Sunday, July 05, 2020

Out of Stock

Nearly everything is back in stock at the supermarket.  I can't quite get my preferred types of toilet paper, and meats are inconsistently available, but most things are there.  Yet I can't for the life of me figure out why graham crackers have been unavailable for almost a month. Are people hoarding them?

9 comments:

  1. Heidi says tie-dye is impossible to find locally

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  2. S'mores season, possibly.

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  3. I'm told you can find yeast again. One supermarket is better stocked w/ toilet paper/paper towels than the other, but both have less on the shelf than last year. Available, though.

    Have you been down to the local gun shop lately? I was curious, and went to Cabelas. Nothing much was left of the AR pattern machines, and the handgun selection was much smaller than usual. Lots of ordinary rifles were left, though, and it looked like they still had 9mm ammo. I get the impression that a lot of people envision themselves in the same situation as the two lawyers.

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  4. Even within chains, supplies can be inconsistent. Pound packages of yeast disappeared. Easy explanation: with more people staying home and baking bread, there was much more profit in selling yeast in ounce or 4 ounce lots.

    One local HEB store(HEB is the locally dominant grocery chain) has had for several weeks about 4 dozen 1-pound packages of bread yeast.Usually pound packages of bread yeast come from Canada only, but now there also pound packages of yeast from Mexico. Other local HEB stores have no pound packages of yeast. The small packages and 4 ounce jars of bread yeast started appearing about a month ago, but supplies are inconsistent at both HEB and WalMart.


    The local Mexican grocery- part of a chain- stopped its weekly ad circulars with the virus scare, but I notice that many items that periodically appear as specials of the week still get their prices dropped for specials of the week.

    Graham crackers- no idea.Maybe because kids are home?

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  5. WRT the crackers--we bought cinnamon grahams by mistake (for s'mores, as C.B. suggested), and when I went to Walmart for the regular variety, they were almost out. They were in a special s'mores sales section...

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  6. I gathered that yeast crop production couldn't be easily ramped up to match the spike in home baking demand.

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  7. Had a long search trying to find a replacement pressure canner (as my garden starts to produce more than we can eat right away) after discovering that the inherited aluminum pressure cooker and the fancy schmancy Kuhn RIkon I had been using for years are probably unsafe for any but acid foods, and it's a wonder we haven't all died of botulism...am now waiting for the Presto 23 to arrive in 10 days, (by the time the All-American ones are in stock again, my garden will be put to bed for winter) and hope it doesn't turn out to be a scam like the inflatable pool I tried to order from Amazon to amuse my grandkids (don't be suckered as I was). Actually, it's rather odd how many things related to our everyday life have gone in and out of stock recently: canning lids, yeast, cannellini beans, flour, certain garden supplies, rice, gym equipment for my better half, etc. My family are glad I got a subscription to an online source of grass fed meat a year ago. As our supermarket meat deteriorates in quality if you can even get the stuff you want.

    So far no permanent shortages of the basic sustenance, but the niche stuff, and the healthy stuff, and the really fresh stuff is increasingly hard to find. In my local supermarket, they got rid of all the organic and natural and better ethnic food sections to make way for the packing area for groceries people are picking up or having delivered. We hadn't realised how NON mainstream most of our purchases were until then.

    Our local Indian grocery has had plenty of staples, wonderful spices, rice, beans, cheapest vegetables. While they don't sell loss leader Big Name soda for red-blooded normal offspring with regrettable tastes, and they have had shortages of a few utterly essential items like Falafel Mix, they have overall had decent, more reasonable stuff than my Whole Foods, our local Trader Joe's (worse quality lately) and the grumbled-about supermarket.

    We had some luck with orders from a restaurant supply for awhile, when under serious lockdown there were no delivery slots available from Amazon and our local stores, Extremely high quality, and had things that were out of stock locally back in April and May. But kind of pricey for some stuff. The Mormons have great staples, packaged for an apocalypse, and reasonable, but they are often out of stock of certain things...

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  8. I never cared for graham crackers.

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  9. Hello Everyone,

    Probably eight weeks ago I mentioned to my wife that certain food stuffs were missing in the store and I couldn't figure out why. The answer was obvious to her: all of the sudden a bunch of moms and their kids were home during the day and the moms needed to get a variety of snacks for the kids. Probably the same thing happening here.

    Glenn

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