Tuesday, September 7, 2021

What my friend saw

I have a friend in Maine who enjoys a rural lifestyle. We have many things in common. We spoke on the phone recently, and she mentioned something in passing that was so startling I asked her to send it to me in an email so I could post it on the blog.

It seems she had gone to a Walmart and noticed a lot of things missing from the shelves: "No or very little dried beans, rice, canned soup, flour, sugar," she wrote. "Almost no shoes, the shoe department was basically empty and very little in the way of winter clothes. Also only a few autumn items and it looked liked stuff they found laying at the back of a warehouse."

She talked to several Walmart workers about "what the heck was going on," and was told "stuff is being taken off the trucks in bigger urban/city areas and not getting thru to the rural areas. They said they are only getting a small portion of the orders they are expecting."

I haven't been inside a Walmart in a long time – almost a year – so I haven't been following what's happening there. However I took that above photo in September 2020 when I was looking for inexpensive moccasins and found the selection low. Apparently things haven't improved. Has anyone else seen these kinds of shortages?

My friend found a similar situation at her regional tool store. "We also went to Harbor Freight which sell cheap Chinese-made tools and equipment," she wrote, "and they were missing quite a lot of stock also. The gentleman who worked there said they order six of an item and are lucky if they get one. There were no bungee cords, my personal favorite. I don't see this getting any better in the near future."

The last time I was in the city, I wanted to pick up a bulk box of bacon from Cash'n'Carry (a restaurant supply store). Unable to find what I was looking for, I talked to one of the managers, and he shook his head and said they haven't had that particular (and popular) kind of bacon in quite a while. He said bacon in general is hard to get, and they only thing they've been able to find is an off-brand which tastes – and here he paused – "continental." When I asked what he meant by "continental," he admitted it just didn't taste very good.

"Of every four orders I place, I'm lucky to get one shipment," he told me. He cited labor shortages and trucker shortage for the problem.

What's going on in the wider world? Are urban and rural areas being impacted differently? Are others seeing shortages and bare shelves like this?

25 comments:

  1. I was in a rural Arizona Walmart yesterday with no shortages except- Gatorade and mustard. I guess due to the Labor Day holiday? I was all over the store and those were the only bare shelves I saw. They actually expanded their livestock choices ( more horse and goat products- and pig treats!). We always wonder if other rural Walmarts carry these things.

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  2. I am near Louisville and we have pretty much everything we NEED. We don’t have everything we WANT. I have a farm and am building a house and if you see what you WANT you better buy it because it is there and may not be there tomorrow.

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  3. Out here, there are few shortages. The biggest I've seen (since I've been looking at them) are utility trailers and well pressure tanks.

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  4. This is how "rich" our country is. There are so many people wanting to purchase things and so few willing to work in order to produce and provide.

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  5. Last year things here in rural southern MN were pretty normal; not so much this year. Walmart's school supplies were pathetic this year, and there are many empty shelves or just thinly stocked. I can second what "anonymous" said, if you see it, buy it now, as it won't be there tomorrow. I will say that Aldi grocery store and others (HyVee, Cub Foods and Fareway) are well stocked in my area with no limits except on some sale items. I've felt promptings to stock up on as many things as I can, both food and toiletries, and household items. Who knows what will happen and how soon. The leftists seem determined to destroy our great nation and turn us into Venezuela Norte.

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  6. Last month was the last time I visited a Walmart here in South Eastern Arizona . The section for rice was almost cleared out , I managed to get the next to last last 10 lb bag, The caned vegetables were very picked over , meat section had lots of vacant areas as well as decreased selection in the frozen food section . I had been hearing from some other blogs that there were shortages of most things starting to pop up across the U.S. Since our children live in populated California cities I asked if the were seeing the same thing and all answered no. Taking an educated guess, it seems the cities are being well stocked and rural areas are seeing the shortages first . My husband and I went to Home depot in a neighboring community to buy horse fencing 6 ft x 100 ft, they had 2 rolls in stock but the price was just under $400 dollars ( a few yrs ago we paid $90 for the same thing ) Tractor Supply had it for sale for $280 but it was only available in the Tucson store 60 miles away . So yes, we are seeing shortages as well as inflation. Prices going up every month .

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    1. I wondered why your children didn't see the shortages, but believe that if you ask my adult children, they might give you the same answer. My husband and I live in San Jose, California and have experienced the shortages and inflation in the particular stores we shop, though we don't go very often. For instance, there are less varieties in Costco, especially in canned food section. There are less useful items in our local Dollar Tree and Grocery Outlet, while necessities have been under stock. Walmart seems comparatively okay. My husband, who is a mechanic, needs to wait longer than before to get his automobile parts, and sometimes he needs to check with several suppliers in order to secure one. Almost everything has become much more expensive after the lockdowns. Quite a few small businesses closed. More stores don't accept cash... We do sense that something has been on the way.

