Impending, possible meat shortages

That Costco didn't enforce rationing?

Depending on what you’re buying here there isn’t any on some products.

Ground turkey has been consistently available throughout, for example.

Makes a great taco. Folks said the bad week when we were still away, they stocked up. Mom said she made a lovely crock pot turkey stew with veg and egg noodles.

Lowers your risk of early death even more than anything Covid related, too. Just in a different year. :)

I’ve noticed friends who hardly if ever cook, have had a more difficult adjustment than most. Substituting ingredients just isn’t something they’ve done much of, and they’re often posting how they were worried about the result.

Meanwhile the cooks are like, “Always wondered if doing that would be good... if it sucks, there’s always cayenne pepper...” LOL
 
Not even considering going to Costco and standing in line for an hour to get in unless I have a very good chance of getting what I want/need. That includes paper products.
 
That is just wild that it’s so far out of whack there.

For curiosity how many weeks has it been like that?

Took about two here, and that was over a month ago.

It’s hit or miss. Last night they had some fresh chicken and some odd steak cuts. I took the last two 1lb ground beef packages to make dinner. Frozen chicken is completely nonexistent along with packaged 1lb sausage rolls. However, they had more bacon then I’ve ever seen. The deli counter is fully stocked. I asked the lady why they were fully stocked vs empty lunch meat shelves in the back. She said people are scared they’d receive contaminated deli meats from the deli machine or her. She spends most of her day cleaning or just watching people walk by. But the adjacent fresh sushi counter is always empty and the chief can’t keep up. WTF?!??

Then it’s just random stuff. Like they’re completely out of most spices, all baking supplies, baking mixes, taco seasoning, most cleaning supplies, asian import products, fresh produce, and the local ice cream brand. But fully stocked on bread, milk, frozen produce, and hand sanitizer. Yes, legit hand sanitizer!!

I think a university should do a human psychology study at their local grocery. Just nuts noticing what products people perceive as dangerous vs safe.

All that Arkansas chicken is going to California?

I’m guessing. It’s odd how random it is on stock amounts and locations.
 
It’s hit or miss.

I hope it follows our pattern and straightens out for you guys relatively quickly.

As I’ve mentioned, we missed the worst week of it here, and my folks found an enormous pre-cooked ham and stuck it in our fridge.

I was quite done with eating ham for a while after the two of us finished that thing.

But was happy to have it, overall.

When home was closed and goofy, MN hadn’t started yet, and if one more flight had been cancelled we would have not only rented a car but loaded it with stuff for family and friends.

Still say if things get too weird anywhere, we all know how to do an airlift for folks here. Or meet halfway.

Private aircraft can be kinda useful during stupidity.
 
No meat at my local store. Talked with butcher who said it could a very long time before they have most types of meat in stock. He laughed and said enjoy being a vegetarian for a while.

That's one thing I like about Sparrow Fart: We do have exceptionally dumb deer.

deer_neighbors.jpg

So far I've left them alone because I find it hard to shoot a creature that's too dumb to be afraid of me. But if it came down to it, I could overcome that reservation.

Rich
 
Season 2 episode 15 if some of you missed the joke:

And at the end Scotty beamed them into the Klingon's engine room. "Where they'll be no Tribble at all!" :p

So far my wife (she does most of the grocery shopping) has had no trouble getting anything (except TP, and earlier flour) she wants. We've got plenty of TP, so that won't be an issue for some time. I don't know about prices, but given how tight she is with a buck I'm sure I'd hear about it if prices went up significantly. Paper towels aren't a problem. We got some a month or two ago at Costco and are about ready to start that pile. One package per customer, so we should be fine for several months. Now, I do need to make a Costco run as I'm running low on their microwave popcorn (which is really good). Needless to say, we'll see what else they have while we're there.
 
That Costco didn't enforce rationing?

I assume they did; there were signs up advising limits on purchase of key items.

I’ve never seen a wait to get into Costco.

—-

Kroger, today, a solid selection of meats. And several varieties of that elusive and most sought-after commodity, TP.
 
While there are plentiful, if lightly rationed, meat supplies here in SoCal, I was perplexed today by a rationing of boxes of pasta and pasta sauce at my local Ralph's (aka Kroger) today, to only 2 pasta/2 sauce each. Except for the first week or two after the stay-at-home order, supplies of pasta hadn't been much of an issue here. I've got plenty of flour though, so I guess it's time to learn to make my own.
 
While there are plentiful, if lightly rationed, meat supplies here in SoCal, I was perplexed today by a rationing of boxes of pasta and pasta sauce at my local Ralph's (aka Kroger) today, to only 2 pasta/2 sauce each. Except for the first week or two after the stay-at-home order, supplies of pasta hadn't been much of an issue here. I've got plenty of flour though, so I guess it's time to learn to make my own.

My $1 box of pasta and sauce mix(not Mac & Cheese) just finally started showing up again, well, I hope it is since I only bought 3 boxes instead of all they had.(Fred Meyer, also Kroger, but had no limits posted)
 
Are the meat shortages over yet? The news hasn't said anything about it recently. They must be on to the next big thing.
 
Are the meat shortages over yet? The news hasn't said anything about it recently. They must be on to the next big thing.

