Shortages

Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia. No non-grocery posts.
Bradford011
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Shortages

Post by Bradford011 »

Has anyone else in the northern VA area noticing that shelves are once again becoming empty? And both my brother and I have noticed that Aldi has been raising prices.

This has been predicted (there are a lot of articles about shipping delays and lack of drivers) but how bad is it going to get before things get better - assuming they do.
TW-Upstate NY
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Re: Shortages

Post by TW-Upstate NY »

If consumers don't panic buy (again) we'll probably be OK but you can never count on the consumer to keep a cool head in these matters.
Bradford011
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Re: Shortages

Post by Bradford011 »

Agreed. Witness every winter in northern VA when the four letter word beginning with "s" and ending with "w" gets mentioned. Stores get mobbed and the following disappears (not necessarily in this order):

1) Bread
2) Eggs
3) Bottled Water
4) Toilet Paper
5) Ice Melt/Salt/Kitty Litter
6) Snow shovels

I swear, I think these idiots use their snow shovels until spring at which point they throw them away and re-buy them again the next winter.

My local Food Lion has been out of Diet Mountain Lion (their version of Mountain Dew) for about 2 weeks now and there's no word as to when they'll be getting more. Got plenty of the regular but I need the diet...
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Re: Shortages

Post by SamSpade »

Off Topic
Bradford! You're not following "Bless the Harts" joke that in NC the two things that fly off the shelves are yes, your number 1 (bread) but what about MILK? :lol:

Hope y'all are having a nice day.
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Re: Shortages

Post by storewanderer »

Main thing I am noticing is it takes longer for items to be replenished. I am not really seeing that many empty shelves day after day. For instance I can go into a grocer one day and see hundreds or thousands of out of stocks, but then if I go back a couple days later those items are all replenished (and now there are some new out of stocks).

Stores that tend to attract panic-type customers (Costco) seem to be having more trouble than stores with a more normal customer flow (Safeway).

Also noticing independent stores supplied by C&S in Northern California are in BAD shape, especially in certain product categories. Independents supplied by Associated Utah are fully stocked.
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Re: Shortages

Post by SamSpade »

It sounds like some Associated (Utah) stores made plans, here's a report about how Broulim's (a moderately sized chain served by AFS) purchased some essentials for Thanksgiving through New Year's in August.
https://localnews8.com/news/idaho/2021/ ... a-problem/
Their reported current shortages are:
Broulim's in particular said they have a lack of frozen fruits, cream cheese and frozen desserts.
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Re: Shortages

Post by storewanderer »

SamSpade wrote: October 14th, 2021, 11:28 pm It sounds like some Associated (Utah) stores made plans, here's a report about how Broulim's (a moderately sized chain served by AFS) purchased some essentials for Thanksgiving through New Year's in August.
https://localnews8.com/news/idaho/2021/ ... a-problem/
Their reported current shortages are:
Broulim's in particular said they have a lack of frozen fruits, cream cheese and frozen desserts.
Ridley's has pallets and pallets of stuff. I have no idea what they are going to do with multiple 25 pound pallets of Food Club Sugar or the multiple pallets of cases of ramen but they seem to be preparing for something. Also if the 6 or so pallets of water I saw around the store from Associated weren't enough already, they had another pallet of bottled water from ACE. I had not seen ACE branded bottled water until this time.

I have heard Turkey might be an issue this year; it will be interesting to see pricing. Will the major chain stores finally not do loss leader turkey?
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Re: Shortages

Post by buckguy »

Was it Whole Foods and Giant yesterday---no shortages of anything. There are some subtle things, like less than a full range of pasta in one brand and half-dozen sized cartons of eggs, but those have been true for months. I was at Costco last week and, again, no shortages. I also have not noticed sizable price increases recently, and the usual items that often are in promotional rotation, like different brands of frozen entrees and Tide are pretty much where they usually are. I was on a road trip last month and was dodging semi-trucks about as often as usual on long haul roads like the Pennsy and Ohio turnpikes and I-95. If there are shortages of trucks/truckers, it's probably a small minority.

The only significant shortages I've heard about have been in relatively remote places like Hawaii, which is totally dependent on ships for things like major appliances or rural areas which are probably at the end of distribution chains---whatever shortages there are of trucks and trucker, it's marginal enough not to seriously affect densely populated areas, which are where most people live. Clothing seems to be an area where there have been shortages besides the offshoring of the manufacture a lot of it has been the unpredictable patterns of supply and demand---there was a huge glut, so companies put out very few new styles last year, then there was a big run on outdoor/sports clothing and more recently demand for business clothes has picked up sooner than expected, It will be awhile before all that is in balance. People must be buying shoes at a more predictable rate, because they don't seem to be in short or glut supply.

My guess is that once you get past the cable news porn, few things of critical importance are in short supply for most people and it seems like many of the past critical shortages (e.g., vaccines) have been shortlived.
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Re: Shortages

Post by Romr123 »

A niche clothing brand I follow apparently had long pants/trousers held up for nearly a season, so needed to blow them out. Costco ditto---$4 a pair for their Kirkland jeans (which are reasonably nice and a quite good value at normal price of $15, if a bit dad-sized).
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Re: Shortages

Post by mbz321 »

buckguy wrote: October 15th, 2021, 5:56 am I was at Costco last week and, again, no shortages. I also have not noticed sizable price increases recently
As a Costco employee, it seems like every day we are either out of TP, paper towels, or both. Whatever does come in is not a huge quantity and is usually sold before the end of the day. There is a noticeable lack of certain items, although Costco has done their best to keep up appearances. At least in my store, the candy/cookies/snacks section seems to be the hardest hit. Many products are spread out over multiple facings. Also, products that we have a lot of stock of are now being stocked in a few different places on the floor to fill space. If you look up in the 'steel', it is still remotely full, but definitely emptier than normal. We still have some furniture and summer merchandise out that arrived very late. Shoppers are definitely buying up Christmas candy/toys/decorations now and it got me wondering if there will be much left to sell come the end of the month/early November. We seem to be in no short supply of clothing though...they even had to expand the department to put it all out, and it's all getting bought up! I'm surprised you haven't noticed any price increases as I surely have. Bacon has to me the most notable, along with other fresh meat items, coffee, nuts, motor oil, and so on.
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