Shopping in the Time of the Coronavirus

[batmagadanleadoff]

Chocolate sales soar as antidote to pandemic stress, data shows

Chocolate was the most popular candy that comforted Americans during the past three months of the pandemic, sales data show.

Consumers bought nearly $3.7 billion in chocolate during the 17-week period that ended June 27 – a 6.3 percent jump from a year ago, according to sales data from Nielsen. Multi-serve packages brought in almost $3 billion of that total, indicating that buyers either bought chocolate in bulk to share or just to have all to themselves.

Sales for salty snacks increased by almost 20 percent to more than $9 billion, according to Nielsen, especially with potato chips, tortilla chips and popcorn. Sweet snacks brought in $1.8 billion in sales, an almost 16 percent increase from a year ago.

Shopping for candy and other snacks reflects earlier trends in consumers stocking their pantries with packaged foods like Oreos, Goldfish, Doritos and instant soup instead of fresh and private-label products. With the economic and health stressors spurred by the pandemic, and backed by the temporary closures of restaurants, indulgent snacking grew in popularity.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2 ... AKGHNDJ45E

[Ceetar]

price and convenience factors in there too. half of america is unemployed and maybe not going for "private-label" products, and if you have to hunt or shop around, that's not really encouraged either.

me, mostly I bought beer. Gotta support my local small businesses! (also podcasts and baseball statistics, but those things aren't food)

[batmagadanleadoff]

About two weeks ago, however, I did run out of those disinfecting wipes that I'd never purchased before this health emergency. And I can't find them anywhere, now. Everybody's out of those. At least where I shop. And it's fucking up my system.

Those wipes were the first thing to disappear, even before toilet paper. And, unlike TP, it was at least logical that demand for them shot up and and supplies were wiped out (pun partially intended).
Demand obviously remains high but they're starting to reappear in stores although in small quantities so you almost have to turn up in the store as they're being stocked.

Yeah, I'm getting that sense because I'm literally out hunting for these like a tiger hunts prey. No luck.

Wiped out by demand: Clorox says disinfecting wipes shortage will last until 2021



Excerpt:

The supply chain is on the rox.

Clorox top brass warned Monday that store shelves would not be fully stocked with its disinfecting wipes until next year, Reuters reported.

The cleaning brand has been unsurprisingly swamped by demand during the coronavirus pandemic. Its products flew off store shelves in March and have been hoarded ever since.

"Given the fact that cold and flu sits in the middle of the year, and then we expect the pandemic to be with us for the entirety of the year, it will take the full year to get up to the supply levels that we need to be at," Clorox president Linda Rendle said Monday, according to CNN.

https://www.nydailynews.com/news/nation ... story.html

[kcmets]

1/3 cup of bleach, gallon of water and roll of paper towels = disinfectant wipes

[Benjamin Grimm]

It's now been four months since I've set foot in a supermarket. I've been using the curbside pickup and I've gotten to a point where I can't imagine pushing a cart through a supermarket for a half hour and then standing on a checkout line. When this is over I'll probably still make quick stops, like for a carton of milk or something, but I may never go back to shopping the traditional way.

[kcmets]

Maybe I'm weird (of course I am) but I enjoy going to the supermarket.

[whippoorwill]

Just got home from grocery store. The required morons were there mask less, and of course talking and breathing a mile a minute,even the ones that were alone

[cal sharpie]

My wife has been doing most of the shopping but going early on Friday morning when she usually goes is a breeze - in and out. We are both way to obsessive over all things food to let others pick out stuff for us. Our favorite thing has been going to the farmers market every weekend - outdoors, everyone masked and, this being summer, really delicious food.

[Fman99]

I still do a weekly run to the grocery store. it's the only time I have to wear a mask for more than 2-3 minutes, but I would be missing 28 things if I had to try and have someone else get all the things I know we need and don't think of until I get there. Luckily it's about 98% people wearing masks and wearing them properly. Covid rates in my county are also consistently pretty low these days.

I've come around on masks now. They suck but luckily I almost never have to wear one.

[LWFS]

I would LOVE our farmer's market here in my aunt's NJ town... if it weren't so hit-or-miss. Plus, it's on a Saturday morning, so if the produce is particularly pricey or "meh" or both, we end up having to hit the produce market on a midday Saturday run.

We've been hitting that produce market-- which tends to stock a fair amount of local produce/dairy, anyway-- 10-15 min away 1-2 times a week, with butcher/supermarket/fishmonger stops about biweekly or triweekly. Have had a good amount of time to pick my spots, so it works out.

[whippoorwill]

1/3 cup of bleach, gallon of water and roll of paper towels = disinfectant wipes

I’m going to put on some old clothes and try this. I wonder what kind of paper towels would hold up best

[Frayed Knot]

1/3 cup of bleach, gallon of water and roll of paper towels = disinfectant wipes

I’m going to put on some old clothes and try this. I wonder what kind of paper towels would hold up best

Doesn't matter since paper towels are every bit as unavailable as the disinfectant wipes.

[kcmets]

Paper products haven't been much of an issue here the last month or so. One oddball
thing that is mysteriously hard to find on the shelves is canned pumpkin. I give the dog
a few tablespoons of pumpkin with his dinner.

[Frayed Knot]

I think what happened is that paper companies -- and there are three* companies that manufacture most of the paper products in this country -- shifted their focus over to toilet paper after the hoarding back
in March/April wiped out most of that supply. But because of that, stores are starting to see the delayed results of that shift so while TP is now not a problem, paper towels and paper napkins are suddenly in
short supply.
The disinfectant wipes are just going to take some time. They're an item which some people bought occasionally but now just about everyone has decided they need one or two canisters plus a backup for
each room in the house.




