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Panic and Empty Shelves
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Nik
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Apr 02, 2020 02:18AM
As the initial wave of massive stocking subsides, at the moment only eggs are hard to get here, as far as I notice. If it continues, may look into poultry farming more closely :)
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Yes, I happily left the shops today with a pile of fruit, vegetables and some meat for the next week. We may need the odd thing to add to it, but our local places are doing a great job of making sure we have everything available to collect/order/have delivered.
I got milk, bread and eggs this week. No teabags on the shelves. The frozen meals and snacks were emptied out.I keep getting notice of more Amazon subscribe and save subscriptions being canceled. No pur water filters for my faucet. Amazon is marking some stuff as expected to be available after April 20th, so I have put in new orders and will wait and see if TP, water filers, and other household items show up at the end of April.
In the meantime, next week I will face the task of searching for everything from shampoo to laundry detergent, along with actual grocery shopping in hopes that things like hamburger, chicken and produce are back on the shelves.
There's a big problem here with the lack of migrant Mexican farm workers to harvest crops because of virus travel bans. Blueberries and squash are ready to be picked and will rot in the fields if there's no one to pick them. I imagine this will happen with other crops throughout the summer. I've been looking for squash plants and seeds at stores and have had no luck. I have some eggplant and tomatoes ready to plant. Just saying that I'm not going to be able to plant everything I'm going to want for the summer, and the supply at stores might be iffy.
My daughter shopped for me this week and got more or less everything I wanted, although there were sometimes size issues, This lockdown is going to hurt our kiwifruit and pipfruit exports. The required pickers can't travel around, and some of the pickers usually come from the Islands. The current estimate is that about 10 - 20% will rot.
The virus on the back of bad flooding has hit may farmers hard. There were already concerns about casual labour with Brexit. I suspect there will be some temporary shortages but again that Government's will relax rules to treat the next crisis. Starvation remains some way off.In most apocalyptic scenarios it's power and water/sewage that have a faster impact and so far neither of these have been impacted although staffing of all facilities will be of concern.
For farmers short of labourers perhaps they should invite consumers to help pick self distancing permitting - fields tend to be big.
Scput, good point. And with the crackdown at the borders and immediate deportations, i suspect it will contribute to that issue.
In my opinion, the issue of casual labour comes back to the nature of the problem. Politicians had to react fast and put saving lives as a priority. They then did the best they could, but they could hardly be expected to think of everything. There were bound to be some hiccups. The test will be how we emerge from this mess, but don't forget that if they did not take this action there would have been a horrible mess too. We have to dissuade certain people from wanting to eat bats.
Right now, no one is worried about what the emergency measures due to the virus are doing to the economy. We're focused on survival, and rightly so. Are you confident that we'll come out of this okay and continue as before, or is this the new normal?
Of course we shall come out of it, but I suspect this will also be the straw that broke the back of the current economic model. I think there will be a bit of a retreat from globalization as some countries realize they have to be more self-sufficient. Right now there are too many things you can't buy easily because the more wealthy have bought them and production is low.
Someone on another thread says she's saving her junk mail just in case she runs out of toilet paper :-) And, for heaven's sake, there must be plenty of toilet paper in warehouses. My local grocery store has some, but will only sell one pack to each customer. That makes sense, although I've heard that people are leaving, putting it in their car, and returning to buy more. Of course.
There is no shortage of toilet paper, unless there is a dramatic shortage of transport. The problem here is people keep buying far more than they need, and it takes quite a lot of shelf space so frantic buyers clear out the shelves faster than the staff can replace it.
Limits on the number people can buy seems practical. Sensible people will buy one and go on their way. Sensible people are hard to find these days, though.
I don't actively seek out TP and bleach at the moment, but when I have been in stores such as Target, Walmart, Safeway, I look in anticipation of my supply running out, and the shelves are consistently empty. I also search Amazon every week to see if I can reactivate my subscribe and save, and they never have any of the usual brands available - charmin, northern, angel soft. Eventually, unless people stop their craziness, I am going to have to start looking for the when and where and times and get my 1 pack.There are other things in the stores that they are also limiting how much you can buy. Many canned goods are 4 only, milk only 1 or 2, eggs - same thing, depending on the store.
Why tomato sauce is in limited supply around here I don't know - but 4 trips to 2 stores over an 8 day period before I found some. No enchilada sauce mix (McCormick, Ortega, or whomever makes those) during the past month. I can season it all myself, but it is interesting to note the things that are missing off the shelves.
I haven't been able to buy cold brew iced tea bags for a month or the Luzianne iced tea size bags. Last week, there was no tea bags of any type at Safeway. I generally go through 8 iced tea size bags a week. I will have to start brewing my loose teas for iced tea if they don't start stocking the shelves again.
