Not a shortage, per se, but our subscription to toilet paper (via Amazon) seems to suggest something odd with the demand.
A case (3 6-packs of Charmin mega-rolls) has been running us about 30 dollars, including the one that arrived the other day. The new price is DOUBLE that. I’m glad I forgot to cancel the shipment we got the other day (we have 2 full cases in the house).
I was just in Costco and they had plenty of Charmin.
Kinda dumb, but we found some cole slaw we like. Little tub or whatever. I donno, 20oz.
Liked it enough that I bought another a week later and when I set it in the fridge I saw the price had gone up from 3.19 a container to 5.29.
Huh. Shipping issues I suppose.
A few weeks ago, hash browns were all that were available here in the frozen potato food category. No french fries, no wedges, no tater tots. Everything is back to normal now, though.
Had a hard time this week of finding a big jar of peanut butter. Had a bunch of smaller ones, but none of the larger sizes.
A new one here - razor blades. Two Safeways and a Raleys are out of most blades, not just the ones I use. I need to check at CVS also before I call it a real shortage.
A rather frightening article in the NY Times the other day talks about possible worldwide crop shortages.
I haven’t done a comparison of our grocery costs versus last year but I know they have gone up. It’ll be tough to do a straight-up comparison, of course, because we’d been ordering online and doing curbside pickup. I recently went back to doing the shopping in person and have been pretty shocked ate the markup. Wegman’s uses its own employees to do the shopping, and as a result they mark the prices up on nearly everything about 15% (e.g. something that’s 1.89 in store is 2.19 on the app). Sometimes the markups are even more insane: I bought a box of protein bars that was 10.99 in store (the app had it at 19.99 or so). Ouch.
As far as actual shortages: The cereal aisle was pretty sparse. We bought some store-brand corn flakes and shredded wheat; there was no brand-name product even available if we’d wanted it. I think someone here mentioned that there’d been a strike at one of the major manufacturers.
Those big bags of frozen chicken thighs have been difficult to find on and off this entire pandemic. They always have breasts, breast tenders and almost always wings.
Weird. I’m seeing the opposite. We ordered 6 bags of breasts, but they sent us 6 bags of thighs because they couldn’t get any breasts.
Very similar experience. I cleaned out the last two 5-packs of ‘Fusion’ blades from CVS the other day. The rack was virtually bare.
Cans of original Coke were out of stock for the first time on my Kroger pickup today. I had ordered a 24 pack or two 12 packs. So I stopped by Walgreens on the way home. There were only two 10 packs of mini-cans (which I bought) and maybe a dozen liters available. They did have other varieties (mostly Coke Zero) but not much of them either.
I haven’t been able to find Diet Dr. Pepper, or the new version Dr. Pepper Zero, in several weeks.
Last week, a coworker mentioned she couldn’t find Mrs. Grass chicken noodle soup. While shopping last weekend, I made a point to look and, hopefully, surprise her with a few boxes. Instead, I found an empty spot where this product would normally be. I also noticed the Kraft Mac/Cheese single boxes (same aisle) were sold out though the five pack was still available. Some of the instant ramen shelves looked a bit picked over, too.
Looked for Kraft Mac & Cheese a few days ago at the local Giant. They had all sorts of specialty varieties, Extra Creamy, Three Cheese, Spirals, etc., but a big empty space for the regular stuff. And the price had gone up to $1.49 for all varieties.
The cookies and crackers are still pretty much wiped out here…it seems to be mostly Nabisco products. Produce quality is starting to drop a bit, but that may be a seasonal thing. Also, we have been having chicken breast shortages (at least for the ones they keep in the ‘fresh’ case), but there were plenty available last week.
Exactly this here too, right down to the price being hiked to $1.50/box. I was eventually able to buy a five pack of original for $6.50 at Hannaford, though.
My local grocery store was out of cucumbers the other day. They got a fresh order the next day.
They also ran out of Wagyu ground beef last week but they had plenty on Monday so I got a package to put in the freezer until I need it.
When I went to the store on Monday they were out of Hostess Chocolate Cupcakes. That’s not unusual, though, since they get a shipment of about six packages once every two weeks and it typically takes a week and a half to sell out of them. It was like that before covid, as well. I started to go over there to see if they have any more but I didn’t think about about it until about 7:10 pm and they close at 7 pm.
One thing about the local grocery store here is that they would likely consider having 100 customers a really good day. It should not be surprising that they don’t get a lot of any one item at a time.
I used to occasionally go to another store in the 1990’s that was much smaller. It was maybe about 500 to 600 square feet, total. Their selection was very limited, but they would special order just about anything you wanted as long as you ordered the minimal amount that the distributor would ship.
I don’t know where you are – but I’d still be surprised to find that at all in a grocery store in that small a community. The first time I saw Wagyu beef in a grocery was quite recently, and it was in a nearby city.
The wagyu beef here is raised by a local farmer and rancher who I grew up with.
In addition to the grocery store, if you want 50 pounds or more of wagyu ground beef, you can call him up and his daughter will deliver it in one pound packages to your home the next time she comes to town. I think that the delivery price is the same price the grocery store pays for it.
You probably have to be within 20 or 25 miles of his place to find his wagyu beef at the local grocery store or to have it delivered.
Our grocery store used to sell some really good grass fed beef raised on another local ranch. I used to happily buy that beef. They haven’t carried it since the grocery store changed ownership about five years ago.
When my mother was still alive, she regularly went to the hardware store to buy beef. A farm supply store in the county seat of a nearby county used to carry grass fed beef from another local ranch. I wonder if the farm supply store still sells beef – it has been years since I was in that store.
Ah, that explains it.
I can get local beef by the side or quarter – not wagyu as far as I know, but I doubt that I can afford or even want that; but some of it is grassfed. By the pound is more complicated in NYState because of legal issues – you need to use a slaughterhouse that meets not just state standards but also has a federal-level USDA inspector; but a Mennonite-run grocery store near here just started advertising local grassfed beef and pork and it’s on my list to check out. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if my local grocery would also have been carrying it – except that a few years back the owners retired and sold it to the wrong person, who ran a store that had been doing very well despite competition due to being excellently run into the ground in about five years. The location’s now one of the miscellaneous dollar stores and the original owners of the grocery, along with a batch of other people, are trying to at least set up some sort of buying club.
I grew up on grass fed beef. Whenever we sold cattle or put them in a feedlot, we would keep one or two back for our own consumption. It would take another year to bring the cattle up to slaughter weight and it was exceptional beef.
In high school once, some friends and I went to a football scrimmage in another town quite a distance away. That town had a well known steak house that very well known throughout the area for their quality – some people in my town would drive nearly 100 miles to go there to eat on a Friday or Saturday night. I was shocked to find that the steak from this steak house wasn’t as good as what we regularly had at home from cattle we raised. I was really disappointed.
Most people think that feeding grain to cattle is about quality. In reality, it is about money – you can get the cattle up to slaughter weight on grain much faster than keeping them on pasture. It does give better marbling, but the flavor is not as beefy.
These days, that does not matter as much to me since I lost most of my sense of smell from a bad case of the flu in the late 1980’s. Texture has become far more important to me now.
The main thing to remember is that you cook them differently. Being leaner, if you cook grass fed beef like people usually cook grain fed you probably are going to be disappointed. I tend to cook beef like it is grass fed and that works well for both grass fed and grain fed.
The Wagyu beef was surprising. Since the fat is more closely bound to the meat, it doesn’t run out when cooking like with grain fed or grass fed. I had to change my cooking methods a little for making hamburgers and hamburger steaks with Waygu ground beef.