FW: Thought I'd beat the crowds

I thought I would outsmart all of the panicking “Nora O’Donnell” * shoppers this morning, so I drove to the Safeway at 3 a.m. By God, I beat all of them.  There were maybe three people in the huge store shopping.  Problem was, there was nothing to buy. The shelves were picked bare.

I was always a daily shopper.  Those days are over, unless I want to wait on line every day for five hours to wait for the truck to arrive.  And counting on people being at work and not able to shop is wishful thinking. Most people will be working from home or are out of work. So, my bet is that 80% of the people who catch the virus will get it on a food line.

I figured I would outsmart everyone by getting Amazon to deliver my food supplies.  Well, after I spent an hour on line last night creating a huge shopping cart for Amazon to deliver, the message came back that there were no more delivery times available in my area for a week, and to come back later. And here I thought I was going to be treated as a VIP with Amazon Prime.

Life as we knew it has changed. So has our diet.  I had to pick up things I never knew existed or were edible this morning at the Safeway, or never thought I would ever have to eat it if I did.

I found one thing very interesting as I searched the aisles for canned salmon. There was no salmon. But the canned chicken shelves were full.  That was odd since Americans eat 2,640,000,000 pounds of chicken a year. Is this a sign that during hard times they are becoming more compassionate for those hapless chickens?  Probably not. It’s probably that you cannot make nuggets out of canned chicken.

By the way, the banana rack was empty, so I ended up buying three bags of freeze-dried, salted banana chips. Terrile. I will trade any reader of this blog three bags of these chips for one not-too-overripe banana.

,

ED

* I blame Nora O’Donnell on NBC for the panic buying. A week ago, she advised Americans to stock up for two weeks of about 10 items. Since food stores stock only for one day, the shelves were bare the next day. And this will ripple through for weeks because when those who were left out get to the store when the shelves are restocked again, they will empty out the shelves themselves.