I try to be a decent member of the human race. I have been pretty desperate for white vinegar. I need it for laundry, if I don’t rinse with it, I break out in really bad itches. Been looking since this shit started.
Last weekend I was picking up an Rx and figured, well, I’m gonna die anyway, so I picked up some other things. Then I saw it–White Vinegar, GALLONS of it. Zoom. There were 6. I wanted all of it, but girded my loins and only got 3.
Have you found your inner hoarder?
Good for you for not being greedy! Did you leave some TP too? 
I was a hoarder long before there was a show about it. The only differences between me and them are time, the fact that I’m not on TV, and I don’t have jars of urine or shitty diapers saved up.
When non perishable items go on sale at my usual shopping places I almost always buy significant amounts. I have the storage space, and generally have sufficient on hand capital to stock up on anything I regularly consume. I shop at Costco, and they sell TP by the bale. I happen to have bought a bale in December, while still having a pack in storage, and five rolls in the bathroom. I am not yet likely to run out of that, or paper towels. Rice, pretty much the same, and various types of pasta as well. So, I was, and generally am fairly well stocked up. Handsoap, shampoo, etc. are also on hand in sufficient amounts from on sale stock ups over the last year.
Things I ran out of? Oats. (big recall got me already in short supply.) Sugar, but that doesn’t seem to be a hordable. Was reduced to store brand flour, but I cannot really tell the difference. A big problem would be clean clothes, as I have no home washing machine. However, I also live entirely alone, and clothes are an option I can eschew. I am also running short of whisky and brandy. I might make a point of getting two bottles of each, once I venture out. Is the liquor store an essential service?
My little podunk grocery store had TP today, and it was huge success on my part that I didn’t pick any up. I bought some last week when Safeway had a dozen or so packages on the shelf because my mother was recently discharged from the hospital and can’t drive herself to the store. I’ve been picking up odds and ends for her. But, she didn’t need TP when I thought she did (my brother found some and brought her a big pack), so I put it in my closet. Which brings my total to… actually, lemme go count… ok. We have 70 rolls plus the half-used one on the wall. We’re averaging about 3 days per roll (4 of us in quarantine right now), so that’s about 7 months of supply for us.
And yes, I wanted more.
I actually started a thread about this a week or two ago. I’ve never been a hoarder but my wife is. She hoards knick-knacks and clothes and the other useless junk like the ones on TV do. However, we dont have garbage and trash lying around… just lots of useless stuff.
But now that we’re essentially housebound, I’m having a hard time not panicking about being cut off from daily necessities. I’m aware that if the manufacturing capabilities and the supply chain is disrupted to point that I can’t replenish my pantry for 6 months, I’ll have bigger problems than an inconvenient lack of bread flour. But that rational part of my brain isn’t really making itself heard. Right now I want to buy a 6 month supply of emergency rations (the freeze-dried Mountain House type stuff, crates of MRE’s, and the like) and squirrel them away in the garage. I won’t, because a) we don’t have the space, b) we don’t have the money, and c) my wife, despite her desire to never throw out old clothes, would murder me.
But I do plan to start accumulating some basic necessities and to keep at on hand at all times: 1) a month’s supply of non-perishable and frozen food, 2) at least 3 month’s supply of prescription medications [I have close to this already as I am a diabetic and – exactly once – I ran out of my meds and had to wait 3 or 4 days for the shipment to arrive in my mailbox. Never, ever again], and 3) probably 6 weeks worth of basic household stuff like laundry soap, shampoos and shower soap, feminine products, dish detergent, bleach, and the like. I may aim for a 6 month supply of all of the above.
I always thought hoarders were a bit wacko. I was a hospice worker doing in-home care for almost 15 years and knew more patients than I can count who had lived through the Depression. They all saved and hoarded all sorts of weird things like shoe laces and bread bags and and and… but of course the big thing was food. An elderly couple or single person would almost always have, if they lived alone, a big freezer packed to bursting with all manner of food, most of it years old and beyond freezer burnt. It always made my stomach crawl when I had to fetch something for them, which thankfully wasn’t very often.
