One reason I am attempting not to panic about groceries is that I often go quite early Sunday morning, when it seems reasonable to assume the shelves might be depleted from Saturday shoppers—particularly if the grocery store is having staffing issues and is low on stockers. Sometimes on Sunday I will have a series of “Oh no, they’re out of ____!! and _____!! and _____!!!” moments, one after another with rising panic, and then I will stop by again on Wednesday mid-morning and they will have plentiful supplies of all of those things. So quite possibly they had ALL those things on pallets in the back all set to put out when I was there on Sunday, and it’s just that I was Little Miss Up Before Dawn and they weren’t ready for me yet.
Still. It was looking very Early Pandemic at my grocery store. There were a lot of empty spots on shelves; a lot of shelves where the items were only one unit deep, with empty shelf behind. They’re not just low on pasta varieties anymore; the pasta shelves are nearly empty now. Pasta sauce is also weird and depleted and spread out.
They’ve been very low on orange juice, sometimes having only a couple of specialty varieties (e.g., one organic kind with extra pulp, three of the kind where it’s like orange-pineapple or orange-mango or whatever), but today they had much more of it, and they had the kind I usually get.
They had Pillsbury canned crescent rolls and Pillsbury canned cinnamon rolls again.
Still no cream cheese shortage at my store. (I’ve been hearing about national cream cheese shortages but haven’t seen it locally yet.)
Chicken nugget-type things were low on variety again.
They had SOME quick oats, but no regular rolled oats—and the quick oats were spread out and only one canister deep, and it was mostly the smaller canisters. Further down the aisle I found four canisters of regular rolled oats that had been part of an attempt to fill in another product gap, and I felt very lucky to get one, and resisted the urge to buy TWO. (I do not NEED two.)
There was no Raisin Bran Crunch, or even regular Raisin Bran—and the whole cereal aisle seemed very depleted, lots of areas where a single type of store-brand cereal was occupying a bunch of slots.
No bagged Splenda again. No baking cocoa again.
Soups looking very depleted again. Canned fruits looking depleted again.
I got the last bag of sugar-free cough drops, and the whole section was mostly empty pegs. One flavor of store-brand cough drops was filling almost all the pegs that weren’t empty.
Very low on menstrual pads, and out of the kind I usually buy.
Very low on cat litter. Very low on cat food. That whole aisle looked stressful.
Still no plain or mini M&Ms.
No regular Hershey’s syrup, just store-brand and Special Dark.
Very low on popcorn kernels: only two bags of them, plus maybe half a dozen bags of an expensive organic kind.
Frozen french fries looking a little better again—more of them, more variety. But still on the sparse side.
Still no Gardein beefless ground and no Morning Star faux-chicken nuggets.
Signs up in the produce department about difficulty getting bagged salads.
Some of this is probably just my specific grocery chain and their specific supply trucks, though: I had to pick up a prescription at Target the other day, and they had the Gardein beefless ground and regular Morning Star faux-chicken nuggets, they had plain AND mini M&Ms, they had plenty of the soups we usually get. Their site says they have Raisin Bran Crunch and Always pads and our usual cat litter. They too are out of sugar-free cough drops, though, and very low on cough drops overall.
(They also had these sweet little bowls, which I put into my cart in a green floral and a pastel floral, and then turned around and put them back because I DO NOT NEED ANY MORE LITTLE BOWLS RIGHT NOW. The kids broke, like, four little bowls during the pandemic when I didn’t feel I could go out and buy any, and it’s true that bowls were then scarce at our house and so I felt justified ordering a set of Modern Look With Elk Design bowls, and then when I COULD go out and buy bowls in person I bought maybe six more bowls, so we are ALL SET on little bowls.)
One of my Coping Thoughts is this: “Even with all the alarming gaps, this store is still VERY VERY FULL OF FOOD. There is LOTS OF FOOD here. Some of my USUAL FOODS are not here; some of my TOP-CHOICE FOODS are not here; but there is still ABUNDANT FOOD AVAILABLE.”
