We haven’t had a Grocery Store Report in awhile, in large part because I hadn’t felt the need for them: pretty much everything was in stock, pretty much everything seemed back to normal. I even went back to letting Paul come with me on shopping trips, because we were both vaccinated and because I was no longer feeling like we were in emergency mode, where we should aim for the absolute lowest possible number of people in the store.
Now I am getting pretty twitchy again. A nearby city has put a mask mandate back into effect, so I will be shopping at the branch of our grocery store that’s there, rather than the one in our city where there is no mask mandate. Even with the mask mandate, there are people in the store who are not wearing masks, which may provoke me into regrettable behavior. It’s not that I think grocery store employees should have to enforce mask-wearing (though I do think the store managers should do so, just as they would presumably do if a customer came into the store shirtless/shoeless/smoking), it’s that I CANNOT TAKE ON BOARD that there are people who, even disagreeing with a mask mandate, would REFUSE TO COMPLY AND YET STILL SHOP IN THE STORE. Get OUT!!! Get OUT OF THE STORE if you don’t want to wear a mask!!! TAKE YOUR BUSINESS ELSEWHERE, that’ll show them!! If you DO come into the store, then follow the RULES! Follow the RULES!!!!!!!!
*pant pant*
Anyway. The stores have also been extra crowded, probably because of the holidays, and so I am back to that old feeling of being too stressed to be able to concentrate or make on-the-spot decisions. I have to work from a list (on one trip I tried to buy snacks for stockings, without deciding ahead of time exactly which snacks I’d be buying, and it turned out I could not handle that); I sometimes have to circle back if an aisle is too crowded (CROWDED WITH NON-MASK-WEARING PEOPLE) and/or if the store is out of something and I can’t figure out what to do about it. I don’t think I can have Paul keep coming with me, not only because it’s seeming like we should go back to the “fewest possible people in the store” philosophy but also because it’s too distracting to have to guide him (he is a CART-SWOOPER so I have to give him warning about where we’re going or else he’ll continually overshoot and then SWOOP back, but I don’t really…WANT to do that, I just want to calmly steer the cart myself).
Here are some of the things my store has been out of for several trips:
• Plain M&Ms. They are also low on many other kinds of candy: the Twizzles and Snickers are spread out across the whole length of a shelf, to make it look full. But I’ve specifically noticed plain M&Ms because we always get them for New Year’s, so they’ve been on my list. We did finally find two bags of them this morning—but there were ONLY two bags.
• Mozzarella sticks. None available in any brand, for weeks. I did find some today at another branch of the same store.
• Pasta varieties. For weeks now, each brand of pasta has had only a couple of varieties available, and those have been spread across the shelf to make it look full. In the Prince brand I usually buy, there is only angel hair and tri-color rotini. In the store-brand, there is only radiatore and rigatoni.
• The bread shelves have been VERY stripped-looking. We’ve still been able to get the breads we want, but there are often vast empty spaces on the shelves.
• Jalapeno peppers. And when they DO have them, they tend to be HUGE, which seems like the opposite of how it would be: I’d think they’d be harvesting them SMALL to get them to the store sooner. But perhaps since they’re sold by the pound it makes more sense to let them grow longer. Or perhaps the issue is that fewer trucks are going, so the peppers have longer to grow in between pick-ups. I know nothing about vegetable economics.
• Coleslaw mix, though perhaps it’s a fairly seasonal-demand item and there’s not much demand for it in winter. I was waiting for another shopper to finish looking in that section so I could get some coleslaw, and then I heard her asking an employee if there was any coleslaw, so we were apparently of the same mind. The employee said no, that there hadn’t been any on the last truck, and the next truck wasn’t coming until tomorrow, and she didn’t know for sure there would be coleslaw on that one either.
