Remember in 2020, when everyone was hoarding everything? I couldn't find yeast in my local stores for months. I'm convinced that someone, somewhere had a spare room filled with bags of yeast.
When people are stressed, they (we) do strange things, like buy a lifetime supply of bleach. Uncertainty breeds anticipatory feelings of scarcity.
A week ago I wrote about my big stock-up shopping trip at WinCo, mentioning how I went over my allotted cash. It was a generous amount of cash I'd packed with me. So, I was genuinely surprised when the cash register subtotal was ticking higher than was comfortable for me.
Since then, I've thought about why I spent so much, or should I say, why I bought so much. I bought 4 pints of fresh-ground peanut butter, 2 gallons of milk, 2 dozen eggs, 2 types of breakfast sausage, 2 whole chickens, a flat of canned vegetables, and many more items in larger than normal (for me) amounts.
I think it has hit me that for the time being I'm just not going to be able to get to WinCo as often as usual. I went once in August, once in September, and now so far, just once in October. I think I was having some feelings of impending scarcity, that I wouldn't be able to get to the grocery store for several more weeks. And I really didn't want to run out of any of our favorites. While my situation isn't a crisis, it still triggered the cavewoman need to store up lots of wooly mammoth for the winter.
So here we sit, with enough food to last several weeks. It actually feels strange to not need to run out to the store to buy more of almost everything for a while. We'll run out of bananas, but the rest is well-stocked.
Who needs four pints of freshly-ground peanut butter? What was I thinking? The fortunate thing in all of this is I didn't buy much that was perishable or couldn't be stored in some way to prolong shelf-life. I froze a few quarts of the 2 gallons of milk. The meat all went into the freezer. The small amount of produce I bought was all long-keepers. And we'll eventually use all of the peanut butter.
I've had issues with food scarcity thoughts in the past. One of my daughters deals with these thoughts on a regular basis. 2020 certainly didn't help for either one of us. The mind reacts strangely to various triggers. Being too busy to go to WinCo happened to be my recent trigger causing overbuying of food. I think it helps to identify the "why" of some of our shopping or spending, particularly when it doesn't make sense for our usual selves. It helps in providing some self-compassion for a one-off over-spending. And it can help guide us when future circumstances are similar and could potentially derail our normal behavior.
Did 2020 grocery shopping have any lasting impact on how you shop now? Have you ever lived through a period of food scarcity, real or imagined? How did that change your grocery shopping?
We moved from California to a small city in Oklahoma in 2022 and went from having all sorts of grocery stores around to only 3- Aldi's, a store called Homeland which I've never ventured into because the flyer prices seem too high, and Walmart. That's it. We have had tornado and weather warnings here that have caused a rush on the stores, my daughter works at Walmart and would send pictures of shelves being completely wiped clean in a few hours because a snow storm was coming. So I'm always aware to be ahead in my grocery shopping, because there may be competition for what's needed! Also we are in what is considered a food desert and there isn't much of anything being grown here, so everything has to be trucked in and I notice that things like fruits and veggies spoil much quicker. So I've been a lot more aware of our grocery situation than I used to be!
ReplyDeleteWhen snow is predicted here, everyone rushes to the store and buys bread and milk.
DeleteWhile the pandemic certainly had an effect on how we shopped, I think we are mostly back to our old ways. We try to shop once a week and usually hit Aldi, Walmart, and Costco. However, we sometimes need milk in-between.
ReplyDeleteI have 2 stores in this town of about $40,000-safeway and wm. Both have a long-standing history of being out of stuff, pandemic or not. If I have trouble finding something for awhile, and then someone has it in stock, I find myself buying extra just in case I can’t find it again. This also happened at Costco with frozen corn. It’s the only brand we eat, and they were out for months. I spotted it a few months ago, and bought 4 bags lol. Costco is an hour away, and we only go every 2 or 3 months. I decided I needed 20 lbs of corn in my freezer lol.
ReplyDeleteI sometimes do the cavewoman thing, too. Last spring, one of the things I stocked up on (that I heard was going to be scarce due to tariffs) was soy sauce. I didn't go crazy, but it's shelf-stable and I use it frequently to jazz up my meals, and didn't want to be without. I always like to have a stash of toilet paper (at least 6 rolls worth)--I've always been this way, but covid definitely made me more mindful of keeping extra on hand.
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