on what should or shouldn’t be done. They may or may not match yours, but today we’re stuck with what we have. If you have that big of a problem with it then take it up with corporate.

I’ve been resisting writing another depressing post. We all need the cheering up, not the pulling down. But somethings have to be said. I’m not including links. More than half of my sources are from conversations with farmers, or from their FB posts, or the like. There is a remarkable, and scary, lack of mainstream media notice of this. Edit-after posting this I found a few links. They’ve been added at the bottom.

When this first started, when I first posted my first response to the shutdown and buyout out of the stock at the stores, I was outright hopeful that agriculture would come out strong. And I firmly believe that if the shutdown and fear mongering had really only lasted that two weeks that everyone insisted was needed that I’d have been right.

The problem is that we’re well into month 2, and about to head for month 3, of this mess.

Yes, RIGHT NOW, there’s probably enough perishable foods in the various warehouses to fill the nations grocery stores no problem. What we have RIGHT NOW is a distribution problem. We either can’t get the foods to the stores quickly enough, or the foods are in a form meant for restaurants rather than retail and so it can’t be immedietly sold without costly repackaging.

The problem is that the distribution problem has backlogged into agriculture already.

A HUGE portion of this country’s agriculture is based on supplying restaurants in various forms. This sort of food takes a completely different form than what the average person buys at the grocery store. And while I’m perfectly happy breaking down a 50lb case of beef for freezer storage, a HUGE portion of this country not only has no clue how to do that, they don’t have the freezer space to even contemplate it. And thats without getting into things like, onion rings, which people eat a LOT of when out at restaurants, and not nearly as much at home. A huge number of farms out there are dedicated to supplying the restaurant/food service supply chain. The meat and produce goes directly into processing plants meant to process it for food service. And those processing plants aren’t immediately able to switch over to retail packaging. It would cost a fortune to do. And that assumes that they have the people to make the switch and run the lines. Which they don’t.

Even the side of agriculture that is intended for retail sale is backlogged to the point of shutdown. Processors are being scheduled months out. In a time when the average American is trying to stuff their tiny little fridge freezer full of enough food to carry their family of 4 through weeks of quarantine the price per pound, that is paid to the farmers, of livestock and produce is crashing like a rock. Prices have been way low on that end of things for years now, but they just crashed, hard. Add in that the processors, big and small, are running short handed, or even shut down, because of fears of this virus. And even if the processors weren’t running short handed, this side of the agriculture equation just isn’t BIG enough to make up for the food that people are now buying at the grocery stores instead of at restaurants.

Look, remember how when this all started there were horrifying images of dairy farmers dumping milk? Well, those same dairy farmers are now looking at having to sell off their dairy herd, and not to another dairy farm, in order to just put food on their own tables. And once those 100’s and 1000’s of dairy cows have been slaughtered they can’t come back and start producing milk again. It’ll be years to rebuild those herds.

A friend of mine raises sheep for meat and for lamb sales. She normally has NO problem selling off her spring crop of lambs. But not this year. This year NO one is buying. Well, thats not entirely true. She’s had random city people pulling into her driveway trying to buy her livestock. People who have no clue what to do with a lamb, much less a cow. But even if she was willing to sell to those people they aren’t willing to pay a decent price for the animal either. She’s started making a point of counting her chickens every night as she closes them up in their coops. And she’s had medications for the animals disappear out of her barn.

Add in that a huge portion of the US consumers are now out of work. They no longer have the money to buy whatever catches their attention. And the longer this shutdown goes on the larger the percentage of them will that won’t have a job to go back to.

If this trend doesn’t get switched around by god fast there are going to be some by god major food shortages. We might not feel them till fall, but I have a feeling it won’t take that long.

Do we really want to find out what malnutrition does to the normal flu death rates? I’d really rather not. Really really not. Or malnutrition on top of the fall surge of Covid19, cause yes, there’ll be a fall surge. I really don’t want to go there.

Really really really don’t want to go there.

Edited to add links:

UN warns of global food shortage

Corona Virus affecting Georgia Farmers

NYT Corona Virus Destroying Food

Minnesota Chickens Killed

Tyson Foods Warns Food Chain is Breaking

Food Service Shut Down affects Potato farmers

Why Farmers Are Dumping Food

One trend I keep seeing.  People seem to believe that if we can all just properly “social distance” for a few weeks this virus will stop being an issue.