• The kinds of frozen vegetables I usually buy. There seem to be a lot of the steam-in-the-bag kind, but not the regular bagged kinds. This has been the case since well before Thanksgiving, which is when I noticed I couldn’t buy frozen corn (except the steam-in-the-bag kind) or the Birdseye Classic Vegetable Blend.
• The kinds of frozen fruit I usually buy. I use frozen raspberries for a Jell-O salad I make at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I usually buy the store brand, and there have been NO store-brand frozen raspberries since I started checking in October. I finally bought a name brand. We’ve also had trouble finding other frozen fruits (peaches, blueberries), especially store-brand.
• Haribo peach gummies
And there have also been intermittent issues where for example it looks as if an entire truck has been delayed: the dairy section almost completely empty of milk and cream, with only smallish sections of more specialty products (buttermilk, small cartons of organic milk, etc.) stocked. Or we’ll find that just about everything on our list happens to be out of stock, but it’s all there the next time we go. Just weird things, increasing my twitchiness.
I have heard reports of a nationwide cream cheese shortage, but our store has been fully stocked. I bought two cream cheeses just in case.
How have your stores been? Have you been noticing things getting nerve-wracking again, or does everything still seem normal?
This is not a supply issue, but a mask one. We have no mandate where I live and very few stores require them. I was in Costco yesterday and I’d say half the shoppers were masked. What really got me was the folks wearing their masks incorrectly (below the nose). Like, why bother?? For some reason I was more enraged with them than the ones with no mask at all!
I’m in the UK – so masks are legally required in shops. But at the supermarket yesterday I was watching the self-checkout tills and probably a third of people were unmasked including my cashier. It’s incredibly depressing when the UK is a huge hub for Omicron, and I honestly have no clue what people’s issue with masks actually is! I just can’t work out how it’s harmful or damaging to them to wear a piece of cloth over their faces for 20 minutes….
I am in AZ where there is very little mask wearing in general, but I did notice a higher percentage of mask wearers when I took a break from work and went to the store Thursday morning. Too bad I can’t go at the time normally. Anyway, the shelves have looked pre-pandemic for quite some time. EXCEPT! On Thursday, I was getting lunch supplies and the Cheetos section was empty. And then, throughout this pandemic the pasta used for stuffed shells (large-not the itty bitty shells) is hardly ever in stock. I regret not getting an extra last time I saw it (which I can’t remember when that was). It was gone again yesterday. And our store brand doesn’t make that shape. All other shapes are accounted for. And yes, I suppose I could get manicotti instead, but the one time I tried to stuff them, it was not nearly as easy as shells. Wish it wasn’t crazy expensive to ship anything. I’d send you’d a bunch of pasta shapes!
Taquitos? Where are the chicken taquitos lately? I feel like AZ should stock them but they are suspiciously absent from the shelves whilst the beef taquitos carry on…. I think we have compared notes on AZ before, but mask wearing continues to be hit and miss everywhere in Tucson (which, as a blue dot in a red state, is horrifying). Grocery stores seem well stocked in general (except for the taquitos) but I just can’t venture out when I am wishing the worst fate on the maskless. School starts Monday—I am not optimistic on our chances to stay virus free. Anyhoo, we are all fine and healthy, so I should just get over our asshole governor…happy New Year!
All the chicken taquitos are here in Kentucky, and none of the beef taquitos! Ha ha. I’ve been looking for beef for weeks.
If I could figure out how to do it, it would be a great swap! Beef taquitos for days here, no chicken in sight. We are on week 4 of this travesty.
I was craving baked ziti. No ziti noodles and no ricotta. Used penne and made ricotta from scratch. My sister has been unable to find fat free half and half for weeks. (And exactly what is fat free half and half? And why?)
No ricotta for weeks here either
I’ve been having good luck finding some basics like bread (and snacks) at Walgreens/CVS. The Walgreens snack section is particularly robust. Also, even though we have no mask mandate (lol Texas), I find that most people in drug stores DO wear a mask.