Our last grocery trip (also on a Sunday, so I wondered about the restocking issue as well) was as bad or nearly so as early pandemic days. No frozen potato products of any kind (hash browns, tater tots, fries — totally empty), still no cans of pork and beans of any brand (my daughter loves pork and beans and we haven’t seen a can on the shelves in weeks and weeks), nearly all of the faux meat section and pasta section gone, no chicken nuggets of any kind. Still plenty of cereal though and dairy section looked full as usual.
I try not to get stressed out about it all but am having mixed success.
This stood out to me because the freezer section of my grocery store where pancakes/waffles are stored was nearly bare of those things… but JAM PACKED with potato products. Enough hash browns for the entire city. (The fries section was well-stocked also.)
It is additionally interesting that these issues seem very local/regional.
I shopped Thursday morning and found the same. The only frozen waffles available were store brand buttermilk waffles. There were no pancakes, no french toast, and no toaster strudels. Also, wasn’t there some sort of bagged salad recall which would explain it’s scarcity.
I didn’t know until this week that the cough drop situation is bleak. My son is sick (with the thing) and went through our supply. I’ve tried to add more to my cart at WalMart, Walgreens, Sam’s Club, and Target. All have none. I keep being like “really? REALLY?” Maybe when I can shop in-person again I’ll be able to get something. (A flavor all the kids will hate, I’m sure.)
Oh dear. We often use a small spoonful of honey to soothe sore throats. And if the throat comfort tea is available, that works well.
Nothing to report on the grocery front, but I wanted to say that, before we moved there was a Target less than 5 miles from our house and now we are 30+ miles from a Target, and I don’t think I’ve been there more than twice since we moved here. Which is good, because i would be stocking up on ALL THE BOWLS and many other cute, delicious and unnecessary items you show us here. Those floral bowls!
The Husband does our grocery shopping and reported yesterday that the milk section was completely wiped out. We aren’t blaming that on anything but weather as snow/ice hit North Carolina this morning. What these people are planning to do with all that milk is beyond me…particularly if they lose power.
Fellow North Carolinian here and for the first time EVER, I needed milk during a snow/ice storm and didn’t have it! I thought I had plenty, but the kids drank more milk than usual over the weekend, and when the storm hit, I had no milk for my daily latte. So I will be venturing out to the store today to find milk.
Every time I read a grocery store report that mentions shortages of things that are plentiful in my area, I wish there were a simple, economic way for us to share the respective wealth amongst ourselves.
The situation — which, in my area, seems to be “bare one day, fine the next” (like, one day there were NO POTATOES OR YAMS, and then the next time I went, they were full up on both, but NO SPANISH ONIONS) — has me feeling Extremely Watchful. But I haven’t started buying an extra package of XYZ at each trip.
My normal grocery day is tomorrow, so I will report back.
I did my grocery shopping early this morning (Sunday) and found bagged salad for the first time in weeks. The salad section was pretty empty overall, but there were at least two kinds, which is two kinds more than they’ve had recently. The bread section finally looked decently stocked. There were plenty of canned soups too. They were still out of Pillsbury crescent rolls and such, though. I got everything on my list except for chicken thighs. I will be substituting chicken breast for thighs in a crock pot recipe this week and will probably get annoyed when they turn out dry. (Context: Midwest, only got an inch of snow from the recent storm)
Where I live there is currently a grocery worker strike happening at the Kroger chain. Anecdotally, the public seems to be in solidarity with the workers and are not crossing the picket lines (great!,) but of course it’s creating even MORE supply chain stress at the other grocery stores that are now seeing more than their average numbers of customers. Luckily it’s a reasonably large city with lots of different store options, but yeah, a lot of missing products when I shopped today. :-(
A few months ago (or more?) you linked to an adorable tiny bowl set from Target that I impulsively added to an online order because they were cute and cost almost nothing. My husband was mystified when they arrived, asking what we would possibly use them for since they were so small. Well. Let me tell you, we use them constantly. They even have their own special spot when loading the dishwasher. When my Mom was visiting over Christmas she found them incredibly useful as well and ordered her own set. Hooray for very small bowls!