Still no vinegar anywhere here, and I was lucky to get the last box of family-sized tea bags. Vegetable seeds and plants are gone, too, except for onions and asparagus, which no one here grows. I guess we're all thinking that vegetables may be hard to come by this summer.
One of the reasons for empty shelves which has not been addressed is the collapse of restaurants, takeaways, fast food and coffee shops. Most whole sellers distribute to this market, in large containers e.g. milk supplies in tankers. This is then repacked by shops distributors for supermarket sales or used in those quantities direct by manufacturers.One story today sums it up. Supermarkets have seen a run on baking ingredients. Why because we cannot get the muffin, cake or bread from a cafe or restaurant/coffee shop therefore want to get these foods at home. Hence flour demand. Flour whole seller normally sells in 10-50kg bags to chains. They have enough flour they are trying to sell direct but don't have 1-2kg bags to pack for direct sale to consumer. Just one chain, just one ingredient. Suppliers are trying to adapt but are unused to dealing in consumer quantities whilst normal supplies in consumer bags then disappear. Some reports show 400-500% increase in demand for some of these goods.
As with most things there are a chain of root causes. If we apply Six Sigma techniques to understanding this process and do a 5 (or more) whys analysis perhaps the shortages become clearer, starting with a 20% plus reduction in family meals provided outside the home - probably much higher. e.g. working people have lunch out now they are working from home or furloughed adding to home demand for food and yes TP.
Yes, I guess it's a combination of real increase in demand, as described by Philip, panic buying and probably additional reasons.Here, I think they limit only eggs, as far as I'm aware, and, of course, some people attempt to circumvent by visiting a store a few times to get more.
Offered my friend in NY to send him a pack of TP by DHL or UPS, but courier costs will make it "golden" :)
Alot of things are still empty here. Still no rice. Went to 3 stores and there were none. We do seem to have eggs and milk though. No paper products. Over here in the states we have a store called Dollar Tree - everything in the store is a $1.00. They have quality brands for the most part. I was looking for shampoo and normally they are overloaded but not now. Also it seems that alot of can food for meat is out. What is interesting the healthy food is gone but the sweets are still around. You can buy cookies, cakes, etc. but trying to find vegetables and fruit is tough in some stores.
Marie, I love Dollar Tree. I've made up a slogan for them: Shop Dollar Tree, Where Everything is Almost Free!! :-) I go in there for one or two things and end up with a buggy full of bargains.
Aldi's seems to be the only place that has meat. I've been able to pick up chicken whenever I go there since this whole mess started. Walmart and other grocers have looked like they've been out of business. Pasta and rice have been a different story, but the stores have been gradually getting/keeping more on the shelf - I don't worry about empty shelves now. Everyone still seems out of business when it comes to paper products though. Not sure why it's the one panic-item they can't get on top of.Back to meat, because House of Raeford supplies to a lot of restaurants, they've taken to parking tractor trailers around this area and selling chicken by the caseload ridiculously cheap to move product. The local news was reporting cars were lined up/people waiting 4 hours to get chicken where they were parked at the State Farmer's Market today.
I wanted to do something for my mailman and asked him yesterday what I could do. He said he needed hand sanitizer, so I'm searching for some. Any ideas where I can order some online?
Well, I ended up ordering some from a local distillery. It's coming in a can...https://www.newcastledistillery.com.au
I'm quite looking forward to seeing it!
Hmmm. Don't know how it would go for me ordering from Australia, but thanks, and glad you found some. Maybe I'll try making some.
In America, I expect pork products with be in demand and off the shelves soon, as a result of the Smithfield plant closing down. What is pizza without sausage or pepperoni to go with the mushrooms?Seriously, they closed down last week. A friend who used to live in Sioux City, SD told me the plant had 300 employees with the virus before shutting down.
As for hand sanitizer, my special gel should be available soon, but I guess NZ is worse than Australia, Scout.
Local news here in NC keeps reporting on different distilleries shifting to creating hand sanitizer, so you might want to check with distilleries around you, scout.As far as meat, I think we're a little lucky around here because NC has a sizable meat processing industry, so we're a little close to the source.
I can go to six different super markets all within a fifteen minute drive from each other and they can either be picked out or fully stocked minus Lysol products. I can never figure why some stores are picked clean and others not so much.
Thanks, Ian and JJ. I found some 62% hand sanitizer on Amazon which they say will be delivered next week. Hope to make my mailman happy. Shopped at the grocery store today for my parents and me, and the paper aisle was completely empty. Luckily, we have enough tp for now. I've started using cloth towels instead of paper, and using china instead of paper plates. Probably should have been doing this all along. No good substitute for tp though.
I went to the grocery store 2 weeks ago for some immediate milk, cream, bread. I did one trip to Target for laundry stuff, but have been avoiding "real" shopping. This month Amazon says my TP on subscribe and save is "delayed, but it's on its way." My order page doesn't show it's been shipped. yet, so we will see if Northern TP makes it here or not.