LOL Texas is right. At HEB (an excellent TX based grocery chain, for those who don’t know) yesterday there was ~50% masking, which is up compared to even a week ago. Stock was generally good, except for pasta. Let the grocery reports continue! Not the pandemic though. Let’s stop with that, mmmkay?
I’m back to using Shipt. Highly recommend. The shoppers text if something is out of stock, but I usually just check “decide substitutions for me” to avoid a lot of back and forth. It works out fine. I can make use of whatever, even if it’s not what I would’ve chosen. Shipt gives us a choice of a bunch of stores ( 4-5 grocery chains, target, drug stores, etc) so I pick the one that works best for my needs at the moment. I tip well. Orders generally arrive within several hours of me submitting the order.
Here in France, the mask mandate has never been lifted for indoor places (all shops, public transport, cinemas, museums etc., plus schools for teens, the work place for most people, etc.) since it first came in back in, what, March 2020? Really not sure, might have been later than that. But definitely 2020. And people are so used to it now that it’s mostly respected, which is reassuring. As of tomorrow (1 Jan) the mandate for mask wearing outdoors will come back into force in many places (including the city I live in, Montpellier), but again, it was really only lifted a relatively short while ago (late summer maybe? Dates are so hard to pin down now that all days kind of look and feel the same…), so it’s neither surprising nor particulary inconveniencing (though there will definitely be people flouting it, I’m sure – but the fines can be quite stiff if you get caught, especially if you get caught more than once).
As for shops, there don’t really seem to be supply chain issues here. Then again, at least where I live, there never were particularly. Right back in the very early days of this nightmare, there was some panic buying, but I managed to get my once-every-3-weeks food shopping delivered without too much difficulty and without too many missing or “alternative” items. I’ve had my food shopping delivered for over 10 years (I don’t have a car) and there was no notable difference, not even in terms of delivery slot availability. Same now – it seems like all the supply chain issues associated with the early days have been resolved and life is pretty much back to normal at that level (very much not so at many others, of course – see “mask mandate” etc.).
I’m not a particular fan of the current French government, and they certainly made mistakes (but who didn’t? Even Jacinda Ahern in NZ made mistakes), but they do seem to be doing fairly well with “dealing with the pandemic” now… Vaccination rates are high, the “pass sanitaire” has been (mostly) accepted – a document needed to enter restaurants, bars, cinemas, theatres, etc. and showing either that you have all your vaccines, or that you have a very recent negative test (though that pass is going to be changed to a “pass vaccinal” on 15 Jan – meaning only full vaccination will be accepted, not a negative test any more – and I’m fairly sure there’ll be kick back against that), schools have (mostly) been kept open since September… I feel safe here and am glad to not be in my native UK, which is a shitshow (at least it is in some places) thanks to the combined effects of a global pandemic and the self-inflicted idiocy of Brexit…
Last time I went to the grocery store it was out of several basics: frozen spinach, plain diced tomatoes, one brand of olive oil, yellow onions (?!?). They didn’t have the frozen croissants I always get for New Year’s breakfast. I’m going back today to see if they’re in stock.
Most people are wearing masks where I am (we have a mandate) but it depends heavily what store/venue you’re in. Trader Joe’s is like 98% and Target is about 80% and the gas station is more like 60% counting the clerks.
I noticed that here too. Trader Joes and Whole Foodds are about 98% masked and BJs and everything else are much much lower.
Our grocery store was BARE on Wednesday, in a way it wasn’t even at the beginning of the pandemic. It made me kind of panicky, even though I was just browsing for New Year’s Eve food.
I have noticed the thing with the jalapeños, too: none (or, like, two or three tiny shriveled specimens) and then an overflow of ENORMOUS peppers. Very odd. And similar issues with some things being out and then being back as normal. Rosemary was out of stock earlier this week. I got some this morning, but it was only two sprigs of rosemary in the same sized sleeve that normally has more rosemary than any human could use before it goes bad. Of course, the same PRICE for the two sprigs, though.
