How are the supermarkets holding out where people live?

I was amazed at how fast they came up with the spit shields. Our supermarkets are running the same and with butchers, produce shops and liquor stores shut it has been a license to print money. Tomorrow we come out of level 4 and go to level 3. We will be able to buy stuff ordering on line and collect. I’ve ordered a 730 CCA battery and radiator flush and replacement coolant for one tractor.

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My mom is from the early 30’s. Grew up in the Depression and WW II so she has been uh, obsessive about keeping plenty of food on hand. Huge stuffed upright freezer that is a hazard to open as some frozen package may fall on your head, a walk-in pantry the size of a small bedroom. I’ve laughed at her for years but when I told her I couldn’t find flour she said, “You’re not laughing now are you wise guy?I only have about 20 pounds of flour left, been baking a lot,you know you need to rotate that stuff anyway. But then you wouldn’t know about that would you because you are not properly prepared Mister, I can always go to the store. I would ship some to you but I’m not going out. Go catch a fish and bake it, hahaha”
Those depression era people can be cold.

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I guess they didn’t make it through what they did & this long by being soft? Most of the oldest things I own aren’t the most comfortable but I’ve had them for a couple of decades & they work just fine.

Our last small home didn’t have a pantry until we remodeled the kitchen & built a small half sized closet pantry ourselves. The home that we live in now came with a small one under a staircase but nothing like the much older homes that I’ve seen with large pantries like your mom’s. I wonder if this crisis will last long enough or make a big enough impact to change the way homes are designed? I don’t think modern architects give too much floor space to pantries anymore because families are smaller, food was readily available & people don’t cook as much. I know we will rethink our pantry after this, for how long, I don’t know. But for sure, some of the Greatest Generation had to have it rough to still be practicing what they learned all those years ago.

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Where I live in the UK almost everything is in stock in the supermarket, except from flour and yeast as so many people want to do baking at home.

It’s also nearly impossible to get any home delivery slots from supermarkets, bad for the people with commodities that shouldn’t go to the supermarket but have to because they can’t get a slot.

There is a story below about a 70 year old man who had to live on Domino’s pizza, chocolate cookies and coke zero because he couldn’t get a slot for online shopping and had nobody to go shopping for him.

Had much worse at sea!

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What every child in America dreams they could eat forever.

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I’m in NoVA. Most of the supermarkets are in good shape, especially the smaller, expensive ones (e.g. Food Lion). The bigger store I usually shop in has somewhat random shortages. One day it was popcorn. None - no microwave stuff or plain kernals. Later in the week it was fine. Sugar & fake sugar is scarce now.

There latest shortage is narrow elastic. The line to the local fabric store has been ~50 deep for most of the last week or two. I stood in it one day, as I needed fabric.

I’m not sure how much good these mask drives are doing overall. They make people feel great, but based on the discussion in the line, people were getting supplies not to make masks for themselves or immediate family, but a hundred or so for whatever charity or their Etsy business. The result is that people making them for themselves can’t find the supplies. They end up having to buy them on Etsy or similar. Also, many are questionably done. If someone is making 25 masks in a night, it probably won’t filter out a fart.

I lucked out. I sew regularly, which means I have stash of random stuff, that I may or may not know I even have. The other day I found several yards of 3/16" elastic. :grinning:

You have to love this - when I was standing in line at the sewing store, I kicked a small rock, 2-3 inches in diameter, that was on the sidewalk. The rock was soft & didn’t roll???. The ‘rock’ was a small bat curled up on the sidewalk at 10am. When I kicked it, a wing peaked out. I don’t think it was a healthy bat. Everyone near me was glad when the line was moved to the other side of the store.

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You weren’t near a Chinese restaurant were you?

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Apparently many states have had less total deaths from covid19 than what NYC was having in 1 day at its peak. So things are opening up modestly quick in some places.

I went to 3 stores this morning. Walmart, Sam’s Club & Lowes. A lot of other people out & about all practicing social distancing with about 50% wearing PPE. My Walmart had a whole shelf of toilet paper & at the checkout counter they were selling hand sanitizer spray. Both were limited to one purchase per customer. The baking aisle was skimpy & they didn’t have any flour. But the International/Hispanic aisle did have meseca & flour.

Lowes looked exactly the same as before except for the social distancing & PPE.

The Sam’s across the parking lot from the Walmart had more flour than I could use in the rest of my life. Things are bouncing back fine as far as I could tell.

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Meat will be next on the hoarders’ shopping lists.

Just visited stop and shop in the NYC area. They’re still having shortages of products in many areas. A lot of frozen food is still not stocked, certain dry goods are not stocked. To compare the ACME market down the road has remained well stocked throughout the pandemic. It must be Stop and Shop’s supply chain that is messed up.

Have the people in Walmart continued to mutate or has the virus knocked that on the head?

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Immuned, go figure…

Generally most country folk here stock their freezers at this time of the year starting from the end of March. There are tax advantages in having a steer break a leg, the weather is cooler and you go into winter with the best cuts vacuum packed for the return of summer and the casserole meat ready for winter.
I leave the butchering of beef to the home kill guy who also offers a great range of small goods such as bacon, ham, pastrami and the best sausages around, as good as the Amish sausages I had in the US.
I do the lambs myself and there is a fine looking rack of lamb on the menu later in the week. Most small holdings don’t keep pigs or if they do that’s all they keep but there is always barter.