Guys, it doesn’t work that way.

IF we could do a hard lock down on everyone in the country.  No emergency services, no stores, no gas stations.  EVERYONE locked up at home.  For 3 or 4 weeks.  AND test everyone as they came out of lockdown to catch the folks who are sick with no symptoms, maybe it would work that way.

But we can’t do that.  Life doesn’t work that way.  Not to mention that here in the US of A humans are so used to having outside stimulation that they’re going out to the few stores still open just to “browse”.  Seriously.  They’re going to Home Depot and Lowes to browse paint colors.  Design their new kitchen.  Meander around and annoy the fuck out of the employees.

Best we can hope for is that this will slow down the infection rate enough that the hospitals will catch up.  As it is, once the various governments release their “stay at home” orders, I can promise that all those silent carriers of this virus are going to continue to spread it, and the infection rate is going to bloom again.

And once THAT happens the panic might just become a nightmare.  You only THINK it’s bad now.  Right now a fairly large percentage of the population are holding back their panic with the knowledge that this social distancing order is going to save us all.  The panic when they realize it doesn’t work that way is going to be seriously ugly.  Don’t let those prepper stockpiles dwindle to far, cause this summer has the potential to be really really bad.

Along those lines:

The big grocery store next to my work is kinda back to normal stocked on meats.  Kinda, it looks good, till you realize they still only have half the normal selection.  And purchase limits.  Strict purchase limits on milk and eggs mean that they’re well stocked.  There was NO CHEESE except for the weird flavors no one eats.  Dry cereal was well stocked Friday, and wonder of wonders, no purchase limits.  There were purchase limits on pasta, granola bars.  Paper products was still glaringly empty.  Frozen pre-prepared goods had no purchase limits, but the shelves were also still mostly empty.  Breads was better than it had been, but not really normal either, plus purchase limits.  Flour was marginally stocked, as in, maybe 10 bags of AP flour and that was it.

The smaller grocery on my way home is better, meats are damn close to normal.  No purchase limit signs.  Cheeses were pretty well stocked.  No paper goods to speak of, but they never carried much that way.  Freezer goods were sparse.

The Pet Supplies Plus was actually surprisingly well stocked considering that the grocery stores are basically sold out of pet supplies.  However Chewy.com is running a solid week + behind on shipping orders.  Thankfully I only rely on them for odds and ends and not foods.

My work has gotten in one (1) pallet of paper towels (it sold out in 24hrs), and one (1) pallet of toilet paper (it lasted 8hrs), both had purchase limits on them.  There is still no hand soap to be had, we’ve gotten a few cases of sanitizing wipes and they’ve sold out in hours.  No Lysol or other sanitizing sprays to speak of.  The only bleach left is a few cases of highly concentrated “outdoor bleach”.  Last I checked we were almost out of dish soap.  Cleaning supplies in general were basically gutted.

So far none of my co-workers has tested positive.  However my husband started working from home just in time, he got notified Saturday morning that a coworker in the same call center he normally works in just tested positive.  Husband’d been working from home for 12 days.  Quite a few of my coworkers are taking advantage of Home Depots offer of two weeks of PTO for anyone who needs it, and so we’re short handed, even with the shortened store hours.  Not that any of us blame those folks.  A large portion of our employees are “mature”, ie: near or over retirement age.

Deep breath folks.  And keep plugging away.

Press Release here.

The short form, in order to reduce staffing requirements, and hopefully spread of the virus, all Home Depots nationwide are reducing available shopping hours to 6am to 6pm, effective today.  Employees who normally work later shifts are still being scheduled for those shifts, but will now be spending extra time stocking shelves and cleaning instead of helping customers.

This is actually pretty big news.  Home Depot considers itself to be an emergency service and does its damndest to be open under all conditions.

In other news, I’m home today with the sniffles.  I don’t actually feel sick, I just have a runny nose and mild sinus pressure.  I’m fairly confident that its my sinuses, again.  But if I go into work with the sniffles we’d have half the city in a panic.  So I called out.  I don’t think I’ve EVER had a manager give me less hassle about calling out sick.  No one wants to trigger more panic right now!