If I make it out of this alive, I will be on my 600 pound life. I set a goal for myself and I’m going to achieve it.
With all the warehouse stores around here, I buy TP in the case lot quantity. This weekend the jungle delivered a case (small one) of TP. [only 27 mega rolls] Food wise, the freezers are full, the fridge is full, and the pantry is kinda full. I lived through the blizzard of '78, and the storms of '15, so I know to keep backups–now I’m in a Ye Olde Fart community of 1400 or so–and it’s 6 miles through woods to get to the nearest source for milk that doesn’t have legs. Only reason I have to stick my nose out the garage door before June is milk and dialysis. I have at least 2 months of meds.
Why do you think the food pantry would want your expired food? That’s not really how food pantries work.
Shelf life of vegetable oil is two years. After 18 months in your pantry it still has 6 months to go, and most food obtained from a food pantry will probably be consumed fairly quickly.
Incorrect. it’s one year.
There are none. There is plenty of food. There is one reason to stockpile- to reduce shopping trips. So, two weeks of grub on hand= less trips.
Yes, the reason for empty shelves is= idiots.
Sure, have that ten day earthquake supply, but make sure you have water also.
I’m not convinced that 10 days is an adequate supply. Hell, I usually have 10 days of groceries in the pantry when we aren’t plagued by… well, plague. I have two teenagers in the house and, up until a couple weeks ago, both my wife and I worked. When we got home we were exhausted from long days and didn’t want to do any extra shopping. I hate grocery shopping, it takes a while even doing it weekly. If I have it my way I do grocery shopping monthly for non-perishable and freezer stuff, and a weekly shop for the fresh stuff.
As I noted in my OP, one reason to keep more than a week’s supply of food and household goods is for medical emergencies. I know there’s a couple of Dopers who had strokes fairly recently, and I can’t imagine having to deal with rehab and whatnot while worrying about how I’m going to do my grocery shopping.
Remember, “Luck favors the prepared.”
I went to Costco today and there was a YUGE queue outside the front entry. Employees were trying to keep people 6 feet apart, but with the big carts everyone had it wasn’t really an issue. I decided not to wait in line, because it was cold and raining and fuck that shit.
So I went to Safeway. They were fairly well stocked, there were only a few shelves that were bare. The pasta section was only half stocked, and of course the paper product isle was mostly empty. But there was TP! Actual choices, too! I didn’t need any, but I did need paper towels and Kleenex, which they also had several packages of different brands of. It actually felt almost like normal, albeit with a much reduced quantity.
I like to keep backup inventory on hand in case of tight financial weeks or other need, and I’m now happy that I do that. Found a few areas where I’d let supplies run down too much, such as Lysol and disinfectant wipes (the latter, I mostly use at work), so I now know where some restock needs to happen when things normalize.
It’s still a huge challenge in my area to get anything disinfectant, but paper goods and foods seem to be recovering to some extent. Pet supplies have not been a problem, so even if I had not by sheer coincidence stocked up on cat food shortly before things went nuts, I’d have still been able to keep the Princess fed and her box in decent sanitary condition.
We are preppers. While I thought that having a 6 month stock was a little overkill (3 months, max), we have the room and have been pretty happy with our supplies. We have been able to help friends and family out, mostly without gloating.
Running out today and buying up 6 months worth of supplies would be hoarding and pretty inexcusable IMHO. Slowly building up a good supply during times of plenty is the smart way to do it.
My suggestion is to always buy things you actually like and want to use. Rotate your stock, its wasteful to allow things to go bad and have to pitch them. Keep track of what you have and where it is. If you like Spam, buy a couple of cans every time its on sale. If you don’t like Spam, imagine how it would be if you were quarantined with nothing but Spam to eat.
One of the things that surprised me about this was stores running out of kitty litter. We still have enough to last a couple more months, but its now on my list of things to count instead of estimate.
I am absolutely stocking up on canned food and dry beans.
I put the beans in the freezer. If the power goes out, they are already-preserved dry beans. They will serve.
I am eating these rations. A can of tuna here, a can of chili there. I have cut my expenses dramatically over the past year. Paid off the car. Paid off the credit card and other loans. Cancelled the cable TV. I just refinanced, so I am not even paying a mortgage for 2 months. Restaurants used to be how I liked to spend my money, but now it is cheap food from cans. I can hunker down and just pay the mortgage for many, many months. I am secure as of now.
I bought a 12 pack of Cottonelle toilet paper at the grocery store the other day. Almost enough to wipe my ass with!
Actually, what I heard was the reason for empty TP shelves is that because no one is going to work, demand has shifted from commercial grade TP (that single ply stuff in your office) to the consumer grade. Apparently they are completely different supply chains.