* virtually every brand you've heard of is under the umbrellas of either Proctor & Gamble, Georgia-Pacific, or Kimberly-Clark

[Edgy MD]

This weekend, I visited the alien landscape that is Big Lots! and I realized that, despite their acre-sized footprint, strewn with dusty housewares and evergreen non-perishable foodstuffs, they keep a single, tiny refrigerated bin of perhaps six gallons of milk, and maybe one or two dozen eggs, and this is what allowed them to stay open through the lockdown.

[Frayed Knot]

Revisiting a nearly year old post here:

I've been doing pickups from grocery stores. You place your order online, then (about a week to ten days later) pull up in the parking lot, pop your trunk, and a masked stranger loads you up with groceries.

Is this something you're still using? Still plan to continue using?
Is the 7 - 10 day lag time still the norm or has that improved?
Can you not get same day service, or it that only theoretically possible but time slots are too scarce?

[Benjamin Grimm]

Oh, it's gotten much better. I can usually get same day, or worst-case, next day. Still using it, and I will probably continue to do so well after the pandemic ends. I don't miss, in any way, pushing a cart through a store, waiting in a checkout line, loading groceries on the belt, putting the bags back in the cart, and loading the bags into the trunk.

Now I just have to do the last step, unload the groceries from the car when I get home.

[Frayed Knot]

Is this a service run by the store or something they sub-contract out to an outside operation? Insta-Cart is one such op I've heard of (and not heard well of) but there are probably others.
What, if anything, is the fee to use?

Now I just have to do the last step, unload the groceries from the car when I get home.

That's what your personal robot is for.

[Frayed Knot]

Well the good news is that Grape-Nuts cereal is now shipping at its pre-Covid levels to all areas of the country.
And if you were one of those who paid (not making this up) Black Market Rates of over $100 per/box, Post will reimburse you if you have a valid receipt for such a stupid purchase. [they didn't say 'stupid', I did]

[Benjamin Grimm]

Is this a service run by the store or something they sub-contract out to an outside operation? Insta-Cart is one such op I've heard of (and not heard well of) but there are probably others.
What, if anything, is the fee to use?

I know Wegman's uses Instacart when I get a delivery, but when I shop at Giant and do the curbside pickup they seem to be fulfilling the order themselves. The fee is $2.95. At this point, if I just need three or four items I'll go into the store and buy them the old-fashioned way. (I haven't had cause to do this yet.) But usually I'm getting about $100 worth of groceries, so the $2.95 fee feels pretty negligible.

[Benjamin Grimm]

I pull into one of the designated spots, call them on the phone, give them my name and tell them which numbered spot I'm in, and pop the trunk. They load up the trunk and I'm on my way. I rarely have to wait more than a couple of minutes.

[Fman99]

The problem with this, still, is that my "list" that I prepare each week includes the specific things that my family requested, but, also, probably 20 things that I know I need or want but don't write down, and only purchase once I'm at the store. In that scenario I don't get any of those things.

I don't mind it, I guess, it's a 45 minute errand once a week and I can pick the cuts of meat that look best and make on the fly menu changes in my brain if there are certain ingredients out of stock when I get there.

[Frayed Knot]

The fee is $2.95. At this point, if I just need three or four items I'll go into the store and buy them the old-fashioned way. (I haven't had cause to do this yet.) But usually I'm getting about $100 worth of groceries, so the $2.95 fee feels pretty negligible.

Yeah, I was thinking that if this kind of thing had been around back in the day when my mom was shopping for a husband plus five kids and a dog, a fee of even double that size which allowed her to skip
the supermarket would have been a downright bargain even without a global pandemic.
Of course she would have had to learn how to actually use a computer without mangling things up ... but that's a whole 'nother issue.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

As Fman mentioned there are lots of potential "pitfalls" for e-commerce-enabled grocery orders including the loss of incremental "impulse" items they merchandise at the checkout. Plus stores getting instacarted and shopped at the same time have inventory issues since the apps can't actually know the stock condition at a store with the same reliability they could from a warehouse that doesn't have walk-in shoppers picking through the inventory allatime. Finally doing the shopping and fulfillment is a labor the shopper used to do for free, that's costly.

That said the retailers know that folks like Grimm who like the experience of online ordering and pickup are likely to devote a greater percentage of their overall food $$ to the store that does that (gaining market share despite losing $$ on the cost of shopping for you)-- and the data they glean from that kind of shopping is more valuable than in-store since they can see with magnitudes more granularity of what you searched for, substituted, etc, then take it, chop it up a billion ways, apply AI forecasting, integrate offers from suppliers, make educated guesses as to other things you would like, and deliver them to you in coupons, ads and offers. The ad revenue the retailer generates from this, goes back into addressing the cost to shop & deliver on you behalf and to things like warehouses staffed by automated robots who one day will pick orders for you.

Instacart is a whole other thing, a "marketplace" where shoppers who want things delivered go so the retailers need to be on it or lose to those that are. The delivery is all crowdsourced a la uber, which is a hunger games type gig for hustlers that's probably the closest way to handle inefficient tasks at scale. Instacart is very controversial in that it's both a friend and foe to the partnering retailers, giving them that market expansion and greater reach but competing with them for data and ad revenue that otherwise would belong to them

[Fman99]

So what you're saying is it's all SkyNet basically. And when the Terminators get here it will be Wegmans' fault. I knew it!