Yup; I'm hearing from government and media that food supply chains are fine, yet I can't seem to find rice or flour or yeast anywhere, for going on a week now. The people who answer phones at local stores don't seem to have any idea when more is coming in.
If the supply is there, you'd think it'd be straightforward to bring in a few dozen pallets of big (10-15kg) bags of rice and flour, 1 per customer, so that people can avoid coming to the store for the next month or so and avoid infecting themselves/others whilst shopping. I'm curious what the holdup is.
TFA recipe looks delicious. I wish I could try it.
Supply is normal, demand is up. My guess is that panic buying will dry up fairly soon.
Staff at the grocery store can find out when new stocks are coming in. The orders have already been placed, the trucks are already scheduled to arrive, and staff are scheduled to stock the shelves. It’s just a pain to answer questions from so many people.
Stores here (NYC area) had stockouts in bread earlier in the week. The stockouts are happening less, they’re less severe, they’re not lasting as long. Your experience will depend on where you live, exactly which store you go to, and what time you go to the store. My personal experience is that some stores will stockout much sooner than others, e.g., Trader Joes, maybe because the clientele is more prone to panic buying, maybe because of differences in stocking.
The catch here in NYC is that plenty of people just eat out and don’t know how to cook, don’t have food stocks, don’t have tools. Our household bakes bread anyway so we stock flour.
> Supply is normal, demand is up. My guess is that panic buying will dry up fairly soon.
I don't think there is any panic buying going on. Buying for 6-12 weeks for a household is a very rational and prudent thing to do during a declared national emergency for a pandemic with a doubling time of approximately 3-4 days so far.
Presuming that people buying enough to avoid the store for a month or two is "panic buying" is to invoke the term "panic" when there probably isn't any panic, which I think is a very harmful thing to do.
I normally have about 3 days worth of food at home, not 3 months. Other than Mormons, I don’t think I’ve met anyone who regularly planned for more than 1-2 weeks. By that standard, and using the definition given on Wikipedia, “panic buying” is absolutely accurate.
You're deliberately excluding the rest of his sentence. If things were normal, yes, buying 1-2 weeks of supplies would be fine. But they're obviously NOT normal. Stores/businesses are closing, supply is inconsistent, and wanting to limit unnecessary interactions make it prudent to plan for greater than your normal 1-2 weeks.
I wasn't passing judgement on whether it's a right or wrong or rational thing to do.
I'm saying that this literally is the definition of panic buying: buying significantly more than you normally would, because you fear that goods will be unavailable, or you will be unable to do your regular shopping in the future.
I think the term "panic buying" is a really bad term for it, then, if you can be entirely not-in-a-panic and fit the definition of "panic buying". It paints it as something it's decidedly not, and people who don't encounter the term very often are likely to make incorrect assumptions about it.
I did my "panic buying" in February, and there was no panic or urgency whatsoever involved.
Panic is uncontrollable fear. Fear is a normal emotion, especially in this situation. Panic would imply buying five years worth of toilet paper because someone told you trees would go extinct.
Words are often used in ways that are etymologically inappropriate. Although “panic buying” sounds like it should require panic, it doesn’t. Other examples of this phenomenon include “automobile” meaning something different from “self-driving” and the way “American” implies “not Mexican” even though Mexico is a country in the continent of America.
panic also explains fighting over toiletpaper. if you weren't panicking you'd simply wait until the toilet paper is restocked. there is enough evidence out there that people are panicking.
I think that household grocery demand will be permanently up - the switch to working from home, and having kids be home instead of school means that suddenly we're home much, much more than before and eating much more meals at home.
So lots of food supply that used to go to restaurants will now be going directly to homes - it does not affect producers much, but it's a very different distribution chain than what the restaurant purchasing uses/used.
It's worth noting that, with the exception of the fresh vegetables imported from somewhere warm, all of the food you're going to eat during this crisis was grown, harvested, processed and preserved last fall, and the current supply chain is just moving it from the warehouses and granaries to your door.
If the supply is there, you'd think it'd be straightforward to bring in a few dozen pallets of big (10-15kg) bags of rice and flour, 1 per customer, so that people can avoid coming to the store for the next month or so and avoid infecting themselves/others whilst shopping. I'm curious what the holdup is.
TFA recipe looks delicious. I wish I could try it.