^ This

Most places are not having issues. Probably because people have already stocked up. It's harder for the media to cause a run on meats as they cost so much more than a pack of TP. Spending $20 buys a lot of TP, but not much in meat.

I'm seeing odd things in supplies. Some days one thing is not in stock, another day something else is not in stock. Last weekend we were looking for skinless boneless chicken thighs. None at two nearby Publix. Went to Sprouts and they had plenty, and at a low price (for Atlanta).
 
Are the meat shortages over yet? The news hasn't said anything about it recently. They must be on to the next big thing.

Our friend from Arkansas above is still having issues, but it all seems very regional now. Everybody’s timelines are diverging at this point. Ours was a few weeks before many.
 
I was in Publix today. Plenty of selection, and significant price increases is what I saw.

Still no TP. No napkins either. Why would anyone need extra napkins?
 
I was in Publix today. Plenty of selection, and significant price increases is what I saw.

Still no TP. No napkins either. Why would anyone need extra napkins?

Because they were running out at the store! :eek:


:D
 
I think I got some chicken today that was originally processed for institutions. First of all, I've never see boneless, skinless, chicken leg meat for sale. I often buy boneless, skinless thigh meat (I much prefer dark meat to breasts). It also seemed very inexpensive. I'm not price-sensitive, but this was unusually cheap; enough for me to notice. These things are huge for legs! I'm showing two, but I there were more in the package. I think they are legs and thighs together, skinned and deboned in one piece. I was only going to cube an marinated them anyway so it doesn't matter to me, but I had never seen chicken packaged this way before. I've also never heard of the producer, but that's not too unusual.

Screen Shot 2020-05-19 at 19.01.04.png
 
Plenty of Kleenex. I was thinking the same thing, if no TP, facial tissues are the next best thing.

We got down to 4 rolls of TP yesterday, so I went to both stores in town. The shelves were empty, except for facial tissue. I checked Amazon while I was standing in the isle and bought a 32 package that Amazon says will be here by Friday. I guess we'll see.

Meat coolers still look pathetic, nearly empty. Being a rural community, I guess we're just getting scraps of grocery orders. Shipments being decided by distributors that don't live anywhere near here rather than filling entire order placed by store management. We aren't going without meat, but choices are limited
 
Shipments being decided by distributors that don't live anywhere near here rather than filling entire order placed by store management.

Early on there was a Reddit post by a store stock manager showing the chaos of his spreadsheet for tracking and such, and he included info that no store in his company was receiving everything ordered. Additionally they were specifically warned about padding order numbers to try to manipulate the computer system they used.

He needed the spreadsheet to see what could substitute for other items, and such. The computer didn’t have any features for that sort of analysis.

He mentioned that his own company in normal running mode would use not a warehouse but surrounding area store orders to cover single store shortages in regular times. So when every store has shortages, there’s no slack anywhere for a supply side whipsaw.

At that time he estimated it would take three months to return to normal without new upstream outages or massive production increases to backfill the initial numbers lost. And that was roughly two months ago, and both of those things naturally got worse.

It’s definitely not “just” a rural thing. His store was IMHO a “mid-sized” city suburban location.

“JIT” or “Just In Time” distribution driven by computers has been SOP for most supply chains for decades now, for better or worse. Trucks re-routed “in flight” even.

Unfortunately, I usually bookmark anything that useful or interesting on Reddit (because finding anything that interesting and useful there is quite rare! Ha...), but I didn’t on that one. Kinda wish I had to see if he followed up.
 
Take out smoked Prime Rib tonight was excellent. Small town restaurant, struggling. Was nice to help them out.

I hope those of you in areas still experiencing supply weirdness get relief soon.

Smoking Prime Rib wasn’t one I had thought of. It’s ... really good.
 
Gillespie County, Texas (Fredericksburg) - no apparent shortages. Walmart had gobs of toilet paper, too.
 
Normal supplies of everything here the past few weeks, including TP and all types of food. An overabundance of bleach...
 
Selection is a bit less varied than usual, and prices a bit higher, but nothing approaching a shortage. Grabbed two full racks of ribs for $1.99/lb today.
 
Plenty of meat (including ground beef) at Sam's Club this morning. Limit of one per item, but the items were big and there was a wide variety. I really didn't need any meat, but I bought some steaks anyway. They looked lonely.

steaks.jpg

They also had plenty of TP (several brands) and paper towels (Member's Mark). Limit of one case of each.

This was the Sam's Club in Kingston, New York.

Rich
 
no TP or ground beef logs at Sams....

we smoked 4 racks and a butt yesterday....so the meat dept was fine. ;)
 
Last edited:
I stopped at the local WalMart market this morning. Pretty much everything except disenfecting wipes and hand sanitizer. I saw a nice tri-tip, and made a command decision that now I know what's for dinner tomorrow night.
 
No shortages of meat at the local Safeway yesterday, although I did see a limitation on the number of packages of pork you could get. No problem, we weren't looking for it on that trip. I didn't pay too much attention to TP as my wife says we're in good shape. I just opened the big package of paper towels we got at Costco a few weeks ago, so that won't be an issue for quite some time. Otherwise, we go to the store maybe once a week, get what we need and go home.
 
Back
Top