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  7. the stock items are on a daily basis of maybe or maybe not. I have 4 Walmart's in this city and I have to shop all 4 to end up with what I want. MOst people also don't know the hog farms are mostly owned by CHINA and so expect supplies to be short as China and the USA become more uglier to each other.

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  8. I heard a large company CEO stating on Fox Business a couple of weeks ago (sorry, I can't find the story in my "history") that there are one million shipping containers backed up. This has been a story all year. First of all, so much is from China, second the ports are all boogered up for all sorts of reasons - not enough workers to unload, not enough truckers, etc. We live 54 miles outside of Anchorage. It is hit or miss as to what is on grocery shelves or not. Sometimes, they are stocked to the hilt, other times there are holes and we can't find our regular food items. Shelves in the household items have looked sparse all year. Lumber and PVC pipe and just about anything involved in house building or house repair is still high priced and hard to get. So as others here have said, "If you are going to need it sometime soon, get it now!" We searched high and low for a medium brown "Khaki" spray paint we needed to match an outside door, and the spray paint shelves had only a few cans at our Lowe's and Home Depot and local retail stores. My husband finally stopped looking and postponed his project. A week later, he found cans at Ace Hardware in Anchorage. Has anyone ever seen the spray paint aisle empty at Home Depot or Lowe's??? Lived through the Jimmy Carter years, and the inflation was bad, but this time the difference is that almost everything comes from China (and they own so much US industry and technology and everything in between), so it is going to be much harder for all of us. My motto is, buy food and other household supplies while you can, because inflation eats that cash quicker than you eat that food.

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  9. Seeing a lot of price inflation here in MI. Also, while I live in a rural area, I shop in a city (have to since there are no stores here besides the gas station)... the Meijer has some empty grocery shelves, and hardly any shoes. The missing groceries are completely unpredictable - some empty shelves in the freezers, some in canned goods, some in paper products, one week there was a notable lack of cereal in boxes... the Lowes and the Ace have weird stuff not in stock -I've needed a particular type of fastener for the cables that I hang the rabbit cages with, and they'll only have 8 or 10, when I need 16 (which is a small amount). I've been stocking up the pantry again, on the grounds that inflation is only going to make it all more expensive over the next year, and now also because who know if what I need or want will even be available? I told the kids to go through their clothes at the beginning of summer and tell me everything they would need for the rest of the year so I could get it before prices rise more, or we can't get it at all. They're good for everything except the youngest daughter's sports bras, which Kohl's hasn't had in her size any time we've been there all summer... which reminds me that kids' underwear has been weirdly unavailable, too. My rabbit feed at the farmers' coop has jumped in price 15%, and TSC fencing has gone through the roof. And the t posts are now crappy things I can bend with 2 hands, not the solid heavy t posts I'm used to. And I just had this entire conversation with my neighbors across the road today, so it isn't just me...
    XaLynn

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    1. yes Mi. Meijers , no toilet paper at all some other empty shelves.... and many limits of 2 on many items...hardly any shoes at Walmart...my husbands favorite pop and tea for his lunch have been no shows...store manager said no workers to fill pallets at the manufacturing facilities...so they aren't getting shipments.

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  10. We're in a small town I think, 30k-50k if I remember right, and the shortages are numerous. Loads of food items that are AWOL, and even what is stocked somewhat are frequently stocked thin. It's not just food items either. Few small appliances, such as microwaves,very little canning supplies when they have any at all,few bikes, no distilled water. Most China made items are thin to nothing, but even American made stuff is spotty.

    What is there and isn't changes day to day, week to week, but the trend seems to be steadily towards more and more holes on the shelves.

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  11. It's not just the stores...

    My son, in his first semester at college in Idaho, just called to say that many of the on-campus eateries are closed indefinitely. No reason given. The cafeteria routinely runs out of certain foods. Last week there were no condiments for the hamburgers. Yesterday there were condiments, but no buns. Sometimes the lunch selection is left over breakfast items. I poked around on the school's website and saw a notice that "menu items are subject to change due to staffing shortages and supply chain issues."

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    1. When I was in college from 72-76 the cafeteria food was so bad I couldn't eat it. One weekend I came home to visit and hit some yard sales. Found a dorm size refer and a popcorn popper. I gave $10 for both. I hit three grocery stores in town each week for sales I got out of the newspaper. I cooked out of that popcorn popper for a whole year. For my birthday the next year my parents gave me a 2 burner hot plate and some of their old pots and pans. You don't need much to live at college, you just have to be shrewd and frugal.

