The world got crazier today.
Every single frozen item in 3 stores — gone.
I promised not to cuss 15 years ago (or so) but WHATTHE F’ing F????
But I did h-5 myself for scoring few boxes of kleenex (or similar). I had to tell everyone in line “I am NOT hoarding.”
To be fair they just laughed and said that “hey we are all doing what we can.”
FReepers — and I dearly love you all (and included an old FRiend here) — 3 rules to get us through this: kindness, patience and humor.
If you haven’t already done so, try to find out from a store employee when your desired item will arrive on a truck. Get there about when the truck arrives, and wait on the sales floor for the pallet or cart to be brought onto the floor. Then be conservative about how many units you take—maybe enough for a week or two, because the trucks will keep coming. Inside word from someone who works in one of the bigger stores.
Most of the food and paper products are produced here in the U.S.A. The grocery companies simply weren’t ready for an epidemic and didn’t want to bother with keeping the extra inventory in advance. Or maybe there’s a tax reason. Either way, they didn’t prepare.
But they’re trying to catch up, little by little, with what the producers can send to them. Two pallets of TP came to that big store yesterday, by the way. Customers hogged it all up within an hour or two (no limits at that store).
Other customers will need to wait for the next truck for TP, probably in another day (about every two days). That store gets other kinds of trucks without TP on them (4 or 5 trucks per week). How many trucks per week depends on the size of the store.
Here’s what bugs me. Maybe around 6 weeks or so ago, I advised FReepers to stock up for a couple of months. Said that stores would have a chance to order more and restock earlier.
Maybe that way, there would be fewer people in the stores, when the stores are very infected. The advice didn’t go very far. It was business as usual in the stores at least most of last month, if I remember correctly.
When most of the stores became somewhat infected, people mobbed those stores. Now the stores are more infected each week, and people are still crowding into them. That’s what I was hoping to prompt as many people as possible to avoid needing to be in those places now and after and to spur store managers to order more earlier and get more production going.
At the press briefing a few days ago, Dr. Fauci said that we’re about two weeks behind in the numbers of cases that we see as compared to the real numbers of cases. The numbers of cases can multiply an awful lot in two weeks, as we’re beginning to see.
Do you have a Brave browser? If so, you might be able to see the following map with numbers of cases without a subscription. Might even be able to see it with another browser (don’t know). The map is updated quickly from several sources.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html
Informing people to get them to do something good for themselves is far more difficult than herding cats.
Thank you for the ping! It’s so good to see you again. :o]
Thankfully, I’m fairly isolated where I am, now. I moved from NV about 18 months ago, and it was an adjustment to not be able to shop at 0400 wherever I needed to go, but at least here, the Walmart is 24/7 so I can do some shopping in the early hours, even though the store is almost five miles from where I live.
The last time I was there (a week ago) there was no TP and the paper products were in short supply. I don’t understand the panic and frenzy, but since I’ve been isolated for almost 30 years, it’s OK. I’ve learned to buy enough of whatever for a month, because I never know how I will feel.
As for friends, well, FR is where my TRUE FRiends and friends and family are, so isolation is only panic-inducing when the Interwebs goes down!
Yes, kindness, patience and humor are necessary, now, more than ever.