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Grocery store shortages are back

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Re: Grocery store shortages are back

#41

Post by CaptainBanger »

cableshaft wrote: post #7
hprotagonist wrote: post #3

"There are some issues with out-of-stocks, but it tends to be a situation where if you go to a store on a Tuesday night, maybe something's out of stock, but by Wednesday sometime it's back in store," Rose told NPR. This describes about the “worst” i’ve seen, in new england. I had no trouble getting some fairly fussy ingredients for holiday cooking or my annual winter anti-depression baking spasms. Still, march 2020 d…

Yeah I did the pantry thing after March 2020 (in the basement, the kitchen doesn't have a proper pantry) and wasn't careful enough about protecting it. It was fine for a year, but this winter we got mice in the house and now we have to toss what wasn't in cans or plastic containers already. We set some live traps and I've caught and released (several miles away) four mice already. Still a good idea, we just can't hav…

No post body was provided.

Re: Grocery store shortages are back

#42

Post by nefitty »

hprotagonist wrote: post #3

"There are some issues with out-of-stocks, but it tends to be a situation where if you go to a store on a Tuesday night, maybe something's out of stock, but by Wednesday sometime it's back in store," Rose told NPR. This describes about the “worst” i’ve seen, in new england. I had no trouble getting some fairly fussy ingredients for holiday cooking or my annual winter anti-depression baking spasms. Still, march 2020 d…

What do you like to bake? I have never attempted. I would like to surprise my wife one of these cold winter evenings.

Re: Grocery store shortages are back

#43

Post by reaperducer »

groby_b wrote: post #35
syshum wrote: post #30

I have not been inside a grocery store for over a year... But I have not seen any major changes in my curbside pickup order, no major out of stocks, no major substitution.

Same thing here. I suspect that's due to the fact that a) curbside services charge a nifty premium, and stores revenue share with them. I'd be surprised if that doesn't lead to prioritization. b) this is demand usually known well in advance, which helps the stores deal with planning. c) In many stores, it's strictly a shelving issue. If the curbside service has in-store pickers, there's a chance they can skip shelvin…

Don't forget:

e) Curbside usually doesn't offer everything in store. It only offers the most popular or plentiful items.

For example, if I go to my local mega-chain supermarket, I can choose from six or eight different brands of white bread. If I do the order online, there's only three.

Re: Grocery store shortages are back

#44

Post by prawn »

ravenstine wrote: post #13
prawn wrote: post #6

Meat shelves have been cleaned out at the supermarkets in Australia the last couple of visits. Hopefully encourages people to try their local butcher instead.

Freezing meat when it's available is an option too.

Haven't checked this time, but last time the shelves cleared, the chest freezers were all sold out or expensive in second hand marketplaces. The used market went from people struggling to sell cheap to 4-5x the price and virtually none on offer.

Re: Grocery store shortages are back

#46

Post by prawn »

WalterBright wrote: post #33
cableshaft wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I did the pantry thing after March 2020 (in the basement, the kitchen doesn't have a proper pantry) and wasn't careful enough about protecting it. It was fine for a year, but this winter we got mice in the house and now we have to toss what wasn't in cans or plastic containers already. We set some live traps and I've caught and released (several miles away) four mice already. Still a good idea, we just can't hav…

Amazon sells galvanized steel garbage cans of various sizes. They have a lid that naturally seals tightly. They're varmint proof for anything up to a bear. Perfect for mouse-proofing your food. My experience with mice is that they travel in 6 packs. If you catch one, there are probably 5 more.

One of my enduring memories was in my school years visiting a friend whose family had recently moved to Australia from Asia. At the end of their kitchen bench, they had a food-grade plastic bin larger than the stereotypical Oscar-the-grouch trash can, full of rice. We buy rice in 5-10kg bags but maybe I should be trying to find larger.

Re: Grocery store shortages are back

#47

Post by nickvanw »

I live in the Seattle-area where we've been hit with some serious winter weather in the mountain passes, to the point that for a period of a few hours, there was practically no route to drive to a neighboring state, and the passes were closed for the better part of 72+ hours.

Even with that, and the rest of the aforementioned issues, I have had virtually no problem shopping for what I needed with some small changes, like buying a different brand of eggs or getting organic bananas. This was even after 2-3 days of mountain closures and the panic shopping that goes with that.

This seems to mainly be an issue with convenience - decades of excellent logistics have trained us to basically expect a store to always be in stock of a wide variety of perishables. It's no surprise that when something disrupts that finely-tuned machine, we have to deal with some small setbacks.

Re: Grocery store shortages are back

#48

Post by nate_meurer »

cdjk wrote: post #39
cableshaft wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I did the pantry thing after March 2020 (in the basement, the kitchen doesn't have a proper pantry) and wasn't careful enough about protecting it. It was fine for a year, but this winter we got mice in the house and now we have to toss what wasn't in cans or plastic containers already. We set some live traps and I've caught and released (several miles away) four mice already. Still a good idea, we just can't hav…

I think this is one of the best mouse traps: https://www.automatictrap.com/ Electric traps work too, but are a pain to clean. Snap tracks are effective, but when I had both mice and rats I found that a mouse trap could break a rats leg but let it walk away, and a mouse could eat from a rat trap without triggering it. Neither of those were good outcomes.

On those snap traps, you can bend the wire that holds back the spring downward in slight increments until the trap is so sensitive you can almost set off by blowing on it. This is the only way I was able to clear an infestation of juvenile mice years ago. Before this modification, the small mice were eating the bait without triggering the traps.

Re: Grocery store shortages are back

#49

Post by nate_meurer »

b112 wrote: post #37
adolph wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

House mice and rodents that have lived in buildings for their entire lives will have a slim chance of surviving outdoors. If possible, relocate mice to an outbuilding like a shed or garage. https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/what-do-about-wild-m...

Mice carry disease, and the hantavirus is extremely deadly. I know, I've had it. >50% fatality by some counts. As mice in my area have it, I cannot in good conscience do anything but kill mice I catch. The risks are too high.

FWIW, hantavirus is spread via mouse urine, not by the mice themselves, so the most important way to avoid it is to sanitize places where mice have peed.

Re: Grocery store shortages are back

#50

Post by jimkleiber »

justinator wrote: post #17
jimkleiber wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to live in that area, right near that King Soopers—I hadn't heard about the cause of that fire, thank you for pointing out the investigation into it. Regarding stores, this may seem a bit out of touch, as I assume their prices are probably more expensive and I also don't know what their stock is like, but a friend of mine recently opened a new (small) grocery store[0] downtown[1]. I'm no longer in the area so…

Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out - doesn't hurt to wander by and say hello! Want to stress that the fire investigation is ongoing, but there's a lot of evidence pointing the start of the fire being on the Twelve Tribe's property. But I don't want things to become a witch hunt.

Oh for sure!

> But I don't want things to become a witch hunt.

And i appreciate the qualification on this...I'll just try to follow it more closely than I had been before.

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