My brother, thinking ahead to Thanksgiving, grabbed the last 4 boxes of Stovetop Stuffing off the shelves at our local grocery.
I found Minute Rice cups on the shelf today, which was epic because I’ve been checking every store every time I’m out for the past three months with no luck.
The didn’t have many, about a dozen - and I took 6. I think this is one of those things that they just don’t get enough of so they fly off the shelves as soon as they’re stocked and I just lucked out today.
This is one of the things I’ve been slowly stockpiling over the past 3 months because they were out of stock so often this spring. I’ve amassed several now, though never buying more than 2 packs at a time so others get a fair shot at them too 
The strangest thing I’ve found in short supply the past 6 weeks or so is bacon egg and cheese biscuits. Too bad I don’t like sausage, because sausage egg and cheese biscuits are still plentiful.
I went to the market to day for the first time in over three weeks. The TP aisle had lots of gaps but there was still plenty of name brand stuff. There was a ton of flour and baking items. Pretty much everything was available. Most of all, the desperation and weirdness of April wasn’t there.
Big Lots near me had some paper products, but they’re plainly getting hit. Very busy in there, too, with lots of gaps in OTC meds (I was looking for Dayquil-clone, felt their price for the name brand was a bit excessive, no store brand available).
Horribly heavy traffic during what erranding we did, even allowing for it being a Saturday afternoon.
You know, if it gets bad again, maybe we should shop for each other 
Back in spring, I shared with co-workers and such who were having worse luck than I was. I could be talked into helping other board members. 
Diet Sprite seems to be in short supply nowadays. I’ve tried to get it from our weekly Wegman’s order for over a month now - and no luck. They keep trying to substitute Diet Seven-Up. Nope, nope, nope.
No clue if there are paper shortages: we have an excess of toilet paper around the house thanks to Amazon’s subscription service… and we use relatively few other disposables nowadays.
No issues with our weekend grocery run on Saturday - everything we wanted was available, though it did look like they were starting to get thin in some areas. And of course, Costco is out of paper products and lysol/clorox wipes.
Gov. Inslee has announced a number of new restrictions going into effect tonight and tomorrow night, so I think the panic buying is more related to that than any election-related fears.
Not a shortage, per se, but USPS delivery times are getting bizarre.
I had an Amazon delivery delayed a few weeks ago, and ultimately cancelled. That wasn’t USPS-related, it was strictly Amazon-internal. They said “oops, lost”, I cancelled, and re-ordered, and got the replacement with no issue.
So last week when a couple of things I ordered (computer cables… long “give a mouse a cookie” story behind them). I wasn’t too worried when they didn’t arrive “on time”. I ordered them on Wednesday evening. Supposedly they were to arrive Thursday evening, but I wasn’t surprised when they did not. Friday evening, though, one package arrived, and the other said “running late, should be there Saturday”.
Well, it’s Monday and the other package hasn’t arrived. USPS has had it in their hands since 5:46 AM Friday - at the local post office branch. Tracking shows no movement since then, beyond “In Transit, Arriving Late: Your package will arrive later than expected, but is still on its way. It is currently in transit to the next facility.” (as of yesterday).
Now, I’m normally a big fan of the USPS. You can get a physical document sent cross-country in 3 days, for the cost of a first-class stamp, and while delays happen, they really are not the norm. And I recognize that things are really up in the air what with political vent redacted. But having it in their hands for 3 days now seems… excessive.
And I just know that if I reorder the cables (total value less than 10 bucks), this package will arrive. Amazon is likely to basically shrug and say “oh well, keep them”, but in case they don’t I don’t want the hassle of returning them.
No Mucinex capsules in our store.
Also no Diet Coke, no Hungry Man frozen Mexican dinners, no starlight mints (my Mother’s favorites).
Went to Cabela’s yesterday to buy some cold weather gear. Decided to wander to the ammo aisles and buy a few boxes for the range.
I’m an old saw, been shooting since the 60s and consider myself knowledgeable about guns/etc. There were just a few boxes on the bare shelves and they were calibers that I had, literally, never heard of in my life.
Stopped at the pharmacy today and hit the paper goods aisle on the way out. It was full, but had 2 items/person limit. I didn’t need much so it wasn’t a problem.
Canada is getting worse but has been well supplied for awhile. I have learned my lesson and replenished my stock of wipes, yeast, flour and so forth.
