What a Mess

I went out on Friday, yesterday, to do my regular weekly grocery shopping. People are crazy. I’d like to say that’s all I’m going to say about that, but it’s not.

Warning. This is a rant.

I usually have at least two stops to make on my Friday shopping run. Yesterday, I had five. I left early to allow for the extra time it would take. It took way more time than I had allowed. About twice the time I thought it would. Mainly because people are crazy. Maddie (our dog) was very upset that I was gone so long. Who knows what Bonfire (our cat) thought. I can never tell what he’s thinking.

I always go to Fry’s (a regular sort of grocery store) and Costco (everyone across the nation knows what Costco is). My usual trip to Fry’s is to get those things that I can’t get at Costco. It usually consists of no more than ten or so items and takes me 20 minutes car-to-market-to-car tops. Yesterday it took 45 insane minutes.

Fry’s recently put in a lot of self-checkout registers and I’ve made good use of them. But yesterday, only half of them were working. To top that off, they had only four regular cashiers working. The lines for the registers, all of them, were at least 20 people long. I don’t ever want to do that again. And I’m a patient person. But that was just nuts.

It wouldn’t have been so frustrating except that people were buying mass quantities of bottled water, soft drinks, beer and the like. My husband’s favorite tuna was all sold out. Luckily his favorite chocolate bars were still in stock.

At Costco, the parking lot was jam packed. When that happens, which is rare, I park in the Petsmart parking lot and walk the extra distance. The Petsmart parking lot was also jam packed. The inside of Costco was even worse.

Costco has done away with the food samples for the time being so that helped with the flow of people and shopping carts. But the check-out lines were enormous. Plus, they were sold out of my husband’s favorite frozen Brussels’ sprouts. And they had no tomato paste at all. Who hoards tomato paste? Come on folks.

Thankfully, the other three places I went weren’t too bad. Petsmart seemed fairly normal. Sprouts was busier than usual but they had all the things I had on my list. Walmart, well Walmart is never one of my favorite shopping experiences. And that’s all I’m going to say about that. Really.

Okay people, listen up. The supply chain was never going to break down. It hasn’t in the past when we weathered other pandemics. But all you crazy people out there buying up paper towels and toilet paper just might manage to break it anyway.

So stop it. Stop it right now.