I was just coming to comment that I too bought the tiny bowls from Target, and I also love them! They’re great for toddler snacks, but they’re excellent for my little snacks too. They make me smile every time I use them.
Oh, this is VERY PLEASING.
I love this. I especially love that the purchase met with incredulity but then turned out to be UTTERLY JUSTIFIED!! I too use them just ALL THE TIME, and so do the kids. I have six of them and sometimes they are ALL in the dishwasher.
Hmm, we must live in the same area, because we are having the same problems! I was glad I hadn’t made a comprehensive list because nothing I wanted was there. That being said, we are not going to starve.
BUT! I was actually coming to second the success of these tiny bowls! We all love them and they are in use all the time. And recently two other small plastic, convenient bowls cracked so I am shopping for their replacement. So, Swistle if you think it’s silly to link these things sometimes its actually very helpful.
Have you ever addressed the fact that Morningstar farms changed their beloved sausage patty recipe and made it vegan and now they suck?
Oh INTERESTING! I think we only bought the sausage patties once, to try them, and they were not popular with our vegetarians so I haven’t bought them again; I wonder if I bought them BEFORE or AFTER the change?
Oh no! I loved those sausage patties but haven’t bought any in ages. I’m depressed to hear that they changed their recipe. Poop.
I do grocery pickup (and have since it showed up in my area about five years ago) so I base my stock on what I can get and what I can’t. Produce has been hard to get and meat has been low. Ryan’s favorite pretzels are out and his favorite goldfish and mini pizzas aren’t available in any variety or brand.
Let me tell you when a good time to get an order is and it is right after your store reopens after having been closed for three days for “deep cleaning” (woman on Next Door: “I used to work there, we never deep cleaned anything, this means everyone has covid and they don’t have enough people to work”). They had apparently been still getting trucks but no food had gone out the door in three days and it was a magical order of no out of stocks and no substitutions.
As a weirdo vegan buying mostly whole foods, I’ve been largely unaffected by the shortages, but my cats’ Aldi cat food has been out of stock for over a month and a half, and what I thought of as my ridiculous stockpile in response to early pandemic shortages is down to 10 cans. Like you said, there’s still plenty of food and plenty of cat food, and even small cans in different flavors at Aldi, but the disruption to our routine is noteable.
Also, my local co-op said they’re out of bulk rolled oats and don’t know when they’ll be able to get more. I snagged the last bag of Bob’s Red Mill oats, but it’s not something I’ve ever found in short supply before. Maybe lots of oat-based Christmas cookies? That’s definitely why I’m out.
Are you in an area that’s supposed to get hit with snow? We’re supposed to get about 18 inches tonight, so I’m assuming that’s contributing to some of the shortages here.
I have been avoiding GOING to the store since Christmas but we’ve ordered groceries. Our store was OUT of whole, organic, milk in gallons for like 2 weeks but then they had them last week. I think the cereal is labor disputes more than anything. Of COURSE my girl child discovered her deep and abiding obsession with rice crispies when they barely exist (at least around here). There was a week where rolled oats were scarce but it seemed to be just that week. Stop and shop didn’t give me my bread flour and gave me the small bags of wheat flour but Wegmans gave me all I wanted. Wegmans also had the milk but their whole, organic milk doesn’t froth? Idk.
My Trader Joes (in Iowa) was low on a lot of stuff prior to Christmas, but things seem to be back now. And my big grocery store doesn’t seem too bad. There weren’t any Party Size Bite Size Tostedos chips, but there were scoops. And a whole section in the dairy section was out—I think it was stuff like biscuits and cinnamon rolls. But there were signs that stuff was on sale, so that probably played a part in it. Also my preferred frozen pizza (Tombstone, Deluxe) has been hard to find for a long time, but Tombstone Supreme is available, so I doubt that is some sort of shortage situation since they are almost the same kind of pizza.