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My lifestyle hasn’t changed much since this insanity started. Some inconvenience though. The last 3 trips to HEB store and Walmart, there was plenty of toilet paper. The only empty shelves was rubbing alcohol. They predict meat shortages, but I don’t have a problem. 2 months ago, HEB had 10# pork loins on sale for $1 a pound. I bought 5 and cut into smaller roasts and chops, vacuum sealed and froze. They opened the beaches last Friday. My grandsons slaughtered the redfish. I made 1 gallon of ceveiche, fried 3# and vacuum sealed and froze 15# in small packets. My freezer is full of venison, venison/beef hamburger, sausage, shrimp, lump crab meat as it normally is. Not much has changed, except for the hoarding insanity…….

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I tend to get up early in the morning to watch Farm Journal TV’s AgDay. It’s a half hour Farm Report and it’s information tends to forecast the circumstances most of the rest of us will be living with. (that being the prices and quantity of goods in the Grocery Stores in the near future)

Some weeks ago I was watching and they mentioned something like a .671% increase in demand for Yeast was being anticipated. I couldn’t believe my eyes & ears…but look at what we are talking about here now.

These programs are archived in the AgWeb website here:

Farm Journal TV/AgWeb/AgDay Broadcast

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It has been said that when the American economy sneezes the rest of the world catches a cold.
With the shutdown of meat packing plants in the US a number of countries have looked for an alternative supply and as a result New Zealand’s meat exports are up and fetching high prices. The prices in our domestic market are set by the export price so supermarket prices have gone up.
We are OK with enough in the freezer to tide us over

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I went to 2 thrift stores today. One was a Goodwill & the other was a store where all proceeds go to the areas largest homeless shelter. We were looking for a kids bike since our youngest out grew his over the winter. The shelves & aisles were overflowing with really good stuff. We are familiar with both of these places & I would guess their inventory has increased by 30-40% than normal. It dawned on me that with everyone trapped at home, some perhaps for the first time, a lot of cleaning & clutter reduction went on resulting in a lot of stuff being donated. So if your shelves are empty around your town due to covid19 & shipping delays you might want to check your local secondhand charity stores?

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I’ve noticed lately in all of the stores I shop at the meat dept features more ground beef and in some cases ground pork than they ever carried before. Lunch meat and hot dogs seem to be missing now. It got me to looking at the shelves and I noticed almost an absence of “Hamburger Helper Boxes”. So I looked for the Tuna Helper Boxes and they were nearly gone…and the supply of canned Tuna along with it. Boxed potato items like scalloped, au gratin, and instant items are absent too.

Then I went by the soda isle and it was quite depleted too. Next to produce, and the
head lettuce, bags of pre made salad were shopped down along with much of the fruit. (grapes, bananas, oranges, and apples were mostly gone) Items like potatoes, sweet potatoes, eggplant, peppers, larger onions are in the reduced bins.

The bakery area isn’t as well stocked now and I was told where so many working people were buying donuts and such to take into the office…that market is flat on it’s face. The snack food isle is generally supplied by vendors such as Frito/Lays and they are busing their a&& to keep those shelves stocked…

In the dairy area milk is cheap now, cottage cheese as almost always near gone.Yogurt surprisingly seems to always be displaying marked down stickers. (I guess people are making it at home now) Biscuits, Croissant rolls, Pizza dough, Puff Pastry etc in tubes
and cookie dough seems to be in very thin supply.

In the bread isle sandwich buns are usually depleted but I was happy to see that some of the varieties of loaf bread are beginning to return. A few weeks ago it was rather limited to
low end sliced sandwich bread loafs. Now Rye bread, Buttermilk, Multi Grain Whole Wheat, and even the thin sliced diet bread is returning. Bagels, English Muffins, are back but some of the other items like Pita are gone. I did notice the flat Mexican breads were well stocked, but with the cinco de mayo holiday I figured it was a special effort.
(I usually use these to make roll ups with a leaf of Romaine Lettuce, some sliced cheese, and lunch meat.

It makes a statement to me regarding peoples decisions as to what to eat and what they are capable of cooking.

Given all of this I began to start observing people shopping and the contents in their carts.
That seemed to tell the story. I think it is a reflection on the cooking skills of so many people.

At last I went down the isle where the cooking gear is located and so much of it was priced so low they were almost giving it away. So many interesting accessories (silicone items for instant pots) that were $15 dollars back before Christmas were now $2 to $3 dollars. But no one seems to be buying it even though they have plenty of time at home to cook.

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Considering this isn’t a bad pandemic (we could all be zombies) I’m most surprised that there are breakdowns in the food supply chains. I’d always figured it would take millions of fatalities or horrible sicknesses to cause a food shortage. Now I see that we can have a functioning breakdown where everything looks normal except for an increasing amount of empty shelves. The shelves at the big grocery stores still look mostly full until I look deeper. The workers are just spreading out what’s there to make the shelves look full. Instead of being loads of product behind the first item I see the shelves are getting empty.

Now I wonder about the fall or winter or whenever the projected second wave hits. If the second wave is worse than the first it might be best to buy another deep freezer and stock up while there’s time.