Now I understand the mentality. And I’m very, very lucky in that at least for today, I’m still employed and therefore viewing all this from a position of privilege.
It’s really scary.
When I was taking my BA I lived in a tiny one-bedroom flat. The apartment had a laundry room. In the basement. And I lived on the fifth floor. And there was no elevator.
Not wanting to schlep my laundry up and down the stairs a couple times a week (and pay an exorbitant sum for the privilege), I bought a little hand-cranked washing machine that looked like a 5 gallon propane tank that spun on the horizontal. It worked really well. I bought a little spin dryer that looked like something like a motorized salad spinner, and that got most of the water out. Twice a week or so I’d spend half an hour washing clothes in the tub, and then hang everything to dry on a collapsible laundry rack. Everything would be dry by morning despite this being an old drafty flat in Portland, where it rains all winter long.
I still have all three of those items, even though they haven’t been used in years (well, I use the washer to do tie-dying every summer). I’ll probably never get rid of them, and this little adventure in plague survival has me convinced that’s the right choice.
I have a large hoarder gene. I have to be careful. I could be overwhelmed in about a week. I’m also OCD and I live with my stuff. As in, I don’t leave the house much and I like things tidy and stowed away. So I work on it everyday.
This whole crazy thing makes my hoarding gene buzz.
I’m happy I’ve stored away lots. My house is full of refugees. The food we go through is amazing. Not to mention other consumables.
I think we could happily be okay for 6mos or so. Not including milk and produce.
My produce needs will be met with my vegatable garden.
Milk is the big question mark. Were using evaporated milk for cooking. But the kids need fresh milk as long as we can get it.
I think we’ll be okay.
Part of me is a hoarder, pure and simple. But another part of me loves rigid organization, cleanliness, and precision, so anything I buy must be labeled/dated and stored in such a way as to stay clean and not get wasted.
These two tendencies kind of cancel each other out. So I’ll buy lots of something, but only if I can store it in a pre-determined spot devoted to that particular class of items, with easy stock rotation and little chance of waste.
Go out and milk that sow you’ve been whining about. 
If white vinegar turns out to be a magical sort of disinfectant for coronavirus, or if drinking it seems to become a cure, you may wish you had grabbed all six bottles.
I don’t think vinegar goes bad either, so it’s not like you’re buying it and won’t have a use for it later.
Username OP combo!
You can also make vinegar, but it apparently takes a bit of time - get a bottle of the apple cider vinegar with “mother of vinegar” and cheap alcohol. The mother of vinegar turns the alcohol to vinegar.
Kombucha is what you get if you start consuming the product halfway through the process.
You know those ramon noodle cup things? I eat maybe 4 a year. There are half a dozen in our pantry. I saw them on a grocery store shelf yesterday, limit 4. I had to have a serious talk with myself as to why I did NOT need more, but in the end I held strong.
Oddly enough, I had no desire to get TP (But did take a minute to stand there and admire the sight of TP on the shelves, 4 brands, only 2 of which I recognized.)
Its really odd how the mind works, my BFF has a well with wonderful crystal clear water. She has a generator and a hand pump for when she loses power. She was at the store and saw one lone case of water on the shelf and found herself actually reaching out to get it. (she left it on the shelf)
Lancia there is nothing wrong with keeping supplies on hand. While I personally think that 6 months worth is slightly excessive, 3 months isn’t out of line. Start keeping track of how much of what items your family consumes. Things like toilet paper, which last forever can be stored in random places (like under the bed). Buy food you and your family like to eat. Even shelf stable food should be rotated, but because you are buying things you like and use, this won’t be an issue. You can store a LOT of food in a 9 cubic foot chest freezer, but be aware if the power goes out, you are going to lose a lot of it. Most important of all, keep track of what you have and where it is. This will help in so many ways!
My grandmother was the epitome of hoarding. She didn’t save trash or dog poop or bottles of urine. She did a lot of home canning (my grandfather always put in a humongous garden every year), and those home-canned foods not only fed her family during the Depression, they traded extra food for other necessities. Even after her children were grown, had families of their own, and their kids had families, she was stockpiling food, clothes, linens, and “necessities.”