I live near Seattle, and our stores have been a little sparse lately, but I blamed it on the fact that all the ways to get over the mountains were closed for snow for several days. I went to Costco today, they didn’t have the butter I like, but they had other kinds, and there’s no limit on toilet paper. Everything else I wanted there and at the regular store was there. What is up with cream cheese? I heard about the shortage before Christmas and went stampeding out to make sure I had enough for my Christmas desserts. There was plenty, and I’ve seen it every time I’ve shopped since.
Philadelphia (the cream cheese brand) had a cyberattack late last year and it majorly affected their production.
Here we are having bagged salad and frozen potato problems as well. And sourdough bread.
I think the big shortage, grocery-wise, in my town is still labor. Reddit says that pickup orders at Kroger are sometimes taking two days -TWO DAYS- to get filled. As in, I guess you get the little automated notice that says “yay, your Kroger pickup order will be ready at 6 tomorrow night.” And you get there, and it’s not ready, And if you’re lucky enough to get someone to pick up the phone at the store – it may actually be TWO DAYS from when your order was supposed to be ready when you actually get it. My co-worker’s husband works in a different department in this chain, but has been pulled to work pick-up orders. They are desperately short staffed; I am avoiding Kroger as long as I possibly can. (we do not live in an area where the workers are striking FWIW.)
I went to the coop and to Whole Foods last weekend. The coop was low on produce and especially salad mixes and lettuce. The dairy case was fine, though. Whole Foods was well-stocked and I would not have known at all that there was a pandemic or any supply chain issues.
My pick up orders seem to be half filled lately. Sometimes I go in the store afterwards and find that the store is not out. Labor quality is the issue. I get it. I don’t want to be in the store either.
I usually shop during the morning on a week day (the joys of working from home). Lots of masks, not to crowded. I shopped later at night last week – no masks not even employees. I felt the need to wipe my groceries.
Also can we bring back reusable bags please?
OH, this is something I hadn’t taken into account: reusable bags! Our store wouldn’t allow them for QUITE a long time—LONG after it was clear that the virus was NOT spreading on cloth bags. But then they allowed them again, and now THAT’S been for quite a long time. (I’m STILL working on using the many, many, many plastic bags I acquired while they weren’t allowing them.)
Random note that food pantries often appreciate donations of plastic bags if you want to get rid of a *bunch* of them at once. (also empty dozen-size egg cartons so people can take eggs home in a sane way from the bulk egg things)
I have WAY too many plastic bags but single-use plastics are supposedly becoming illegal here later this year (I’m going to digress for a moment and say how annoyed I am about this… it’s been proven that, at least for grocery bags, the impact of this will actually be worse for the environment. NPR did a podcast and several articles about here about it. Here’s one: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/09/711181385/are-plastic-bag-bans-garbage. This ban is a knee-jerk reaction to public opinion.), so I’m going to keep hoarding them to use as garbage bags until I run out.
Me too! I have a little holder thing under the sink that holds plastic grocery bags perfectly open for trash, and I don’t want to go back to a regular kitchen trash can ever.
I’m in central Texas and have had no problem getting anything I need. Some prices are up a bit, but we are managing with no real difficulties. Oh, I did think of one thing: a specialty bacon was out of stock (but I think it might have been due to to digital coupon for $2 off). Curbside pickup is a little less accessible, but I assume it’s because the virus is surging and staff is out sick. I’m sorry for those struggling to get what they need, but did want to say that shortages aren’t everywhere.
Another central Texas report: frozen potatoes were sparse last week. I got the HEB Potato Puffs (tater tot equivalent), but I wasn’t happy about it because the HEB Crispy Rounds are way better. Well, I was still happy to have fried potatoes.
It’s interesting how different this is all over the country. I’m in Pennsylvania and the two grocery stores where I do most of my shopping have been totally fine. I haven’t noticed empty shelves or anything in particular being consistently out of stock. The one place I did notice a shortage the other day was at a drugstore where I noticed the cold and flu aisle was almost completely empty. But I guess that makes sense with Covid giving a lot of people head cold symptoms right now.
This weekend we took an overnight trip to the DC suburbs and I had to run into Target for something and I noticed that their grocery section was practically bare in most of the aisles. It’s so strange because I live only a few hours from there but it’s a totally different world.
