So … I was at WalMart an hour ago and …
They were out of all frozen food from all freezers, except for a few frozen pizzas.
They were out of canned soup.
They were out of eggs.
They were out of all paper products. No toilet paper, no paper towels, no Kleenex. They keep all of that stuff on a very tall double-depth shelf with no backing, so you can access it from either side. That entire display aisle – ten feet high and more than 30 feet long with multiple double-depth shelves – was empty. A wag had hung a sign on the shelving: Добро пожаловать в Советский Союз (Welcome to the Soviet Union)
Why is toilet paper the go-to thing to panic buy? Do most people live from sheet to sheet, while having huge amounts of food, water, cigarettes, alcohol, propane, candles, etc. on hand? I don’t get it. It’s cheap, non-perishable and sold in bulk. (I have not seen anything smaller than a four roll pack in years or decades. And now they claim the rolls are double or quadruple size.) Why the surge in buying? If I was worried, I would buy food and maybe water. Just getting enough of that for a month would be tough. What’s the point of three years of TP?
Too many people just don’t know how to deal with a crisis.
I went to the liquor store yesterday, where stock was plentiful and I was the only customer in there.
I’ve always wandered what reality it would be OK in to do my best Beavis Cornholio impression in public. I guess I got my answer.
First you get the TP. Then you get the power. Then you get the weemun.
Wow. I was at a 24-hour Meijer’s a little before midnight Thursday. They were nearly out of toilet paper, but had plenty of everything else I noticed. (Meijer’s, if you don’t have them, is more like Target than it is Walmart. Being open 24 hours is another distinctive feature for them.) A 24 hour mega-grocery store near the Meijer’s was closed, but I have no idea why. This was in the greater Milwaukee, Wisconsin metropolitan area.