I have inherited my grandmother’s migraines, and her hoarding bug. There have been times I have wanted to keep something that was only “slightly broken,” and my sister would tell me, “Throw it away, Hilma!” (my grandmother’s name)
I have a pressure canner, a dehydrator, and my ULTIMATE purchase recently has been a home-use freeze dryer! It’s parked at my son’s house, and look out world, his hoarder gene has awakened!
scuffing toe “My name is VOW, and I’m a…hoarder!”
~VOW
~VOW, as usual you stun me. My Granny was named Velma. She has slew of kids. Never wasted so much as a pat of butter. Never bought clothes. Made her own. We bought her 100s of dresses and nightgowns. When she died they were all in her closet, never worn.
She preserved or canned everything. They lived on a chicken farm. She canned whole chickens in 1/2 gallon jars.
Daddy used to call me ‘Velma’ when I got all silly about saving wrapping paper or bows.
Good times.
VOW: I hope you get a kick out of this. For quite some time now, I’ve subscribed to a (non-extremist) “prepper” site: AVOW, as in Another Voice Of Warning.
I thought I’d check out a place with such a COOL name.
Alas, I got “Internal Server Error.”
~VOW
Okay I fiddled around and eventually accessed AVOW. I would love to look around, but, alas it is private, members only.
And I wouldn’t be comfortable joining an LDS site.
Thank you anyway.
~VOW
My hoarding instinct isn’t “heretofore unknown”. I’ve had it all along, and come by it honestly, from a parent who grew up in the Depression and another one who almost didn’t grow up at all for lack of food at one point in his childhood.
They kept it under control (except to some extent near the end of my mother’s life when she was starting into dementia) and turned it into something useful; I try to also. I grew up in a large house out in the country, and do so now: daily errands would be a waste of time and gas, and there’s plenty of storage space. Makes more sense to buy extras of things on sale; and I’m much happier knowing I’m well stocked and don’t have to go into town on any specific day just because I ran out of something. Anything that stores well (and that includes in two chest freezers) gets its backup item(s) replaced well before I run out of the one that I’m using, just on general principles.
I had, right before things go really weird, mostly by coincidence done a routine stockup run in a city about an hour’s drive away that I usually only get to once every month or two. As things were starting to get somewhat weird I got extra on some items, in particular on cat food, over the usual stockup amount, which would in any case have been enough to give me a couple of months’ worth on hand. A few days later I did a local run and also got extra (there still being plenty in stock locally) of cat litter and a couple of other things.
I wouldn’t ordinarily, on that run, have bought kleenex, because I already had my normal number of backup boxes. I had to stop myself from buying more anyway, and might have done so if there had been a lot on the shelves, but they were almost out. When I went to get potting soil, I had to stop myself from getting eggs, which they had some but not a lot of. Spring has come and my neighbors have eggs. I knew they’ve got eggs, I’d been talking to the neighbor (out in the fields, at a safe distance) the day before the trip. I did get a backup jar of honey. They had plenty of it, but realistically I don’t expect to need that jar of honey for several months. Honey keeps forever, and is one of the items I usually get a backup of shortly after opening the previous backup, but – yeah. The hoarding impulse keeps trying to go into high gear, right now.
I screwed up.
Went to the grocery store today to get, among things, hardboiled eggs. They come in blister packs of two, and my dogs and I really like them. The shelf where they sit had a basketful, so I grabbed 10 packages. Normally I get 8 to 12, so this was a typical load for me.
When I was going through the cash, the checkout girl let me know that I probably wouldn’t be able to get that many next time. It never even occurred to me that I was taking too much. There was no sign specifying a limit, like there are for many other items, so I just proceeded as normal.
Now I just feel like a dumb greedy shit.
And yes, I know I could theoretically boil them up myself, but I haven’t seen the top of my stove in at least a decade. Hoarder, remember?
“Stay the blazes home” - Stephen McNeil, Premier of Nova Scotia