Some things that have been in short supply continue to be so: Lunchables are often completely out of stock, or if they are available, it’s just a handful. Frozen pancakes are appearing more often, but only a few boxes at a time. Iceberg lettuce is still $2 a head, which is $.50 to $.70 more per head than normal. Although it’s better than it was, which was $3.50 a head on sale.
Mostly, things have been okay in my area, and I haven’t noticed big gaps on the shelves. Or they will appear one week and be filled the next week, so they leave me only mildly unsettled rather than watchful and panicky.
Mask wearing is and almost always has been decent in my area, so that I do a double take when people aren’t wearing masks. But if you go even a few miles outside of my city center, the mask wearing drops so drastically that I am typically the only person wearing one in a given establishment. That’s unnerving.
I continue to find grocery store reports Very Interesting.
I wonder if it’s an inability to find farm workers to pick them.
I know I’m coming in late, but this is what I was going to say. Farm workers who pick produce are often working under difficult conditions (no health care, low wages, much of the time they are immigrants without legal documentation, so not much choice). My understanding is that the pandemic has been hard on them and it’s not surprising to see produce shortages, especially for things harvested by hand. I follow @flowerinspanish on Instagram and she talks a lot about this.
Our grocery stores have had a lot of shortages over the past number of weeks, but I am in the lower mainland of BC (outside Vancouver), where we have had Other Issues, i.e. all the roads and some of the rail lines in and out were flooded or washed out by mudslides in November. Not to mention the floods decimating a number of dairy and poultry/egg farms. It’s been a fun year! (We also had that crazy heat dome in June and a ton of forest fires.)
Thankfully masks are required indoors everywhere here, and it’s relatively rare to see anyone openly defying the rules.
In NYC where we do have (largely ignored) mask mandates — you can put up all the signs in the world but if the rule isn’t being enforced… And for some reason, like commenter Jen said, it’s the one’s that have the masks on incorrectly that piss me off more than the ones not wearing at all. Anyway, I’ve been pretty much masked indoors since March 2020 so I just try to get in and get out.
All my usual stores (Trader Joes, Target) seem to be have a normal-ish level of stuff, even in before times, there was always that ONE thing that I can’t find (or totally forget about getting, despite having a list). I am definitely noticing an uptick in prices and that’s making me re-evaluate some purchases/brands. Especially if it’s something I know will be on sale sooner rather than later (I’m looking at you BACON).
I went to the store last night to pick up a few specific things – our store was completely out of the bread my kids like. Now, there was certainly other bread available but there was a huge, completely empty shelf space where the specific bread I wanted should have been.
Lactose free half and half has been extremely hard to find for months, as has the frozen spicy chicken my 15yo likes. We buy a lot of both whenever we find them.
Definitely fewer choices here (Midwest city ~100,000) than a few months ago. No Fritos (even the imitation store brand was out), fewer bread choices for brands like Pepperidge Farm or Brownberry, spotty lettuce mixes (maybe it was the salmonella recently), and the most surprising was no refrigerated crescent rolls prior to Christmas. When I asked the staff member about it, he said they have been told not to expect any shipments from Pillsbury until mid-February!!! But, the most frustrating, is simply the lack of masks and consideration of others. Of course, the no-mask mandate in this state makes that possible.
“I know nothing about vegetable economics.”
(snort) I love you.
The mask thing makes me mental on your behalf. I feel like I’m going to lose my mind, just hearing about it. Here we have a mask mandate and for the most part, people comply. The only people who don’t are the ding dongs that walk around with their noses exposed.
British Columbia was hit by massive flooding last month and as a result, a lot of items that come by truck from the port of Vancouver were unavailable. Also, because of the flooding, there were a lot of poultry farms affected, and the other day there were no eggs at all in the grocery store.
