My Wife bought a lot of canned soup and chili and stuff when this first started. And she slowly adds to it as COVID goes along. We don’t eat canned soup or chili, but I approve. If things go in the tank, we will be better off because of these purchases. When/if things settle down, we will donate it.
You also might find it useful for barter.
I know I’ve done a bit of bartering this year, because among my circle of friends one person will, say, find X at a store but not Y, but I’ll find Y but not X.
And yeah - if things really get dire (and let’s hope they don’t) you could definitely use it for barter as well as to eat yourself.
It did occur to me that we really didn’t panic-buy or hoard much of anything early on.
But we have sort of steadily been building up stocks of non-perishable stuff since then, in expectation of some sort of restrictions or lock-down this fall or winter. So for example, we have a couple of bricks of yeast and about 35 lbs of flour, as well as a bunch of sugar also. (my wife has always been a baker; we went INTO the lockdown with about 25 lbs of flour and a pound of yeast without panic-buying at all)
What a ridiculous idea!
Libby’s brand canned corned beef. I picked up a couple of cans while stocking up on backup canned goods during the height of the panic buying. The Mary Kitchen stuff is okay with fried or poached eggs, an old relic of my childhood. I figured how much difference can there really be?
Turns out that for me it is almost completely inedible. A texture issue for the most part - it’s like really runny sludge. Instead of a nice, dense sludge which is what it should be 
.
That’s a shame about the peanut butter! It most likely would have been good for quite some time. Before the pandemic even started, I bought 2 gigantic jars of PB from Costco (I’d have preferred to buy less, but that was the only size available). It took me 18+ months to get through it, but it was fine. It never even occurred to me to look for an expiration date; my nose, eyes, and tastebuds are the best guide.
@bump: I don’t know what kind of climate you live in, but I would monitor the flour if I were you and possibly freeze/give away some of it if you can’t go through it within a few months. Unlike peanut butter, flour does go noticeably bad in less than a year. I learned this the hard way when I couldn’t buy decent flour locally in Egypt and so stocked up on Gold Medal from the US. I stored it well-wrapped under nice dry conditions, but it still acquired a weird taste as it aged and I ended up having to throw a lot out. These days I still buy large quantities of flour, but I only leave a single canister at room temperature; the rest is stored in the fridge or freezer.
To answer the OP’s question, I don’t regret any purchases. I’ve been bulk-buying for years so I’m pretty good at it.
The only thing that perplexes me is a giant jar of artichokes. A friend requested that I get her some artichokes at Costco, so I bought them for her a few months ago. Like many Costco items, the jars were sold in packages of two. She only wanted one, so I kept the other. I don’t want to open it until I feel motivated to eat the contents, which hasn’t happened yet as artichokes are not something I ever use in cooking and certainly not something I crave eating straight (ideas for using them up welcomed!).
I started a thread about that a long time ago for that exact reason: Costco-size jars of artichoke hearts. Maybe there’s something useful in it: Help me use up jarred artichoke hearts! Hopefully new recipe ideas have come out in the last 10 years.
Thank you, needs coffee! That thread was better than anything I’d found through a random Google search.
Yeah, this. I’ve never seen peanut butter go bad, ever. Going bad in less than a year? No way. Either they fell for a mostly fake “Best Before” date, or US peanut butter is very different from that found in Canada.
In fact, I’ve been specifically buying extra peanut butter every time I see it on sale, because it’s a pretty well-balanced food, that I like, that basically never goes bad.
the way has I’ve been told how to tell if PB is bad is if there’s oil on top of the jar take a spoon and skim some of it off and if it smells or tastes strange it’s no good …if there’s no bad taste or smell you can just stir it back up
I’ve only ever seen oil on top in those “organic” type peanut butters that don’t use emulsifiers. I ain’t eating that crap! Kraft Smooth or GTFO!
Regret is too strong but, had I known in that middle of March shopping trip what I know now, I’d have probably not bought the 5 pound bag of medium grain rice. I just don’t cook rice that often but it was all I could find in the otherwise rice-free store. I’ll eat through it but it’s been a bit of a pain to store in the meantime.
We go through it fairly quickly, between biscuits, bread, pizza, cookies, tortillas and all the other stuff we bake/use it for. We got a little bit more than usual, but we’ll still go through it fast enough.