I will say that we live in a part of PA that is a known hub for warehouses/trucking/shipping so I think maybe that’s one of the reasons our stores are staying pretty well stocked. (I also haven’t had any trouble getting Covid tests and it seems like those are really hard to come by everywhere else.)
The DC empty grocery thing was because of the big traffic jam, I think.
The regular grocery store was out of most dairy products and produce a few days ago. I went to the smaller organic grocery for milk. It had plenty of dairy and produce but the meat section was totally and completely empty. However, this was a few days after the 2nd of two snows. And there was plenty of food and I could get many items on my list.
Wednesday is my grocery day so I am sure I’ll have something different to report, but the biggest thing here is imported Asian noodles. There was a lot of infrastructure damage to the highway from Vancouver inland, and so things like that have been hard to come by. Also, due to the floods that damaged the highway, there was damage to poultry farms, and a few weeks there are NO eggs at all. But then my son ran out yesterday to the W*lmart and brought home eggs, organic and free-run no less. So it might be a “my grocery store” thing.
It’s been weird what one chain/store will have that another won’t. I prefer one store’s house brand cream cheese but they have been out (at least when I try to buy it) for a several weeks now. Many times the only cream cheese on the shelf is flavored Philly Cream Cheese. And expensive. So I mentioned the lack of cream cheese to my husband and he checked the next time he was in the other chain grocery store. He found plain Philly cream cheese. I don’t know if the store brand was also available or how expensive that tub was.
Orange juice seems to be another one that might be fine one week and then completely picked over or low stock the next. I did a grocery pick up order from our bigger grocery store and they did not have their store brand orange juice. I did not allow for substitutions so I don’t know if there were national brands to be had. I stopped at our smaller grocery store and they had 1 national brand in 2 different iterations and that was it. No store brand or other national brands.
I forgot to put hash browns on my grocery pick up. Sunday morning my husband went to the smaller grocery store and they had no hash browns of any kind except for hash brown patties. He texted me a picture of the empty freezer shelves in the store.
Also, I’ve been meaning to mention that I got the Kawaii Kitties calendar. For the last 2 years I’ve used Sandra Boynton’s Everyday’s a Holiday calendar. And as much as I love her drawings in the squares, I equally hate trying to write around them. The Kitties calendar is so sparse and clean and exactly what I needed this January. I think I will feel the same way about it in December.
May I ask how the Covid Tests for your kids turned out? My mom needed to go to urgent care mid-December and they of course did a Covid test. But there was absolutely no follow up. The urgent care nurse didn’t even give my mom a phone number or web address so she could follow up on her own. The urgent care is part of the medical group that her pulmonologist is in so at her appointment in early January she mentioned it to the nurse there. Who seemed quite surprised that my mom did not know what the results of her test was. The nurse looked it up — the test was negative. My mom had gone on the assumption that if no one called to say it was positive it must be negative and went about her life.
WE STILL DON’T HAVE THE TEST RESULTS!! They went A WEEK AGO SUNDAY! I’m going to ask Paul to call them today.
Any word on them? That length of time is sincerely not okay.
I know!! It’s of almost no use if it’s going to take that long! Paul called, and they were able to give him the results, and they were all negative.
Yay!!! But also, grrrrr
We’re having a very weird shortage this week (every week is different here it seems). This week they were out of fresh brussel sprouts, organic chex-type cereal, and shredded pepper jack. None of these things is fundamental to existence but it was such a weird and random assortment of things to be out of that it was noticeable.
I have been doing mostly curbside pickup, but had to go into the store to pick up a prescription renewal on Saturday around 5pm. It was NUTS inside! People everywhere, and they were out of not only things I’d noticed recently had become scarce (coleslaw mix – not in that often these days; sweet and salty kettle corn – not seen for weeks at this point in any brand), but it was like a plague of locusts had swept through the produce department with huge swaths of empty shelves. The line to check out – for the first time I’d seen since the start of the pandemic – stretched to the end of the store and down the frozen food aisle.