“I know nothing about vegetable economics.” Favorite line!
I don’t really know what our grocery stores look like right now but I know the week before Christmas the baking aisles were a wasteland. I barely scraped together the ingredients for the treats I make for friends and neighbors.
CVS on the other hand…depending on the week either the skin care aisle is wiped out or the hair care or the makeup.
NC held on to the mask mandate for a long, long time. I was actually proud of our governor for standing strong. Sometime back in the summer, when we were all dreaming of a normal Christmas, it was lifted. Only to be brought back on local levels – which a large percentage of people completely ignored.
Just this morning, the front page trumpeted the fact that we had 18,500 confirmed cases in ONE DAY (oddly, I don’t remember if that was just for our area or the whole state…but does it matter? ONE DAY!) and, yet, people are still walking around and acting like nothing is going on. I am so disheartened.
I don’t want to start a panic, but yesterday when I went to the grocery store they were completely out of name brand TP. Also we seem to have a relatively consistent shortage of lasagna noodles, which seems random and yet it’s been happening for months off and on. It’s bizarre.
We have a mask mandate and people in my city are generally very compliant (at least in the places I frequent) so it’s always an unpleasant surprise when I go elsewhere in the state and find people wearing masks in all kind of crap ways (under nose, under chin, in their ear – ok that last one is an exaggeration but it’s no stupider than those other methods…)
I went to Target early yesterday specifically for TP and found a lot of it, although it was mostly the larger packages AND they were way more expensive than normal but what isn’t, these days? But I was happy to buy a big package to stock up, just in case.
A month ago the cleaning isle was full for the first time in almost two years. I took a picture, texted it to my friends and teared up a little. Honestly it stumped me because I couldn’t remember what brands of cleaning spray we liked. I’d post the picture here if I could.
We definitely have weird shortages- like no elbow pasta, no plain Hersheys bars -but my grocery store seems more adept at filling the shelves with other stuff. I don’t like it because it’s harder to see that they are out and move on. Instead I think I’m loosing my mind but really it’s because rigatoni is where the elbows should be.
On a different note, one week before Christmas I went to TJ Max and they had a full isle of Valentine’s Day stuff. Same with hobby lobby. WTF. Can we get through one holiday first??
(for the record I won’t shop at hobby lobby even though it’s next door to my grocery store because the corporation holds religious beliefs i abhor but I needed a needle to fix something and my grocery store didn’t have any needles – i only spent two dollars and donated $20 to planned parenthood as penance).
I feel the same way you do about Hobby Lobby, I love your penance!
I do like the Grocery Reports.
Let’s see — for several weeks, the 13 flavor Lifesavers were not available. They popped back up last week. I thought about getting several bags but didn’t. The frozen chicken fries that my daughter likes have been hit or miss also, along with the other breaded/flavored chicken options. Our preferred toilet paper has not been available for a few weeks at Sam’s Club where we usually buy it. I can get it at our local grocery store in some decent large sized packages (but expensive! compared to 2 years ago). But there will be maybe 5 or 6 of the large packs. There are other options that will do if need be. Rice a Roni Rice Pilaf — sometime there will be a huge amount of them on the shelf. Then other times — not a single box. Pasta — I wanted small shells for some soup I’m going to make this weekend and neither the national brand I like nor the store brand had them. I noticed that there wasn’t as many pasta options this week for those two brands. I didn’t really look to see what the options were for the other national brand they carry. Store brand canned tomatoes is another weird hit or miss item.
Masks — I shopped this morning and it felt like I was seeing more people wearing masks than I usually do. It could be the day/time I went. The store I went to does not have any signs up recommending make wearing. Some places around me do. We don’t currently have a mask mandate.
The week before Thanksgiving, my grocery store looked like it always does for Thanksgiving. Some things moved out of the way to make room for the seasonal stuff that people buy (extra cans of fried onions for green bean casserole, for example). Two weeks before Thanksgiving, the grocery store was a little bare, but I wondered if that it usually is like that to make room for all the extra stuff the store gets for Thanksgiving dishes.
