Ooh, thanks for the note about cat stuff. I keep a decent-ish stock of stuff for me on hand (except dried beans. I have far, far too many dried beans on hand. Luckily summer means bean salads!)
Since my cats are particular about litter, I’ll likely pick up a decent-ish amount of that to have on hand along with food - canned and kibble.
No, we’re not beginning at all. 
We’ve been doing it for years, and maintain buffers of necessary supplies (food, water, money, meds, fuel, paper goods, etc.) in advance of shortages.
We use from those buffers day-to-day, and trips to the store are to replenish this backup storage. We were doing this long before Covid, and continued without personal disruptions, despite spot shortages in stores. Ditto for the Great Texas Deep Freeze of 2021.
The main challenge in this is maintaining a “coherent” supply (my wording for it). It makes no sense to lay in six months of food in a freezer while only having 6 hours of fuel for your generator. We try to keep amounts sufficient for a complete interruption of everything that flows into our household for at least 2 weeks. The biggest limitations are water and fuel, as the storage of these requires a large volumes, and can become dangerous or useless if not managed/replenished correctly. FTR: we try to stay months ahead on vital medications.
I’m heading back down to Lowe’s for another couple bottles of slow-release fertilizer, enough to last the potted/tubbed fig trees for the season.
Durn Iranians won’t keep me from having homemade Fig Newtons.
You meant “deflation”, not stagflation. Typically inflation occurs in response to a roaring economy. When US inflation took off in the late 1960s during a period of otherwise recession, they coined “stagflation” as a combo of economic stagnation coupled with inflation. Which conventional economic theory pretty well had thought cold not occur. until it did. That coincided with coining the Misery index (economics) - Wikipedia; the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates. While not exactly an economically valid computation, it sure had sociological and political salience.
But otherwise an excellent explanation. Thank you.
As to the OP: No; I don’t stock, nor do I stock up in anticipation of anything.
The reality is that unless you’re committed to an effort on the scale of e.g. @pullin or @Beckdawrek, or we are experiencing hyperinflation as @Al128 describes, you’re just fooling yourself falsely assuaging anxiety you have no legitimate reason to feel. Better to fix the problem at the root by addressing the unnecessary anxiety.
I am no longer taking I-294 back and forth to work. Not only will that save me $30 a month in tolls, it will more importantly save me quite a few dollars in gas. At 85+ MPH, I was guzzling fuel like a jet fighter but, at 35-50 MPH, I’m using a lot less and saving a lot of money.
I did stock up before the pandemic. I bought a lot of rice, dry beans, and canned fruit. We eventually ate everything except some of the beans. (Canned beans are so much more convenient than dry.) But we ate 90% of the beans.
I didn’t stock up on paper goods, but i had a case of toilet paper on the basement. Not because i was “stocking up”, but because I’m lazy and it’s easier to buy a case now and then than it is to buy it at the supermarket every week. (Yes, i use a lot of toilet paper.)
We top up supplies periodically and did so before COVID because we lived in an earthquake zone. We didn’t panic when COVID hit, and were then unable to find toilet paper. That won’t happen again.
What about those durn Americans? They are also blockading the straight. And you know, started this whole mess.
My larger point was directed at stocking up as an anti-inflationary measure. That’s silly at any likely rate of inflation.
Stocking up for necessities that may become temporarily unavailable is a sensible idea, given storage space. The problem is it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. 100 million people deciding “that’ll never happen again” will create the very shortage they hope to forestall.
If you’re somebody who always has e.g. 6 months of TP in stock, then keeping that stock up is fine. It’s the folks who normally buy it weekly then decide to buy 6 months = 26 weeks at once who are the problem not the solution.
Like many other older Americans, my wife and I downsized this year. Our new patio home is nice but the storage space is minimal. Our stock of bulky non-perishable items has been reduced to an absolute minimum. A six-pack of Kleenex is a boulder to work around. Filling the living room with boxes would be an option, but nothing foreseeable is going to cause hording on that scale.
And freeze-dried vegetables? Are there container ships full of broccoli stuck in the Strait of Hormuz?
And would it be a problem if container ships full of broccoli were stuck?
What would you then threaten your kids with?
At our ages? Disinheritance is about the only lever we have left. Until they counter with “Yeah, but we’ll pick your nursing home.” Curses! foiled again. 
Yeah, I realized that it’s simpler and cheaper to order a case off Amazon than to get it at the store when it’s on sale. And after pandemic madness, I keep an extra case stocked.
I’m actually not feeling any anxiety beyond the daily horrors of this timeline, and I’m naturally the kind of person who tries to avoid the whole “just in time” philosophy of supply, so adding somewhat to the usual stockpiles is no biggie.
I bought them before the whole Excellent Iranian Adventure kicked off, as I was embarking on experimenting with slow cookery, and freeze-dried chopped/diced veggies were a good investment because (a) I hate doing fresh veg prepwork, and (b) at the rate I, as a single person with a small appetite, would use fresh vegetables a lot of them would go bad and have to be tossed out before I got around to using them. I could use them even if I lost power since I have a gas stove I can light the burners on with a match.
I actually have a case of TP on auto delivery every four months from Amazon, primarily since it’s made from bamboo and none of the local supermarkets carry bamboo toilet paper, which I prefer.
If you haven’t tested this, you might want to. IIRC there are some modern gas stoves with an interlock such that they won’t flow gas at all in the absence of electricity. Clearly not a factor on an old stove, but how old is old enough just keeps getting older.
My view is that oil prices are bound to stay high for quite some time, and this is bound to be inflationary pretty much across the board. But not extraordinarily so, and not, IMHO, to the extent that requires any special stocking-up. In the past few days, for instance, Brent crude had a big drop from as high as above $114 to now well below $100.
I’d be more worried about shortages, like we had during COVID, but those are hard to predict and often result from impulsive and irrational hoarding.
Here’s a great example of the unpredictability of some price hikes and shortages. Who could have predicted that there would be a sudden run on – of all things – cottage cheese!
This all reminds me that I really need to get cracking on planting this year’s veggie garden. I have a ton of seeds and seedlings that I started indoors, but we had to replace some of the raised beds this year (the old ones collapsed) and they need more soil before I can really start planting. Also considering whether we want to do a CSA subscription this year, but there are a couple of weeks when we will be out of town so I’m not sure it’s worth it.
Don’t need to test my gas stove as (a) it’s well over a decade old, and (b) it’s worked fine being match-lit in previous power losses. The water works, too, and I have battery-powered lanterns, so I’m all good in that department.