You know, as I was dealing with the circumstances I actually thought “I hope Swistle does a grocery store post so I can mention this!”
Our grocery store is hit or miss. Sometimes I can’t get non-dairy milk like Almond or Soy and eggs, other times I can’t get produce. In my case I think it is more weather related (and the Kroger strike) then pandemic. Our pass and Canyon (I live in Colorado) often close due to accidents or weather and the trucks literally can’t reach us. It even affects our gas supply. I usually go on Saturday and have to time it right or the trucks aren’t there yet or if I go too late things are picked over. Always an adventure!
Last weekend my grocery store was the worst I’ve ever seen it at any stage of the pandemic. There was NO produce. Literally just onions. No salad, no greens, no carrots, cauliflower, broccoli. There were some tomatoes. For fruit, they had a few apples & pears and a few too-old berries, nothing else. The meat counter was 90% empty. There was 0 milk. The entire dairy section was mostly gone. There were no crackers. But then I *was* able to get things that are often hard to come by, like pre-packaged sandwich meat. (For context, we had just had TWO big snowstorms that disrupted the supply chain, on top of Everything Else).
Then I went again this weekend on Saturday morning, braced for the worst, but it seems like ALL the backlogged shipments had turned up, and in fact the store was overcrowded with large carts and pallets in most aisles as the workers bustled around re-stocking everything. Milk was still low (but maybe they just hadn’t gotten around to that pallet yet!) but 90% of everything else was abundant.
The unpredictability of it all makes me SO stressed out.
Following the Great Rotini Outage of December, which resolved, we next ran into a Saltine Shortage (no saltines at our store for three weeks), and tortillas were bafflingly non-existent briefly.
Store-brand mac&cheese and frozen fried chicken have also been out of stock for a couple of weeks. I figure the fried chicken is a mystery/supply chain thing, but I’d bet the saltines and the mac & cheese is the whole “at least 2% of the population here is currently sick with covid, many of them are feeling crummy” thing. (I’d bet ditto on the reports of cough drops – we’ve had covid, the flu, *and* strep going around locally to an extreme extent, so yeah, that would be more cough-drop demand than average for this time of year.)
(and there have been a ton of bagged-salad recalls over the past two months; thanks, sloppy water systems carrying effluent from cows into lettuce fields.)
Storms and covid staff outages at all levels of the supply chain and wheeeee! But it should resolve or at least mostly resolve.
One of my friends went grocery shopping Sunday morning and said many shelves were empty. My husband went last night (different grocery store, different area of the city) and a couple of things were very low – bananas and something else I can’t remember. We’ve generally been very lucky and I’m not a hardcore meal planner and both my kids are away at school so we haven’t been overly impacted shopping for only two of us.
I bought a set of the Royal Doulton Ellen Degeneres bowls at Sears for a friend’s anniversary present a few years ago and have regretted not buying myself the same ones ever since. Little bowls are endlessly useful and fun.
It’s the plain(not veggie or odd grain)spaghetti noodles – any brand or size that are out in my town. No, husband, angel hair noodles are not an acceptable substitute. I actually have had to have all kinds of shaped noodles shipped from target.com because they are out of stock when I do pick up!
Also caffeine free diet colas – either major brand, bottle or canned, have been sparse for weeks but totally out since Christmas. This is one silly thing that is making my life worse. I have 5 kids at home and I need a fizzy no caffeine drink after a morning of coffee coffee coffee. No husband, I don’t want to just switch to water in afternoon or switch to decaf coffee In morning but regular caffeinated soda in the afternoon.
Also, we can’t buy cute fancy bowls because we are still in a phase that is plastic toddler sized bowls. And we use 8 per day, easy.
BETHANY. Do you already have THESE?: French Bull melamine mini bowls
They are expensive, I will admit. AND: we have broken SEVERAL, even though they are MELAMINE and SHOULD NOT BREAK, so I can’t even stand behind their quality. (To be fair, we have tiles in the kitchen that break ANYTHING—a sharp contrast from the linoleum floors we had in our old kitchen, where sometimes even a breakable bowl would BOUNCE.) But their colors make me so happy.