I went to the supermarket in my parents’ house a few days after Christmas and the entire fruit and veg section was decimated. Whether that’s Covid, Brexit or the general post-bank Holiday run on the produce section, I’ve got no idea.
And yes on the frozen fruit! I eat frozen raspberries every day with my granola once we run out of fresh berries (which takes about 1 day because my kids are berry fiends) and our online food delivery had absolutely none available for 6 straight shops. I’ve been able to get them in person from another supermarket but it’s deeply irritating driving out of my way just to get one thing.
My husband asked me to pick up some Lysol spray yesterday, and Target was out of the Lysol brand but he got a kick out of the off-brand I bought instead–I call it Lie-sol. Hopefully it works just as well.
I could not find rice krispies for New Years Eve rice krispy treats even after checking 3 different stores in my area. Not even a box of store brand!
By far, the most notable grocery store issue for me lately has been that the large chain grocery where I buy a lot of staples is severely understaffed. So much so that placing a pickup order has resulted in significant delays and crossed wires the last 3 times I’ve tried to do it. The mask usage there is not great (I live in a blue city in a ruby red state), so I had tried to do pickup again instead of going inside once the news of Omicron broke. But neither do I want to sit in the parking lot for an hour after work and wait to see if maybe my order will come out or not.
My local coop (bless) has undertaken the herculean task of implementing online shopping/pickup for the first time, so I will try to go there more in the next couple of months, I’m thinking.
The best place for mask usage I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks was, oddly, the liquor store.
Specific grocery items that have been missing or weirdly erratic for me lately: canned crushed tomatoes. Distilled water. Grapes. Kitty litter deodorizer. 1% milk. There was one trip to Kroger around Thanksgiving when the toilet paper aisle looked like March 2020 all over again, but thankfully that seems to have been an aberration.
Weird beverage shortages in San Diego. Ever since covid, Coke Zero has had periodic shortages. Sometimes there is Diet Coke in these situations, sometimes not. Right now we have no Coke Zero but I was able to get Diet Coke.
Also weird Gatorade shortages. Big empty shelves where the Gatorade should be.
I was unable to get Hersey kisses for someone’s stocking. I checked FOUR different stores. (2 Targets & 2 Wegmans) None. Not even any of the weird flavors/combos. It was weird and unsettling.
Uncrustables and frozen waffles have been in very short supply and I had to try several grocery stores and still didn’t find bagel bites this week. New Years Eve thing or pandemic/supply chain? I have no idea. I don’t usually shop for these, but my daughter has remote learning for the next two weeks so I needed easy lunch options for the babysitter.
We’re in the second sweet and salty kettle corn drought that I’ve seen here since the pandemic.
Ontario, Canada has had a mask mandate since sometime in 2020 so it’s extremely rare to see anyone without a mask in a store here. We seem to be taking this wave seriously (albeit a bit late in the game) and the province just shut down places like gyms, movie theatres, etc. essential places like grocery stores have gone to half-capacity, restaurants are take-out only as of tomorrow, and the kids have all gone to online learning for the next couple of weeks. Indoor gatherings in homes are restricted to max 5 people, though that seems a bit silly since that could mean 5 single people from different households getting together, whereas my neighbours with 6 kids can’t technically comply, even though they all live there.
It absolutely blows my mind that many people in the US seem to mostly be living life as normal right now.
Our grocery store is having issues. One week (I go once a week) the produce is very limited (no lettuce, spinach etc) and another time it’s dairy or pasta or something else. Part of our problem is I live in a mountain community in Colorado and our Interstate will often get closed due to accidents and icy roads. Our trucks come from Denver so any issues over there or between them and us affects us. So it is hard to say what is Pandemic related, or weather related, or accident related. But shopping can be very challenging!