It may be that I’m just hitting the stores on the wrong days, but the shelf for coffee that’s 100% Columbian is always empty.
On a side note: After widespread several electrical blackouts this summer, “canned heat” has disappeared.
This won’t affect me in the US as far as I can tell, but the UK has a CO2 shortage problem developing that’s going to hit food processing, since medical uses are naturally being prioritized.
Uh. Isn’t the news full of stories about how the Global warming process is because we have TOO MUCH carbon dioxide in the air? Can’t we just capture some of that instead of deliberately manufacturing more?
I hear using a mask kills you with carbon dioxide.
I’ve just started hearing about this as well. Would love to hear some UK dopers weigh in on whether or not they’re starting to see more shortages, and the degree to which this seems tied to the pandemic, Brexit, or neither/both.
If only. Pulling CO2 directly from the air (Direct Air Capture, or DAC) is a technology that is in its infancy, extremely expensive, extremely energy-intensive, and not done anywhere at scale. Maybe in a decade or two we’ll be supplying all our CO2 needs this way, but for now, we burn natural gas and capture its waste stream.
Tell that to green plants! They’ve been doing it marvelously for millions of years. 
Sure. But they’re still actually kind of terrible at it. Photosynthetic efficiency is typically less than 1%. We’re getting up into the 20s with solar panels. Biomimicry is hard (synthetic spider silk would be awesome!), and I’m not sure we could isolate a CO2 stream using artificial photosynthesis if we wanted to. But it doesn’t matter because we wouldn’t want to, because the efficiency would be awful.
In the past few months finding store brands of 375 mg acetaminophen tablets (brand name is regular strength Tylenol) was hit or miss. Now I can’t find it at all. The 500 mg is in stock, but the doctor specifically recommended 375 mg.
Regular strength Tylenol, 100 tablets, at $7.
When they were in stock, one store’s brand was $2.
I remember last March/April there was a bunch of news that taking aspirin or ibuprofen for covid symptoms could make the disease worse, so you should take acetaminophen instead. Immediately, every single shelf at every grocery store, drug store, and Target was devoid of all acetaminophen products. But I never heard any followups on that. Is acetaminophen really the only OTC painkiller you should take if you have covid symptoms? Are we still seeing a demand spike (or another demand spike)?
There is plenty of acetaminophen available on Amazon.
That doesn’t mean there’s not still a demand spike. Just that it’s not as extreme as March/April 2020, relative to supply.
Lucerne coffee creamers, especially my favorite flavor (Creme Brulee), have been in short supply at the Safeway stores in my area. Coffe Mate’s version is available on Amazon but $7 a bottle is too expensive for me.
At Walmart this evening, ramen was GONE (good thing I didn’t actually need/want any) and other areas, such as canned vegetables and soft drinks, were distressingly bare. They also didn’t have my car’s oil filter (Amazon came through for me on that one).
My squirrel urges are reviving. Something about the condition of that store had me thinking back to spring 2020.
IDK if it’s the shipping backlog off California or what, but on my grocery run today;
No regular plastic produce bags, the only ones were oversized heavy duty bags, maybe 2’ long. Odd to put 1 small broccoli crown in one.
Cat food! The shelves were almost empty. Does our cat food come from overseas?
Coffee. Odd “flavors” - no regular Colombian, just vanilla etc.
Not that it’s good for me, but I haven’t seen braunschweiger in the deli department (Publix, Florida) for months and months.
My cats prefer one particular kind of dry food. I haven’t been able to get it for the last month with my Kroger pickup. I had kept some in reserve but will run out of that this week. I finally ordered a 16 pound bag from Target which came today.
When I went grocery shopping on Sunday I was kind of horrified that the local grocery store was out of gallons of milk other than skim - there wasn’t a single gallon of whole, 1%, or 2%, of any brand. I’ve never seen that before, not even the day before a blizzard, so I understand your inner squirrel waking up.
I have been noticing that a lot of shelves are understocked. They’ll have the product, but not a full shelf of it.
For me it’s not one particular item, just the selection and quality of the item.
We eat a lot of broccoli in our house, and we’ve never had problems finding fat green crowns, but for the past year or so they’ve been pale, spotty, scrawny, and just generally picked over.
As far as sodas, the 2nd tier brands and flavors (not Coke or Pepsi or Sprite) seems to be pretty random as far as selection. I can’t find a diet ginger ale to save my life. One week they’ll be overstocked on root beer, next week strawberry soda, next week it’s all Big K Cola. Every store is now Aldi.
Ditto for me (Jewel/Albertson’s, metro Chicago) until last week, when there was one kind of liver sausage at the grocery. Plenty of sausages of various kinds, just no liver sausage. They’re presumably still slaughtering animals for those other sausages, so whither the livers?