OT: Dispatches from the front lines - Kroger edition
Some observations from a Sunday afternoon trip to Kroger in Troy.
Several shoppers wearing masks and gloves; other shoppers avoiding said mask wearers.
Pasta and pasta sauce gone. Except for the kind flavored with meat. Frozen pizza also gone, as was the toilet paper.
Plenty of flour, sugar, potatoes, meat, and other staples.
Lessons learned? Americans are incapable of cooking from scratch or cleaning their asses.
Stay safe out there.
Oh no I think American are very capable of cleaning their asses, they just need one roll for each wipe
The monkeys in India are running amuck! Normally, locals and tourists feed the monkeys. With a drop in tourism, fewer people are feeding the normally docile monkeys, causing a sudden food shortage. Monkeys have formed rival gangs, fighting each other and terrorizing anyone in possession of a tasty snack. They started acting “wild” - go figure.
The new one on 18 and Dequindre, Hatter?
Any bottled water left there?
Why do you need bottle water?
Because I'm out of bottled water and don't like tap water
Just buy a Brita pitcher.
Strongly recommend the Black Berkey for filtration. More up front investment, but way more effective than a Brita for taking care of anything truly messy. And cheaper in the long run.
Right? How incredibly wasteful and unnecessary is drinking only bottled water? I drink about 80-100 ounces of water on a sedentary day, and much more when/if I exercise that day. That's 5 bottles of water minimum every day. Around 2000 bottles per year. If my math is correct, almost 60 pounds of plastic per year.
6.8.0Baseball has been canceled, including pitchers.
Most bottled water are just filtered tap water...
US has comparatively much better quality drinking water than the rest of the world. Yes, there are debacles like Flint. If one lives in a relatively new (post 80s) posh neighborhood, chances are the drinking water is pretty good.
No, the one on Coolidge between 14 and Maple. I don't buy bottled water so I didn't check. But they still had plenty of pop and booze if that's your jam.
I bought a fridge sized pur filter pitcher to use instead of bottled. Look into getting one of those, or a different brand, if they're still available.
You guys are lucky. I use the Kroger on the other side of town, Crooks and South, because it's on the way home. That Kroger sucks, it's tiny and doesn't carry half the items a regular Kroger carries.
I shop the same store and did yesterday.
I came to the same conclusion, all the convenience foods/box meals cleared out
Meanwhile meat, ground turkey plentiful, most produce there.
Not only do people want to ride this out at home good.. they want to do so being lazy and without sacrificing an once of comfort.
The only thing on my list, that was gone was Frozen Broccoli. (I know)
Aldi on 14 and crooks still had frozen veg as of 2 days ago. I love that store. The quality of their house brand products is excellent.
I just logged in to say, in the interest of solidarity across the aisles, I agree wholeheartedly with Comrade Hatter. Aldi store brand is money. We also have great luck with their produce in the Charlotte area.
Stay safe, buddy. Let's hope we are around to cancel each other's votes out in November lol!
And more post like this one just add to all the irrational fear and anxiety that already is running rampant.
What is your definition of “irrational?” There are runs on supermarkets right now. That is a fact. People need to make sure they have stuff because everybody is buying all of it. We are wiping our ass with birthday napkins right now.
Get yourself a bidet. They were like $40 on Amazon as of last week.
March 16th, 2020 at 12:01 AM ^
I have one and am not worried about toilet paper! And for the record, they are great!
I did preemptively buy toilet paper about 4 weeks ago so I had some just in case based on what I saw going on in Europe and Asia since I'm heavily involved in dealing with managing this for my company (I did not hoard, my package was about halfway done and I bought 1 package), assuming there would be a run on it here. Wish I was that good at calling stocks...
Indeed. Southeast Asian style bum-guns are even better. Just a little faucet on a hose next to the toilet. Spray for a couple seconds. Wipe off. Done. When I use toilet paper now I hate it. It's dirty, time-consuming, wasteful. You can wash off your ass or you can smear feces.
Get creative. There are plenty to OSU shirts to buy to wipe your ass with.
I was just at my local grocery store and everything was plenty except for hand sanitizers. Even if canned and pre-prepared stuff is gone, there is plenty of fresh vegetable and meats in the aisle. If this crisis forces some to eat more healthy, that is not a terrible thing. I still just buy what I need every couple of days at the store.
People are behaving irrationally, but the fear is entirely rational.
France just shut down its entire economy. And the UK is about to announce a 4 month quarantine of everyone over 70.
I’m not saying there is not a health threat, I thought the post implied that there was no reason to worry about supplies, when there is in fact good reason to worry.