I don’t usually use wipes, but i thought they’d be handy for my mom. BIL was doing a Costco run, so I asked him to pick some up. Nope. None there.
The Winco I visited looked like it had been getting hit, but I wasn’t seeing much in the way of bare areas. They even had Lysol-brand wipes (didn’t buy any, didn’t need them and wasn’t enthused about mango hibiscus scent), but no disinfectant spray (backward from normal for that store lately).
There was a run on firearms and ammo in the lead-up to the election.
When we got warning that we would be put in “Stay at home” status and businesses were closing, my first thought was to go to my hairdresser and buy her out of the hair products I used. I bought her out of all of the locally made goat milk soap and lotion she had. I then went to the local dispensary and bought all the weed I could.
After we unloaded my essentials (if I’m gonna die, I wanna do it clean and stoned, OK?!?), hubs noticed that he was a little low on ammo. All of the gun dealers in Prescott Valley were sold out of everything because people in Phx were flooding to rural areas and buying up everything in sight.
Hubs saw that a certain gun dealer in Prescott was open and had the ammo he wanted, so we got there half an hour before open. It was cold and drizzly and he was able to be first in line so he was all happy. I wasn’t standing in line, but hung out in the rain and listened to people.
Most folks in line didn’t seem to have a lot of anger management skills. There was a very entertaining shoving fight between a couple of guys who got to the end of the line at the same time.
When hubs came out holding 2 very recognizable gun boxes people in line swore at him because they were afraid he had bought “their” guns. I swore at him because we already have a fully stocked armory and he said he was just going for ammo which was still low.
Right good luck finding 9 mm ammo. Also supplies for reloaders are getting harder to find.
Our paper towels and toilet paper supplies are getting a little thin at the store. We reinstituted a 1 per customer limit. Not sure if this is a shortage in the works, or just a slow supply right now.
I was told our coca-cola supplier has cut down runs to supply our fuel station. We keep having outs there because they aren’t sending us enough product. It’s not like there is a soda supply shortage - there’s plenty of the plain cokes all over in stores, we just aren’t getting the deliveries to fuel. And no, we can’t just take stuff from inside - the single sale bottles are different UPC’s than the multi-packs. You can’t just take a six-pack apart - the UPC won’t ring up the individual price, but still the 6-pack price.
The other day I’m on a register and a customer comes up with their load, and plops onto the belt a package of 6 tubes of disinfecting wipes wrapped in cellophane. Well, that’s not a single item bundle purchase. That’s the packaging for delivery from the vendor. Turns out she had pulled it off a stocking cart before it was put out on the shelves. I had to say no, open the pack, but I did give her two. Apparently she wasn’t the only one, someone else mentioned it to me today.
I looked when I got the chance and someone had graciously opened the packages on the cart so customers could pull individual packs until they could get a stocker over there. I was going to do that myself if needed.
Grocery store today for the first time in three weeks.
News this morning said that Tops was putting restrictions on how much of a number of things people could buy; but the Tops I went to only had limit signs, that I noticed, on the rubbing alcohol shelf – on which there was no rubbing alcohol. They did have plenty of hand sanitizer. Gaps on the toilet paper shelves, among others, but a fair amount of toilet paper there. There were a number of gaps on the shelves, as there have been since all of this started, though not always in the same places and not usually all of a particular sort of product. I wanted to see if they had any less-toxic toilet bowl cleaner, because I didn’t want to go to the store several counties over where I usually buy that; but not only did they not have any of the less-toxic versions, they had almost no toilet bowl cleaners at all. That was the only thing on my list that I couldn’t find at all, though; and I do still have some.
Tractor Supply, for the first time I’d seen, was out of the plain non-clumping cat litter. I bought one bag of clumping to find out if the cats like it. I’ve got a fair amount in stock but don’t want to get low on it. They were also out of some, but not all, of the cat food I usually buy.
Ummmm, I was talking about the last stay at home order in Arizona. The one that ended back in April and will probably never come back as long as Ducey is in charge. He’s already made Trump mad because Trump lost here, I’m sure he doesn’t want to risk getting in more trouble by admitting that COVID is real.
9mm is still readily available here, but very pricey. Its much cheaper to order online and have it delivered. The UPS guy hates us, but so does the USPS contract delivery person and FedEx guy because we have fully embraced shopping online.
The one shelf stable thing we haven’t been ordering online is kitty litter. We will have to start, because we haven’t found the “right” litter for a several weeks and know that getting the “wrong” one will cause issues.