The chips and snacks aisle in my local store has been looking pretty sad lately, with lots of large gaps. Haven’t been able to get any cheddar or regular flavor Sun Chips there for at least a month.
This gets on my very last nerve. As you say, it must be the bright idea of the marketing department: keep them here longer and they will spend more. Nope. I will get the bare minimum and forgo anything on my list I can’t get my hands on easily.
Yup. I really didn’t need X anyway. I’m not going to search for it while everyone is also lost during a freaking pandemic. It’s stupid, stupid, stupid.
Buttermilk is nowhere to be found. I know that folks do use it for baking and holiday recipes but it is still odd. I checked (one place) online and they are out of powdered buttermilk culture and also several sorts of mesophilic cultures. I sure hope this is just a blip because a world without cheese is a world not worth living in.
All sorts of strange little things. I was shopping yesterday and discovered the lack of anise seed, sphagnum moss, activated charcoal (I was trying to construct a little terrarium as a gift), and confectioner’s sugar. Also cod, fresh and frozen, which is a staple in New England, nowhere to be seen.
We are rebuilding a barn, and are relying on relatives and friends for carpentry help, there is no one else to hire. There are also unpredictable shortages of various kinds of lumber and electrical parts. Prices are also up and down, mostly up.
Belated cat food report from last week:
Dry cat food supplies still holding up pretty well. Canned cat food still clearly in short supply – some brands missing entirely, and significant gaps on shelves for other brands – but there’s more of it than there was the previous time I looked, and I was able to find a couple of things my cats will eat. And I may have misread that sign last time – while Tops still had one in large print saying ‘one per customer’ this time I noticed there was small print next to it saying ‘boxes of 12 or more’; so they apparently didn’t mean only one individual can to a customer, but only one case for the varieties packed in boxes of multiple cans. I bought six individual cans there (and more at a couple of other stores I also needed to go to anyway) and they didn’t make any objection.
What will be there next time I go shopping (I’m back to trying to do errands only once every three weeks) I have no idea. I’m probably going to try to order some of the missing-entirely cat food through my vet. in a week or two; they tell me they do get deliveries, but don’t always get everything they ordered.
Due to supermarket shelves being empty of giant pasta shells, we are forced to have homemade lasagna for Xmas eve dinner, instead of Mrs. J.'s famous stuffed shells.
It’s an enormous sacrifice, but one I’m willing to make in these troubled times.
Everything looked to be in great shape today…except the cat food again. I have never owned a cat and never will yet I now obsessively check it when I go to the market.
Googling tells me that the reasons are:
-more people are getting cats. But that would seem to me to mean that it’s more difficult to get a cat, not an immediate increase in the number of cats. Maybe kill shelters are doing less killing.
-Shortage of cans. But it’s not like flour where industrial use slowed down and home use increased so there was enough product but not enough small packages. There wouldn’t have been a big use of industrial sized cat food containers prior to this unless it’s a secondary effect of aluminum being in short supply which I don’t think’s the case.
-Shortage of raw materials or labor problems like we had for beef for people but that seems to have cleared up.
This appears to be a nationwide problem and obviously I am over thinking things.
Scored two boxes of big-ass shells, a case of caffeine-free Diet Coke and Saltines (which were also previously unavailable) yesterday!
Now Kroger is out of frozen hash browns patties, which can be endured only so long as my supply holds out.
I would hope the latter; but covid’s been going on nearly two years, and cats can increase in number pretty damn fast.
Many years ago, a sister of mine had two female cats. Cat A had kittens. Two months later, Cat B had kittens. By then, the sister had firm intentions to get both cats spayed – but she wasn’t quite fast enough. Two months after Cat B’s litter, and four months after giving birth to her own first litter, Cat A produced a second batch. All of the litters, IIRC, included 4 to 5 kittens each.
After that, my sister succeeded in getting them to the vet.
A few years after that, a housemate of mine came home with a kitten. She asked me how fast I thought she needed to get the kitten spayed? I looked at the kitten, thought she looked about four months old, and said I thought she had a while yet. Just under two months after that, said kitten, who may have been a bit older than she looked but must have already been pregnant when we had that conversation, produced two kittens; one of whom survived. (To 19 years and 5 months. I kept him.)
The shelters around here have at some points been short on dogs. They have not been short on kittens; though I have heard of some shortages in city areas during spring of 2020.
The increasing standard, especially with American shelters, seems to be pediatric neutering as early as six-twelve weeks/2 lbs weight. The older notion that it is better to wait until 6 months or more for developmental reasons has to the best of my knowledge been falsified by more recent research (they literally took multiple cohorts of kittens, neutered them at different ages and followed up on them for multiple years).
However there are still many individual vets trained under the older orthodoxy that still won’t do it until 22 weeks or later (one of my own vets for example). Which generally I think is fine as long as you have careful control of the access to your un-neutered pet 
.
I’ve heard the same. This incident occurred in the early 1980’s, though; and I hadn’t heard it then.
My vet won’t do it early, either. When trying to figure out why the vet wouldn’t consider it before six months, I did run across a paper that says that early neutering can affect the cat’s long bones (i.e. they might end up taller) by delaying growth plate closure.
Right, which is the opposite of the old objection that it could lead to stunted growth . Far as I can tell no one has ever turned up anything clinically significant related to that phenomenon. At least relative to cats.
Dogs it can be a different story and it seems to be very breed dependent. Some (but not all) larger breeds do seem to have higher risks of joint issues if neutered early.
Went out NYE shopping today and noticed a few shortages. Aluminum roasting pans are very hard to find, took 3 stores till I found the smaller size I was looking for. Our local Walmart was very short on the Frozen appetizers I like to get for our party. I managed but it was a compromise. Hawaiian Punch seems to be hard to find in the original flavor but that could just be a holiday shortage. Still no Surge 
I read a study that showed Rottweilers desexed early had a higher incidence of bone cancer. Then I read a rebuttal pointing out that early spay/neuter led to longer life expectancy and therefore more occurrences of cancers that happen late in life.
There is a lard shortage here.
I’ve been trying to teach myself how to make good refried beans. I’m older than Crisco and I remember how much lard stank, so wanted to avoid using it. I’ve finally given up and wanted lard but despite shopping at several places with a large Hispanic client base, we have started to believe everyone telling us that they can’t get lard and to try Crisco or bacon drippings.
Canned refried beans are easy to find or we can save the 79 cents and eat the substandard beans I’ve been making.
For lard, try Costco, if you’re a member. I saw four-pound tubs for ten bucks when I was there today.
Thank you for that suggestion. We are not members, but the folks who own the small Hispanic market a mile away buy their stock from Costco and are unable to get any. They also haven’t been able to source canning jars anywhere in town.
It seems fairly logical that different areas will have different localized shortages. When things break down, they don’t usually break all at once.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
Can you get pork that hasn’t had every bit of the fat trimmed off it?