You guys are having trouble getting toilet paper? Really? It is not a problem for me. Only bleach and lysol products are not to be found. Pretty much everything else is around in greater or lesser quantities.
In NZ now the initial panic has settled a bit, everything you would usually find is there. I don't doubt there are some things that are somewhat unusual are absent, but I get everything I want now.
I haven't actually been to the shops for about a week, but we can pretty well get most things now. A friend told me that even toilet paper is back!
It is iffy around here on paper products - now I did go to one store the other day and they did have paper towels and TP. But there were limits on them. Could only buy 2 rolls of paper towels and 2 packages of TP which consist of 4 rolls to a package so I guess I lucked out with getting 8 rolls! Lol
Been out quite a bit the last few days it seems, and stores seem to be finally getting paper products in....except for TP. Not sure why it's the only paper product stores still can't seem to get some quantity on.And I've seen some mention problems with baking supplies, but around here, I haven't seen a problem with things like flour or sugar. I just went out and bought everything because I decided to make some cookies and brownies.
On the other hand, I think we can start to see meat disappear again with outbreaks in meat plants across the country lately...it's not just that one Smithfield plant in South Dakota.
i agree - meat will be the next TP My Northern TP was shipped by Amazon, coming from Texas. Will see if it shows up or disappears in shipping. Told my neighbor if I was out to grab it or it might disappear from my doorstep.
Just to thoroughly irritate people, no shortage of TP here :-)
Just had to rub it in, Ian :-) Thankfully, I always keep a stock of tp when I find it on sale, so I'm okay for the next little while. One nice thing at the grocery store where I shop - they reserve 8-9 am for old people to shop, and the store is fairly empty. I like that, and can find most of what I and my parents need. No chicken tenders this week, though.
Ian wrote: "Just to thoroughly irritate people, no shortage of TP here :-)"Yes, I can second that. We order from 'Who Gives a Crap,' and our five monthly order of a box of 48 arrived this week 🤷♀️
Well done, Leonie.As for hours, we have something similar here too Scout - for elderly and emergency workers. It does have the advantage that the shelves are restocked. Late in the day, if we had people buying 48 rolls of TP in a go, I imagine the shelves would be empty in the evening too.
On our local Community Facebook Page, people put up pictures to show whether there's toilet paper in.We started ordering from Who Gives a Crap about three years ago. I have to say I'm pretty happy we did, as it's been one thing we haven't had to think about.
Mind you, it all comes in a big box that says 'You have a nice bum.' Bonus smiles!
Ian wrote: "Just to thoroughly irritate people, no shortage of TP here :-)"It is what it is.
We still have a rice shortage here though and I was wondering if everyone is still experiencing that as well where you live. It is odd how rice and TP are hard to keep around. Also no hand sanitizer at all in stores and pharmacies.
The shortage of hand sanitizer has an obvious reason - before the virus, very few people were using it, so manufacturing, including packaging, cannot keep up. For some reson, toilet paper is a panic item.Yes, Nik, I recall going into a "supermarket" (???) when I was in the old USSR - I could hardly see anything but empty shelves
Marie wrote: "We still have a rice shortage here though and I was wondering if everyone is still experiencing that as well where you live. It is odd how rice and TP are hard to keep around. Also no hand saniti..."
Seeing it to some extent here. Some stores can't get any in, but Aldis has had some on the shelf the last few trips I've made. when this started, I thought about visiting an Asian market to see if they had any because they'll have several pallets of the 50lb bags during normal times, and I've wondered if the Chinese origins of the virus might scare people away from the Asian markets...
J.J. wrote: "Seeing it to some extent here. Some stores can't get any in, but Aldis has had some on the shelf the last few trips I've made. when this started, I thought about visiting an Asian market to see if they had any because they'll have several pallets of the 50lb bags during normal times, and I've wondered if the Chinese origins of the virus might scare people away from the Asian markets......"It is interesting to me that you mention Asian markets. here, there are no Chinese restaurants or markets open that I can find. I wonder if it is over potential attacks.
Thanks for the smile, Leonie :-)I hadn't thought about it until reading your post PPh, but most of our restaurants here are doing delivery or curbside pickup, yet the Chinese restaurants are closed. That's worrisome.
Not really. They may have decided that for the time being it is not worth opening. They may want to wait and see. Maybe they haven't got the delivery or pick-up options clearly available.
J.J. wrote: "Marie wrote: "We still have a rice shortage here though and I was wondering if everyone is still experiencing that as well where you live. It is odd how rice and TP are hard to keep around. Also ..."
Thank you J.J. on the info as we have an Aldis store not too far from where I live and I have been wondering about them. So I will have to check it out! :)
Ian wrote: "Not really. They may have decided that for the time being it is not worth opening. They may want to wait and see. Maybe they haven't got the delivery or pick-up options clearly available."Chinese in my town is almost all delivery. This is something else. I miss the food.
