Could be related to this:
A rodent infestation at a Family Dollar warehouse has prompted the discount chain to recall a wide range of products sold at hundreds of stores throughout the southern United States.
Half my local supermarket shelves were empty the other day, but they were doing a remodel and had cleared out the shelves as they moved items, and hadn’t restocked them. Not a good look, but things will probably be fine in a few days.
Wow, interesting! The last few years Dollar Generals have popped up all over our area. Have they grown too quickly?
Just saw this:
Despite the fact that Dollar Tree and Dollar General are similar, they are two separate corporations
They’re nothing alike. Dollar General is like a small town grocery store. Not everything is a dollar (nor $1.25) – not even close.
The question for this purpose wouldn’t be whether the stores are alike, but whether they’re using the same warehouses. If they are, then a shortage at Dollar General might be explained by a problem with Family Dollar’s warehouses. But if they’re not owned by the same larger company – and it doesn’t look like they are – then that probably doesn’t explain it.
At least, not unless reading that story caused them to take a harder look at their own warehouses and they decided to get out ahead of similar problems –
Not personally at a store but I heard about a silly leadtime at work today. A vendor of ours makes an instrument with a control panel (the keypad and display) which has an optional in-use cover accessory. These covers are a piece of transparent material that’s sort of rubbery, probably silicone, and just sticks to the panel with friction or gravity and helps protect it in messy environments.
Orders placed today are projected to ship in SEPTEMBER. No chips or other electrical components, no moving parts, just a piece of floppy rubber, about 6×9 inches. I guess I’ll just recommend our customers use shower caps.
Grocery store tonight. Some stuff was hard to find in “regular” varieties (had to buy organic zucchini - which I ought to do anyway, so I can’t really complain). Still no saltine crackers! Well, they had store brand unsalted top saltines; the store I went to last week didn’t even have that.
Not specifically a COVID-related shortage, though I’m sure the general supply chain issues are not helping: there was a massive recall on baby formula and specialty feeding products due to contamination. Someone put out an appeal on Nextdoor.com for a family with a child who must be tube fed. His liquid food was all on the recall list and the company does not have any more in stock.
Oh, and they had bottled water, though it was a bit picked over. I was able to restock our distilled water stash - must remember to put a couple gallons in the back of the bathroom so we use the older stuff first. We have seriously thought about purchasing a home distiller (since we both use CPAPs) - but at a hundred bucks, minimum, plus the electricity cost, it’d be a very long while before that made financial sense.
Laserjet printers are in short supply. We have one that’s been backordered since October.
Prescott Valley Safeway Cat Food shelves:
The empty shelves are were the “regular” stuff is, Friskies, Meowmix and such. What you see are the more expensive premium and/or squeeze snack stuff.
Not looking forward to how ongoing and incrementally dire this thread could get. At a major franchise grocery store today, the detergent (laundry) aisle was shelled. A grocery clerk said they don’t expect to see fully stocked shelves again for another year, as things slowly trickle back in. Not a single grocery store in this city - indepedent nor franchise - have any breakfast cereal left. In every store, they’ll face up the few remaining obscure cereal varieties (Cocoa Krispies? Donettes? 
) to the front of the shelf, all the way down the aisle, one box deep, so that it looks just a little less bleak than if the shelves were, for the most part, empty. For the past two months now the squeeze has been put on mainly cereal for some reason. Asian foods sections in grocery stores have also been hit.
When I went to the grocery store on Saturday, the only thing I saw that they were out of was 2 liter bottles of Coke.
They seem to have fewer eggs than normal, but not that much fewer. One thing that is odd, though, is that you can get a half carton of 6 eggs for $1.35. If you want the extra large carton of the same brand with 30 eggs, that’s $7.48. So if you buy in quantity, you get 5 times the eggs for about 5.5 times the price.
And that’s not unusual – the best prices on eggs are usually the half cartons.
They have done this with other things, too. For example, a couple of years ago at the same store, half a dozen fresh ears of corn sold for a fair bit more than six times the price of an individual ear of fresh corn chosen from the same display of corn. For what it’s worth, the corn was picked in their own corn field that morning.
Not really a shortage but my mother wanted me to pick up some bacon for her and they were selling it $5.99 for a one pound package. (This was the store brand by the way.) I swear a few months ago they were selling it for $3.99 a pound.
I did end buying my mom the bacon despite the cost today. (She really wants to make some homemade corn chowder.)
I also want to mention that my local Hannaford’s and Wal-Mart haven’t had any store-brand canned pasta in months. And it has been hit-or-miss how much Chef Boyardee and Spaghetti-Os they will have in stock.
If it was $3.99 you were getting a bargain. Given I don’t care much for it, I haven’t bought bacon since my dad died in late 2019 and I was definitely paying $6 a pound for it then which I remember because the price irritated me.
The grocery store across the street has been out of Mug root beer for a week. Now that’s getting serious.
Walmart today ranged from sparse to nearly bare (ramen, bleach) in all areas I took notice of.
I don’t know about cats but current dog research shows some significant developmentally-related risks from early neutering (not so much for early spaying).
Due to the intense campaign fagainst ‘backyard breeding’ and for both universal spay/neuter and adopting from a shelter rather than buying a puppy from a breeder, many of the more educated areas of the country are now importing puppies and dogs from the more benighted areas, from the Caribbean, and even farther away, to supply demand for adoptions. I was recently offered a rescue “Moroccan Street Dog”.
Neutering significantly affects male livestock mental and physical development – that’s exactly why it is done. My pet wether (castrated) goat died from bladder stones last year at age two. Vets told me it was very common, as the ureter often does not develop properly. My other wether is a good six inches taller than his intact sire – his long bones didn’t stop growing.
Urethra. The ureters are the tubes from each kidney to the bladder. The urethra is the tube from the bladder to the outside world.
Did you hear about the doe that never got pregnant? She was constantly under the wether.
If anyone is interested in adopting an island dog from St Martin, we’ve been helping a rescue there and would be happy to help hook you up with a pup. Dogs are flown from St Martin to an airport (ideally) near the adopter, then driven from the airport by volunteers.
We are going to be devoting time in early April to do this,