That doesn’t explain why it happened before the lockdown, and also the absolute panic over it. I think that’s why it sustained for so long, though.
Among the many things I miss about about normal times is that I can’t always have just whatever I feel like for dinner. Canned goods are kind of an emergency backup in case of power failure or the fridge breaks down; the freezer is full but that stuff will keep more or less indefinitely, so lately I’ve been keeping an eye on the expiry dates of refrigerated prepared foods and sometimes have to have whatever is approaching the end of its shelf life instead of what I really feel like having.
This is all in the interests of minimizing the number of shopping trips. Despite some positive projections of curve-flattening in this area, one has to be prepared for things suddenly turning worse and having to start relying on curbside pickup or delivery for food supplies, which sometimes involves long delays. I’m just glad that my faithful car had some significant preventative maintenance recently and remains faithful and reliable; now is not a good time for either car repairs or car rentals.
No, it’s just silly panic.
I mean, the rush for hand sanitizer- sure that I understand. But no real shortage of TP.
If I want a 3 months supply of non-perishing stuff I must eat some of it during their shelf life? Say the stuff is good for 10 years, that means I have to eat a day’s portion every month? How does that work? You eat 3 meals from your non-perishing stash every month?
If you put stuff in a freezer you also have a 3 month supply of fuel for the generator? How does that work? You have a 3 months supply of water?
I’m curious how this stuff works irl.
Depends. I have a block of emergency ration that I just throw out and replace. I have regular stuff that I use all the time that I replace as I take it out of the pantry; I don’t wait until I’m on my last box of pasta before I buy more.
Disasters come in different flavors. I would struggle to make it three months without electricity. Three weeks? No problem.
You are over thinking this, its really not that complicated. I don’t like tuna, so I don’t buy tuna. There is none in my stash, so I don’t need to worry about rotating or eating it. I do like canned chicken and use it often. I have a good supply of canned chicken in my stash. I don’t have a second supply of canned chicken in the pantry, I use it from my stash and when I open a case, I buy another one. The chicken is being rotated, I don’t have to worry about counting things to be sure that I’ve eaten enough chicken in a given month.
Everything we have stashed is stuff that we use on a daily or weekly basis. We don’t have a second pile of food and stuff behind locked doors, we just have a whole lot of food available at any given time.
The last time I actually stepped foot into a grocery store was on March 10. We ran out of fresh produce and milk in the first week, but that is replaced at a small outdoor farmer’s market. We are starting to run low on paper products (like many people, we didn’t take into consideration how much we used when we weren’t at home.) We only have 60 rolls of TP and 5 rolls of paper towels left. I will confess to giving a whole bunch away, though.
Its not that complicated, once stocking up becomes habit you don’t really think about it very much at all. Until the world ends and nobody has TP, then its really hard to not gloat.
It has taken many tries over many weeks, but we were finally able to order some real TP rolls (not Chinese tissue-packet style) online for a non-exorbitant mark-up. In our community, even if a grocery has TP, they won’t include it in curbside pickup orders, so our supply has gotten low. Silly me for not buying more at the first intimations of lockdown.
Local growers are gearing up for drive-through service for veggies and fruit, instead of the usual farmers’ markets. We can a variety of products every year, so are geared up and trained for doing it; we should be able to put up tomatoes, jams, pickles, and peaches for the winter, among other things. I would bet that there will be a run on canning supplies at some point, but we’ve already got jars, lids and the other paraphernalia that goes along with canning. It gives some piece of mind in case this thing comes for another shot at the title.
I live in Queens, NYC. The Epicenter of the Epicenter.
We started this +/- 6 weeks ago. Freezer filled with double-wrapped meats, all cut down to single or double dinner sized portions.
We’ve got roughly 40 bags of various dried beans and combos of beans.
Two large ( 25 lb ) bags of rice. One Basmati, one Jasmine.
Few bags of flour and a bread making machine. Packets of yeast, which I bought the first day I started shopping with this in mind. For the last 3 weeks at least, when this comes up in Zoom visits or email chats, NOBODY can find yeast. Not in NYC. Not in Bethesda, MD. Not in Bahstahn. Not in Thousand Oaks, CA. I’ve already mailed a few packets to friends.
Painkillers ( Advil, etc. )
Paper goods. Not insane hoarding numbers, but enough to know that if our supermarket closes, we’re good to go for a few weeks.
Why would I think the supermarket would close if those workers are “essential workers” ? Because when enough workers call out sick at once, they can not safely open the doors. Simple. Because when enough delivery route drivers call out sick there won’t be much on the shelves of any use.
Because the second waves is going to make this first wave look like a small inconvenience.
What game do we play in our house? "How Long Can We Make The Toilet Paper Roll Last?? "
So far we’re hovering at 7-8 days. 