Posted on 03/28/2020 8:02:18 PM PDT by thecodont
The coronavirus pandemic has transformed the country in just a handful of weeks. As Americans focus on the essentials—feeding our families and ensuring we have the necessary supplies to keep our households clean and safe—grocery stores and pharmacies have demonstrated just how crucial they are to a functioning society.
We’ve seen chains struggle with the challenges the current crisis presents. Some stores are instituting policies limiting the numbers of shoppers allowed in at a time, creating long waits to enter. Perhaps even worse, other stores are not, leaving their shops a free-for-all without adequate social distancing measures. Staples like flour and yeast, to say nothing of hand sanitizer and toilet paper, are proving difficult to find on shelves. Supply chains are taxed. And the conditions faced by employees vary wildly by chain, with stores developing new (sometimes controversial) policies around sick leave for the workers who have proved themselves essential, and often doing so on the fly.
San Antonio-based H-E-B has been a steady presence amid the crisis. The company began limiting the amounts of certain products customers were able to purchase in early March; extended its sick leave policy and implemented social distancing measures quickly; limited its hours to keep up with the needs of its stockers; added a coronavirus hotline for employees in need of assistance or information; and gave employees a $2 an hour raise on March 16, as those workers, many of whom are interacting with the public daily during this pandemic, began agitating for hazard pay.
(Excerpt) Read more at texasmonthly.com ...
Ping!
HEB is THE best. A Texas treasure.
So thankful to have them in my part of the state.
Thanks for posting.
You’re right, Jane!
I miss HEB.
Yep. I miss my local HEB. They don’t have one near me where I am now. Hope they put one close soon.
TEXAS Strong!
I hope you get an HEB, soon, too.
I have friends/family who make HEB their first stop, when they come to visit.
Well, that was before CV :(
I can’t wait to get back to everyone visiting, again.
Glad I was an early hoarder back in late Jan.
Those in places without HEB will not understand how good they are. Saw it after Harvey and now this. Wal-Mart is not bad HEB is outstanding. But still can’t find yeast at either place. Don’t mind baking my own bread kind of like it but soda bread is getting old.
I was a early hoarder also. Started about 10 years ago. I gave my mother in law 6 weeks of food. Just went down to the pantry and filled up some bags and grabbed a bunch out of the chest freezer. I did go to the store for potatoes and onions though. Even the toilet paper came from the pantry.
HEB doesn’t appear to be in the North Dallas area suburbs. We have a central market but it’s near downtown. South Dallas seems to be covered ok. Stuck with Whole Paycheck and a few others that I don’t care for. Used to live in Kingwood so had one about 2 miles from me. That was nice.
Beer Bread - No yeast required.
3 cups of self-rising flour
3 tablespoons sugar
1 12 0z can of beer (at room temp)
Mix all together, pour in loaf pan, bake at 350 degrees for 45-50 min.
Every kid on Ebay did a better job on forecasting shortages than any MBA at Walmart Target or Kroger.
They let my family down when I needed them the most.
In my neck of Florida today Costco and Aldi had pretty much everything except TP and hand sanitzer/wipes/etc. Wally World is still a disaster zone. They really need to step up their game.
We have an Aldi, Fiesta, and El Rancho near us.
Aldi and Fiesta are doing a good job of keeping things in stock.
Take this with a grain of salt. Shoppers came out of Austin into the small towns and stripped the shelves bare, so HEB had to limit many items. They had to limit hours and even monitor how many cars can enter the parking lot. The system for resupply worked better this week, the only popular item missing at our HEB was eggs.
A friend of mine sent me a pic of the line outside of her HEB, near Wimberley, last week. It went all the way out of the parking lot, and onto the street.
I didn’t see ANY lines, like that, at any of our area HEBs.
Crazy!!
What a load of horse hockey. Just like they voted themselves the best store ever last month. Well, they certainly didn’t ask anyone in our town. Ours is c r a p.
HEB is the only grocer in our town and the next one over. Ours gets what other stores refuse to accept. Our store is nothing short of Venezulea shopping with empty shelves for years and years long before CV. Their fresh produce is half rotten. They usually never order what is in their weekly ads. If they do, they only get in one or two of the item just to say they had it but sold out. Yes, that is one or two if the advertised product. Once, they got in a package of 8 count tortillas for their weekly Meal Deal. No, that’s not a typo - 1 package, a single package and that was at the end of the sale. One bleepin’ package.
I have a small budget and buy only the basics. Even with that, I have never complete a grocery list. They haven’t sold pork ‘n beans or cauliflower for 20 years. You want olives? Sure, there’s one brand of canned black ones and one brand of jarred green ones. You want cheese? They have Kraft and store brand cheddar, mozz and sometimes swiss. The meat dept. is smaller than one wall of my bathroom so you come home with whatever is there. I’ve had to make what amounts to a drug deal just to get a package of frozen fish and the cashier and bagger called everyone over to see it.
It is normal to have another customer beg for one of the two gallons of milk in your cart because the dairy section is always out. “Oh, the truck didn’t deliver any.” And the meat person whispered to me the regular sliced shelf bread comes in frozen. Many packaging is damaged so you spend half your time sorting through to find cans that aren’t bent and boxes that aren’t already opened and sacks of potatoes that aren’t moldy.
Several months ago, they got all happy with Whataburger products. They’d have an entire row of Whataburger mustard. Uh, hello, we only have 12 short aisles and they pull that? Bet it was yet another product no other store could sell so we got stuck with it.
During the CV prep weeks before the shorter hours, they decided to redesign so shelves were empty, again, and aisles were blocked. That lasted for a month though they swore it would only be a week. BTW, I don’t see that they accomplished anything. Though now that everything is in a different aisle, they’ve taken down the web site function (which was brand new) that tells you if something is in stock and which aisle it’s on. That’s not very good when customers need to get out as fast as they can.
I’ve posted on FR how I found only one or two if many items at a time that were on my CV prep list and suspect they were old and were found hidden behind other products or in the back due to their exp dates. The one or two Asian sauces or the one lonely can of spinach or the three tiny little packages of cornmeal way at the beginning of any hint of CV. The bacon/cheese/condiment aisle was pretty much closed every time I went so had to reach around the corner when no one was looking to snag a store brand Velvetta toward the end of my shopping two weeks ago. Was only able to get 4 bacons in Feb. Hello, VenezuTexas. Boo on HEB.
LOLOL!!
You’re right about that.
Funny to see “essential” items are ALL on Ebay.
Glad I’m not having to shop, in the grocery stores, right now.
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