It’s Sunday on the Thanksgiving long weekend and the rain has been coming down on and off for most of the day. Seems like an excellent day for a puzzle.
I was looking for a challenging one but what I ended up finding didn’t seem like it would be overly difficult.
I was wrong. The border took us a couple of hours and involved a lot of head scratching and repositioning of pieces that “seemed” to be in the right place…but eventually. were determined to not be.
It’s been funny, the things that have become hot ticket items in this pandemic. We put our heads together and tried to compile a list of things that we’ve noticed because challenging to purchase where normally they were common and plentiful.
Some we had difficulty sourcing ourselves, many were just things that we noticed or read in the news. Most were short lived supply shortages, but others…not so much.
It wasn’t terribly surprising that hand sanitizer, disinfectant wipes, and isopropyl alcohol flew off the shelves in the first few days. The liquid hand soap I usually buy became rather difficult to find too.
Rice and pasta made a bit of sense, I suppose. When being told that we would all be likely facing a shut-in, people went for the dry goods with lasting shelf life.
Toilet paper just made no sense at all. Someone made a joke on the other side of the world and everyone on the planet panicked and bought a stupid amount of toilet paper. I thought it was a joke and, when I visited Costco, I didn’t need toilet paper but took a look out of curiosity…nada…not a roll in stock. Weird. We live in a country that has a strong logging industry…we make paper products here at home…there was no shortage, but everyone turned into a lunatic.
Everyone suddenly turned into a baker so that those of us who normally baked anyway were suddenly without flour, yeast, sugar, baking powder, and baking soda. The world discovered sourdough.
And with all of those new bakers came a need for the accoutrements that go with bread baking…specifically….bread proofing baskets and bread loaf baking pans. Again, out of morbid curiosity I amused myself by perusing the Amazon and the local cooking stores and laughed at the out of stock items that were normally not big sellers.
Milk! I couldn’t figure this one out at first. When we went into lockdown I restarted my weekly SPUD delivery schedule, and I’m glad I already had an account because I wouldn’t have managed to get one otherwise. I’d order my weekly milk and some weeks simply wouldn’t get it. I couldn’t think why milk would become a hot commodity any more than normal, and then discovered that there was actually a glut because of all the restaurant, coffee shops, ice cream shops, etc that suddenly were closed and not purchasing. The government implemented rolling surplus dumping to spread the pain out across the various dairies so, because SPUD purchases from one dairy, every week or two they wouldn’t be able to get any milk as it was Avalon’s turn to dump.
When the world suddenly started working from home…..you couldn’t purchase a decent webcamera to save your life.
With workplaces and schools shut down, people turned to board games and puzzles to entertain themselves and engage the family in some way other than the idiot box. Good luck finding them in local shops. They sold out immediately.
Everyone with a yard became a gardener. As people worried about a stable food supply, many decided to try their green thumbs out at growing vegetables. So seeds and bags of potting soil suddenly vanished.
With summer vacations down the tube, home and garden renovation projects took off. Bark mulch stocks dwindled, and lumber yards emptied. Indoor and outdoor paints and stains were snapped up and supplies were depleted since most of it comes in from out of country and supply chains were interrupted.
People turned to their yards for cooking and BBQs were a hot commodity. We had difficulty finding our usual lump charcoal, and even our two backup brands were almost impossible to find anywhere. As the days get shorter and cooler, people still want to hang out on their decks, so outdoor/patio heaters are now selling like hotcakes.
If not the yard, then picnics in the parks or in anywhere out of town … we have so much great outdoors, it’s not hard to find a place ot plunk down in a spectacular setting and enjoy and afternoon or evening picnic. But if you didn’t already have a picnic basket or a cooler…you choices were few; sales were brisk.
Gyms were shuttered and walking trails were busy, so people turned to bicycles and the shops sold out their stock and long waiting lists were created. Dumbbells and other home exercise equipment sales went through the roof.
As fall creeps ahead and people are suddenly faced with a bounty from those gardens they planted, their freezers are filling up and they are looking for deep freezers or upright freezers. There are long wait times for deliveries I am told.
So, if not freezing, then canning. The world is rediscovering the fun of putting up preserves. I read the other day that canning jars and lids are now (or recently were) very hard to get one’s hands on in some parts. I’ve pretty much always canned and both water-bath can and pressure can. So I am always well stocked and didn’t need anything, but I understand that I might have come up against some shortages if I had not already replenished my stock at the end of last fall.
When I was ordering groceries online there were a few other oddities that I was regularly shorted on or simply couldn’t get for a few months – a few kinds of chocolate, a basil plant, and cut sunflowers. I guess everyone else was snacking on their favourite chocolate, making tomato basil salads, and putting happy flowers in jars….but not us.
What else have you noticed in short supply at some point or other?
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