On the other hand, I am also made so happy by the colors of the Target Pillowfort toddler bowls, and those are significantly cheaper and we haven’t broken a single one.
Cat food! I can handle all of the other shortages with not quite equanimity but at least a little more grace, but the cat food shortages are making me panicky. If we can’t find our preferred human food, it’s *fine*, there is still more than plenty out there for sustenance even if it’s not as enjoyable as what we want in our hearts. If I can’t find the right cat food though, our 17 year old orange lovebug just.doesn’t.eat. He is 22 pounds, so it’s not like he’s wasting away but bad things happen when cats don’t eat. It’s honestly making me low key stressed All The Time.
Ohhhhhhh this is giving me empathetic FIX IT feelings!! I wish we had teleporters, so that we could all put out Watch Lists, and then if one of us saw the lovebug’s cat food in our own store we could put it right into the teleporter!!
This made me wince: our dog is on a prescription diet that is helping (along with 4 meds a day) keep her healthy and alive. I would be at my wits’ end if I couldn’t find her food!
Will your cat eat canned tuna? (and does your vet approve of giving your cat canned meat intended for humans?)
My dog has a bunch of skin/allergy issues, so he eats a very specific, very expensive type of food (we get it shipped from chewy). The bags of food went from $50 each to $70 (!!!) last time I ordered. I won’t tell you how many bags we go through a week, but let’s just say I spend WAY more money on freaking something food than I ever thought imaginable.
Freaking dog* food. What the hell, autocorrect.
I like your coping thought, Swistle. I am a person who really needs to have Enough Food (or actually probably More Than Enough) stocked to feel comfortable. Remembering that there is plenty even if it’s not my preferred brand or type is helpful.
Swistle’s Coping Thoughts are so often very helpful! I am also a “need food stocks” person and am trying to keep that under control such that we don’t end up with expired/wasted foods, and “food exists; it is just not the exact type I’m looking for” is a useful thing. Okay, fine, they’re out of pasta, *BUT* they have rice, and rice works as a basic starch…
Baby formula is currently the scarce item stressing me out! And of course, we have to buy the fancy hypoallergenic kind, so we can’t substitute. Our regular store had been out of the big cans forever, then had a run of them, and now nothing. Amazon was doing 4-packs for a bit, but now has none with no hope of a restock date, and Target seems to randomly have 2-4 cans available online. So hard to even keep a decent personal backstock when it’s like this!
Aiieieeeeee this is very stressful!!
I don’t know if this will help AT ALL, or maybe be WORSE than unhelpful because it’s an unusable idea, but I have a related anecdote. At the pediatric GI place where Edward gets his infusions, we can often hear the nurses talking on the phone. More than once, I have heard them working with someone to acquire formula. And at least at our clinic, formula sales reps come to them regularly to give them samples—and by “samples,” I mean whole cans. And so I have overheard our nurses saying things such as “Is there any chance you’d be able to come in sometime this week? We could give you what we have. And let me check with [other department] to see if they have any spare cans”—and so on. And I have overheard our nurses being quite adamant on the topic—things like giving some other ideas (pharmacists with a connection, a store they know of that had it when they last checked, etc.), and then saying, “And DO please call us back if you still have trouble. Dr._____ would NOT want [child’s name] to be without this formula and WILL want to have us find a way to get it for you.”
So many reasons this might be unhelpful: you may be unconnected with a clinic; it might be that our clinic gets extra resources for some reason but other clinics don’t; it may be that our nurses are extra helpful for some reason and other nurses would not be, or wouldn’t be able to do anything; this formula might not be one that clinics get samples of; and it may be that even if you DID have a clinic and it DID have resources and it DID have helpful nurses and they DID normally get samples of this kind of formula, THEY TOO would be currently having trouble getting/finding it!! or, they’d be able to give you several cans, but that doesn’t last long AT ALL so then the stress would just pick right back up again. So once again, I like my teleporting idea better, where if any of us happened to find the formula at our stores, we could just toss it into the portal and it would get to you!