There's plenty of supplies getting delivered to stores, you just have to wait a few more days for the panic/opportunistic buying to stop.
Exactly. Just wait for all the control freaks and gluttons to load up. The same people that have no respect for families wanting their regular weekly supply. In a few days, the stores will be replenished and the people will look like bigger fools.
This exactly...work in supply chain/transportation and only issue is shifting enough capacity to move goods to the retail locations at this point. And we were just informed in our group that most in the field are essential employees, meaning we'll keep the goods flowing as long as they are there to move.
Embarrassing anyone would make this political. No shame
It became political the moment Dear Leader proclaimed a dangerous global pandemic "no problem", suggested it was hoax, and said we're "fully prepared" and "ready to test anyone" when none of this is remotely true. The country under him is testing virtually no one is totally ill-prepared to do so -- way behind other countries. Instead of wishing the pandemic away, and blaming it on "foreigners" and Democrats, he could have listened to SCIENCE for once and start setting up roadside testing and emergency treatment facilities and telling people to prepare for danger. Oh, and maybe shouldn't have eliminated the White House pandemic team.
So, yeah, this is political.
March 16th, 2020 at 12:51 AM ^
He said about 2 weeks ago that there were only a few cases and they'd soon be at 0. I literally laughed when I saw that.
Dude - He pointed out that there is plenty of "real" food still left. People are just cherry picking TP and grocery store "fast food". I agree with your (supposed) premise that this is being over hyped. But this post isn't one of those.
Note: By over hyped I mean the constant pictures of grocery shelves being empty with no perspective. You'd think watching the news that there is a food shortage. Which IS causing a lot of panic.
I have a boat load of oak leaves outside, they need to be raked up anyway, and will be turning on the spigot for the water hose outside soon; when I run out of TP.
Americans also apparently incapable of voting for a POTUS who can handle a crisis like this one without thinking only of himself.
Got news for you: if you think this is the only President who would do this, you're sorely mistaken.
EVERY President makes foolish decisions, and I can point to decisions that have done more harm than good. Doesn't matter if there's an R or D in front of the name. You're going to have bad decisions made (Ben Ghazi, anyone?).
Don't be a tool and turn this into a partisanship matter. People acting foolish during a time of crisis is on them, not the President. Take responsibility for yourself.
Nah this one is pretty clearly the POTUS' fault.
When you cut the budget and fire the agency that specifically deals with these things, you should be held accountable, especially when you don't even heed their warnings for 2 months w/ regards to prepping for the inevitable while tweeting out conspiracy theories about the virus being a hoax by Democrats.
Fuck that. Own it. That clip of him accepting no responsibility is ripe for attack ads come November.
CDC's budget wasn't cut.
True and it is important to acknowledge facts, but also to include other facts that provide context. Trump has proposed cuts to the CDC multiple times. He should own that. Congress has disagreed and has not enacted cuts. He should get no credit for that
The CDC has always been very small, currently only 10,000 employees. They have never had the capacity to deal with a large outbreak. It wouldn’t have mattered if they did because government lacks speed and efficiency for most things.
Thanks to Congress not enacting the White House's proposed cuts
Right, I remember other presidents firing the goddamn global pandemic response team too.
Go read the tweets over the past month. More concern for the stock market than human lives.
We should have been preparing for this since December instead of pretending it was going to stay in China.
I wasn't aware that he fired the global pandemic response teams in China, Italy, and the rest of Europe too.
I'm no fan of Trump and there are painfully obvious things that he could have done better to lead through this. But this virus is spreading no matter what central governments do to act on it.
That argument only makes it worse that Trump screwed this up. We literally saw what other countries did wrong (and right in South Korea's case) and did nothing except tweet bullshit.
South Korea has over 8,000 cases and a much smaller population than the US. Not exactly “getting it right”. No country has been spared regardless of preparedness.
South Korea has those cases because they have already tested 250k people. Their curve is flattened and they only have 70 cases today compared to Italy's 3.6k. They have drive through testing in which they swab you in your car and then the sample is automatically run through PCR. They are way further ahead on this than any other country.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-korea/
It was present and spreading there before other places. Also, South Korea and Italy are very small and condensed places unlike the US. If TheCube gets tested today and it comes back negative, TheCube can still get the virus by going to the grocery store two days later.
South Korea is definitely a success story. They're right next door to the outbreak's originating country and have managed to contain things at around 75 deaths currently, and while that's going to go up their "curve" has indeed been bent by very aggressive testing and social distancing.
Yeah, it’s not the number of cases you should at, but the number of deaths. Handled well, in a way that doesn’t flood the health system with cases, this outbreak can have very low mortality. Most countries aren’t handling it as well, unfortunately l.