I had lunch with a friend the other day, who was telling me that his wife has been doing a lot of jigsaw puzzles during the COVID lockdown, and has gone through her entire collection. He said when she tried to get more, they were either unavailable or the prices had skyrocketed.
I also have an old college buddy who is a graphic artist, who has a line of jigsaw puzzles. I sent him a message a while back asking where was the best place to buy his puzzles online, because I wanted to be sure he got his cut. He said he had just signed a new contract with Springbok right before the pandemic, and that they were having trouble keeping up with demand.
Just curious if others have run into a similar issue? We have a locally owned toy store here in town that has a large selection of jigsaw puzzles but I haven’t been there since the pandemic started, so I don’t know what their stock levels and prices are like these days.
And yeah, jigsaw puzzles have been a popular way to pass the time for a lot of people. It’s no surprise that demand would be up. The making of jigsaw puzzles, meanwhile, would presumably be considered non-essential, and so would be at best working with a fraction of their usual staff. Increased demand and decreased supply naturally means shortages.
We have jigsaw puzzles stored upstairs like some people have toilet paper. All were bought pre-pandemic, but I think there are at least a couple years worth should the shortage last that long.
Yup. The Meijer that I shop at has a “this item is in high demand, limit 2 per person” sign in the puzzle aisle, which is usually 95% empty. The only puzzles left are the 250 piece kid puzzles.
Yup. The Meijer that I shop at has a “this item is in high demand, limit 2 per person” sign in the puzzle aisle, which is usually 95% empty. The only puzzles left are the 250 piece kid puzzles.
That’s what I told my friend! I was thinking of something like those “little library” boxes that people put in their yards stocked with books. Take one or leave one. With my luck though, all of mine would get stolen.
I was hanging out at one of my friendly local gaming stores in the Pittsburgh area on March 7th or 14th. The store - Games Unlimited - sells boards games, some RPGs, and jigsaw puzzles.
They had a booming business as people were stocking up after seeing shutdowns coming. They sold out of the board game Pandemic (but not Pandemic Legacy…) and they told me they had business equal to or larger than Small Business Saturday. It looked like there was a run on the jigsaw section. So many going out the door.
We’ve been pretty heavy into jigsaw puzzles for a couple of years, so we had at least some supply, but we’ve run out of virgin ones and are now re-playing some.
Our preference is for either Ravensburger or Buffalo Games and we typically used Barnes & Noble stores to purchase, but no joy now.
While retail is slowly opening up again at this point we could still make a list of items that had shortages on them and became “hard to find”.
From just observation and word of mouth I’ve seen:
-Chest freezers (people want to bulk store food)
-Puzzles (from above)
-Nintendo Switch and Oculus systems
-Bicycles (everyone looking for outdoors social distance activities)
-Free weights (people still want to exercise with their gyms closed)
-Mother’s Day carry-out food (a lot of national chains systems were overwhelmed and a lot of people were left empty handed (Red Lobster, Benihanas, etc.)