You might want to try one first. I quit buying those, they always tasted like wood to me.
A bird raised outdoors where it got some exercise, and ideally some variety in its diet, tastes entirely different.
Speaking of food associated with Thanksgiving, I can’t find spices apple rings on the store shelves. Probably not the consequence of pandemic, but they were readily available before times.
No kidding. I’m looking for the same thing and not even Amazon has them. Unless I want to buy 110 of them.
Today there was no processed pig meat at the grocery store. No sausages, no bacon, no deli ham, just bare shelves.
This isn’t really Thanksgiving related I don’t think, because everything else (except whole turkeys) was available.
I guess we’re keeping all the pig meat over here …
SHARE! Hubs gets grumpy without his breakfast pig meat. Large containers of cream are getting pretty rare which is concerning for my cheesemaking business. Winter is coming and cows don’t calve when it’s dark so milk production slows.
The missing hazelnuts and almonds are all here, as are the shelled walnuts and sunflower seeds.
If anyone near me wants sausages, let me know. A friend’s dad works at a sausage factory (?) and employees occasionally are offered free short-dated sausage packages. He hates sausage, but takes the freebies and gives them away. I have 108 sausages (six eighteen packs) in my freezer.
Shortages notwithstanding, I bought a 20 pound turkey yesterday for less than 6 bucks (.29 a pound)
One of my local grocery chains has amazing deals on Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas hams a week or so before the holiday, I always make a point to take advantage of them.
I prefer the free range / organic, but the frozen ones I picked up will do in an emergency. But they are definitely NOT as good, even when I brine them with the same cider-based version that I use every Thanksgiving.
There will be no turkey for me this Thanksgiving on account of an…incident with the grill. I’ll be cooking a duck instead. (I guess the grill issue isn’t a shortage like others described here; even though parts are scarce, this is due to the manufacturer – Holland – declaring bankruptcy.)
Got to see the opposite of a shortage today when I went to the break room after lunch, and encountered a manager and an employee throwing out the unwanted leftovers from Monday’s Thanksgiving potluck. 
(The office closed at 1; employees had been encouraged to take leftovers home.)
We went out to eat at a local Mexican place this weekend. Much of their food comes with a small side of lettuce and tomatoes. It was cabbage and tomatoes instead. It was actually tastier and I hope they keep it cabbage.
I, too, came here to mention lettuce. The pickings were very slim at the supermarket, and the produce manger grumbled to me about wholesale availability. It’s the drought, mostly.
First of all: hi, @SheilaFett, and welcome to the Dope!
But then:
Was this in late spring and summer of 2020? There was at that time a shortage of toilet paper that was common in the sense of being common throughout the United States; but no, it isn’t common in general in the United States for there to be a shortage of toilet paper. I’m over 70 and I don’t remember there ever having been a shortage of toilet paper, anywhere I was, except for during that stretch in 2020.
No, that’s not what was going on. What was going on was that due to covid most people weren’t going to work or recreational activities, or doing much shopping, away from their houses; so they needed more toilet paper at home, as they weren’t using public or workplace restrooms part of the time. And the toilet paper used by most public and workplace restrooms was packaged entirely differently, and was often of poorer quality, than the versions people used at home; and was sold through different outlets. So it took some time for manufacturers to adjust what they were making and how they were packaging it and to get it into the retail instead of wholesale supply chain.
This was aggravated by the fact that some people reacted to the shortage by buying a lot more than they needed whenever they had the chance, so that others had trouble getting any even when there was first enough on the market.
It had nothing to do with the government deliberately attempting to create an artificially high demand for toilet paper.
Actually, there WAS an artificially-generated shortage, about 50 years back:
And per that article, it was at least partly triggered by a congressman making a speech about potentially rationing the stuff.
In both cases: it was panic-buying fueling more people to panic-buy as soon as they could get it, which sort of snowballed.
I got great brownie points for shipping some TP to my in-laws from Wal-Mart - apparently the packages arrived the day they put their last roll on the holder. As little as I like WalMart in general, they did well for us on several items during the worst of the pandemic.
As far as shortages: We had no problem getting Thanksgiving turkeys. We got two fresh (one to serve on the day, one for “leftovers”) and a couple of frozen ones. HERBS were an issue - I needed fresh sage for the stuffing, and the store was out of it. Of course, this may have had something to do with the fact that I was shopping for it late on the Tuesday - there had clearly been an entire bin full of it earlier in the day.
Ignorance fought!
I don’t remember that. I certainly remember the OPEC oil shortage, which almost left me stranded on my way home for – wait a minute. That’s really odd. What I have firmly in my head is a trip home from college for vacation. But that shortage was fall ‘73 and by fall ‘73 I wasn’t in college any longer; I graduated in spring ‘73. I might, however, have been trying to get to my parents’ house for the holidays in a car full of people, some of whom I might have known from college – I no longer remember who was in the car; only that we tried to stop for gas part way there, and the people at the gas station just laughed at us. We got back in the car (pretty sure it was a Beetle) and kept going, watching the gas gauge drop; but we made it to my parents’, which was supposedly the first stop with others continuing to homes some distance further on; but with the gauge claiming empty and the hour somewhere late at night we all slept at my parents’ and my father called around in the morning and found a station that would gas up the car to get the rest of the crew home.
Still don’t remember any shortage of toilet paper, though. From that article’s description it seems likely to have been a short one; maybe I just didn’t need to buy any toilet paper right then. Or maybe that bit of my memory went up in smoke –
I was in college in the late 1970s when a local ROTC general gave a talk that was widely mocked, saying that the first thing people (meaning you spoiled students) will miss when civilization collapses is: toilet paper. He was just being prophetic, I guess. Maybe it was a meme back then, before anyone knew what a meme is.
I’m seeing reports of shortages of cold and flu medicines in the stores.
At most, I was only dimly aware of the reports of it. I was in high school, and my mom did all the grocery shopping, and I think she just bought her usual 4-pack-per-bathroom purchase at the store. There was certainly no overt concern.
Nowadays, it would likely snowball, but we didn’t have the intertoobz back then, so it was more limited.
As a side note, the interest in toilet bidets really sparked due to COVID and the TP shortages. We bought one a few months into it - not because we had any shortage (we actually had more than we needed, thanks to our Amazon subscription), but because all the discussion made me curious. Now we don’t ever want to be without ours.
Can confirm. Had to go a couple different places to find cough syrup.
Cream soda. It’s weird, but it’s been scarce for at least a year. My local Kroger had none for 4 months or so.