I am keeping that plan in my back pocket, but the cans are so tiny, I think we’d blow through one a day at this point (8 months old). I put out a call for help finding the bigger cans on FB and people helpfully/unhelpfully picked up the SMALL cans which, while not as small as the pediatrician sample cans, are still a bit too small to be really useful unless I get, say 30 of them. I guess it pushes the problem a little bit down the road, but, UGH, what a dumb, stressful problem to have.
Is it okay to ask what kind of formula it is? I’d like to have a try at my google-fu and see if I can find a supplier (checking drugstores like CVS or Walgreens that will ship is my first thought; ebay is my second). (I like trying to find things; I am a nerd.)
Been there, done that, but Similac Alimentum. Looking for the 19.8 oz cans, not the 12.1 oz…for now.
The powdered, or the ready-to-drink kind?
The powdered kind :)
Bizarrely, it seems to be currently available for shipping from Walmart:
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Similac-Alimentum-Hypoallergenic-Baby-Formula-For-Food-Allergies-and-Colic-19-8-oz-Can/123956737
(I don’t know if this is a sane price, though; formula is out of my league)
Walmart has some really interesting geo-tagging going on, depending on location, it will appear available for shipping for some but not others. Not sure I quite get it!
Maybe they show things for shipping only if they’re in a nearby-ish warehouse and make them vanish if all nearby warehouses are out of stock? I don’t know; that’s a new one for me.
Anyway, if it remains elusive and you need someone to buy a half dozen of the big cans and ship them along to you (assuming you are in the US; I am not up for international postage…), let me know! My pseudonym email address is k a t e c r u f i at gmail dot com
I love little bowls too. When you mentioned the deer ones on Amazon I put them on my wishlist and my MIL got me them for Christmas. My kids have been using them a lot. I didn’t get a blue one though – just two green and two red. Still very cute and satisfying though. I will have to keep my eye out for Target ones.
I just want to say that I adore the little bowls as well. AND the Target Pillowfort toddler bowls. Having a toddler myself…. well, preschooler now I guess…. we have bought two sets of these. Then I bought another set in different colors for the cats. Then I bought a rainbow toddler bowl in the same aisle. We are STILL using the Gerber Bunch-A-Bowls we bought when my first baby was born (he is now almost 14!). Munchkin also makes decent ones, if you want plastic bowls.
I also have tiny Pioneer Woman bowls that bring me joy, although they are easy to break and we are already down one.
We’ve been lucky here– we haven’t had a lot of shortages. My husband is a wine/beer buyer and works in a grocery. While it was very concerning the entire time because he was exposed daily, it was handy for him to be able to grab things for us.
My Dad is on dialysis and one his favorite drinks is Sprite Zero. The stores near them can’t get or keep them in stock. He can’t drink soda with a dark color anymore. Andrew is able to buy them and we deliver the goods to their house.
Swistle, this has nothing to do with groceries, but I was thinking today about your cleaning situation and wondering if you’ve figured out a solution? I ask because my husband doesn’t like having cleaners come into our house, and while right now the kids do our cleaning, they’ll be gone soon. I don’t intend to go back to cleaning it myself. So I’m just curious how you are handling it!
Right now I’m still hand-wringing, resenting, and going back to our pandemic routine: I have certain things I do on a schedule (cleaning toilets and bathroom floors on Friday nights, for example), and Paul vacuums, and I give the kids a chore (clean a sink, clean the shower, that kind of thing) each weekend. We’re…keeping up with it. But if I think about it too much, I start getting panicky. I don’t want to keep doing it! But I still can’t picture bringing back housecleaners.
I hear you on this. Thinking of you all.
I live in Japan so a very different situation but I tend to shop right when the shop opens early on a Saturday morning and had been worried for weeks about shortages especially of fresh store-made prepared foods. I kept thinking that there must be fewer workers or something. Then I went on a Friday night after work and behold, abundant shelves and tons of prepared food! I just shop at the wrong time.