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    2. Unfortunately, the cafeteria food is still bad! However the university mandates that freshman live in the dorm and purchase a meal plan. Those meal plans allow a certain number of meals per week to be eaten at on-campus eateries (chains like Qdoba and Chick-fil-a) but those are the places that are now closed indefinitely. Dorms do have small fridges and microwaves, thank goodness. But there is a ban on hot plates, toasters, waffle makers, etc.

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  12. We were just in the Walmart by cabelas outside of Post Falls, Idaho and there were a lot of bare shelves. Personally I think there are shortages but I also suspect Walmart is keeping inventory for online orders because I went to their site and was able to find everything there that I couldn’t get in the store. I also think Amazon is hoarding inventory so they can sell it. Meh, your miles may vary with this theory.
    TS

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  13. Same here in Western New York. The various Walmarts have empty shelves in different places (one time there was almost no shampoo another time it was the cereal aisle) and there was almost no back to school items. Usually this time of year they are already putting out Christmas items but not this year, instead they are keeping the sparse left over garden items on the shelf. The local Wegmans seems to be much better with few bare shelves up until the last couple of weeks where the shelves look a little thinner. And the prices have really started to skyrocket. I am stocking as money allows aa I believe it is only going to get worse.

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  14. I had a thought about this a while back. I don't live in a very large circle, but I do keep hearing about a rise in prices and a drop in availability of commodities, specifically lumber, as well as increased gas prices. I'm not very stock market savvy, but it would seem to me that inflation would cause a decrease in spending, and therefore a depressed stock market, but I keep seeing news of how the stock market continues to break records. I wonder how this is possible given the present circumstances.
    Another thought I had, which has been nudged towards confirmation by some of the comments above, is if the current administration is pushing the population towards urbanization? Does anyone have an inkling on this?

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    1. Your inkling is well founded.
      This article might be a good introduction to the goals of a cartel of evil men and women.

      https://www.thedailyherb.com/telling-on-themselves-rural-cleansing-in-north-idaho-and-montana/

      Understanding the goals of globalists takes time. There is no Cliff Notes version authored by the globalists themselves.

      I'd highly recommend two books.
      Agenda 21: The Earth Summit Strategy to Save Our Planet by Daniel Sitarz
      and
      Hope of the Wicked by Ted Flynn (Out of print for obvious reasons! It pulled no punches!)
      Pre-owned copies of both books are available on eBay.
      Montana Guy

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    2. The stock market has been artificially pumped up by the Fed keeping interest rates low for the last several years (you can make more money in stocks than savings), and by the idiotic Covid checks to everyone (people, like me, who didn't have an immediate need for it, threw it into their investment accounts, driving up stock prices). Once the ridiculous amounts of money being "printed" actually hit us, that inflation in the money supply will drive prices up even worse than what people have been seeing lately. Basically, the Fed has two choices... inflation or gov't insolvency, and you know it won't pick insolvency as the "fix" to the problem it has created...
      XaLynn

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  15. I live outside a small city and it doesn't take me long to reach a rural area quickly. To my west about 30 minutes will put me smack in the middle of farms and rural living.

    Having said that I have noticed A LOT of shortages at my grocery stores and particularly my local Sam's Club. I don't think it is just the rural areas experiencing these shortages. I think it is EVERYWHERE and I think it is getting worse despite being assured by our government rulers and the media that "it isn't as bad as it was a year ago". Bull crap!

    Part of me wants to believe that this is just temporary and will slowly abate over the next year or so, but part of me believes something worse is happening. What that is I don't know.

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    1. I do think it is everywhere, because I live in a rural area, but do a good portion of my shopping in the city... and I'm seeing empty shelves there. I don't believe this is temporary... the economy is going to crash and burn due to the inflated money supply (thank the Fed for that idiocy), and it's going to put a lot more businesses... out of business, thus depriving everyone of the products that they made.
      XaLynn

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  16. I do almost all of my regular Wal Mart shopping online...get toiletries, household items...usually get my new winter slippers that way, affords me a selection in color/size. 4 Wal marts all within 25 miles of my small town.

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  17. Another early(ish) environmental tyranny is "The California Tomorrow Plan" c.1972. I read it as a High School senior. It is even scarier today, because parts of it have succeeded.
    I suppose there will always be folks who thing that humans need to be herded.

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  18. We are in NE Wisconsin and the Walmart here is hit and miss. Some dairy especially yogurt is always in short supply and significant gaps in other things. Another local story reports similar stories, they order 4 of one thing and are lucky if they get 1.

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