Toilet Paper

Checkout_my_Six said:
done both cattle and chickens....production meat is always cheaper. However, I know what I gots in my freezer....and have the scars with the blood and sweat. lol ;)

We didn't do it to "save" money....it's more expensive. However, next go around I will just buy one from my local butcher. I'll pay extra for a local kid to raise my beef....it's not worth the hassle.
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MEAT HOARDER!!! LOL
 
Fiveslide said:
Oh, Lord no! It's not cheaper to raise chickens for the eggs. It may pay off in the long run, but short-term it's more expensive. Didn't really know why we did it until this happened and we're the only people in the neighborhood with eggs.
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I had no doubt, just curious if you’d ever done the math. I have generally have no problems with backyard flocks, but have a few recommendations.

1. Please register your premises with appropriate state agencies and cooperate in the case of a disease outbreak.
2. Please get appropriate veterinary care for the animals in your care.
3. Please understand that you have very substantial food safety concerns. Several common strains of salmonella will colonize the oviduct, and the birds will not appear ill. Exercise appropriate caution with anyone immunocompromised.
 
James_Dean said:
I had no doubt, just curious if you’d ever done the math. I have generally have no problems with backyard flocks, but have a few recommendations.
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Well, I did the math with the first five eggs, it came to over $125 per egg. I quit math that day.

You're absolutely right, our chickens should have a health check and be vaccinated, and they're not. I'm not sure why it never occurred to me to have this done, we do it with all our pets and being raised on a farm, I should have known better.
 
James_Dean said:
It is both.

There is no separate middle supply chain in eggs. I buy the baby chick and I deliver finished product to the retail store. There are 320,000,000 egg laying hens in the US. 55% goes to retail, 12% goes to food service, and 33% gets turned into liquid egg for ingredients, patties, restaurant, QSR etc. Of those 320,000,000 about 86mm are cage free.

If you assume that retail demand is up 20%(to 66% of the total supply) that would require an 2,300,000 million egg cartons per day. The machine capacity to wash, inspect, and sort all those eggs is stretched to the limit.

The demand for the 45% of eggs that went to liquid and food service is down by 40% - 90% depending upon segment. Some of those eggs can shift over, but the barriers are significant.
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That's interesting. I didn't realize you were soup to nuts. I assume there is also a profit margin drop on packaged dozens vs. liquid eggs which doesn't help things right now either.

What about broilers? Are they dealing with similar issues - food service bulk is down more than the increase in retail can offset?
 
James_Dean said:
I had no doubt, just curious if you’d ever done the math. I have generally have no problems with backyard flocks, but have a few recommendations.

1. Please register your premises with appropriate state agencies and cooperate in the case of a disease outbreak.
2. Please get appropriate veterinary care for the animals in your care.
3. Please understand that you have very substantial food safety concerns. Several common strains of salmonella will colonize the oviduct, and the birds will not appear ill. Exercise appropriate caution with anyone immunocompromised.
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If we had enough space, we would probably have a few chickens running around to keep bugs down and generally have something to tinker with - there would be no misconception that it would be cheaper than the eggs we could buy at the store though.

I have a cousin who had grown a flock of 40-50 layers. He lived in a small town so he would sell the eggs locally. Even as a high school kid that had low overhead (using a part of an existing shed, had somewhere to dispose of the manure (they also raised cattle), and only had his own time in labor) he finally realized that it wasn't worth it even with the premium price of "farm eggs".
 
We've been buying a whole buffalo from a high school friend for a lot of years. Two years ago he sold the herd and retired, but our last price was $4.75/lb cut and wrapped with a hanging (carcass) weight averaging around 600 lbs for a cow. Estimating a 65% yield (I never really checked that by weighing the whole finished product but I've read and heard that's a ballpark) our cost for final product was about $6.40/lb ... for everything - burger to ribeye steaks and roasts.
We just bought 2 steers last week around 650 lbs each carcass weight at $5.35 cut and wrapped. Our net should work out to about $7.22/lb again for all cuts ... so expensive burger and cheap ribeyes, however you want to look at it. Neither of these ranchers were certified organic but both were "good ranchers" and took very good care of their livestock. They were not finished out in a stockyard - personal care from calf to butcher.
 
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I'm seeing more and more TP on the shelves. Some of it seems to have been imported from Mexico, others are brands I've never heard of, but it's there.

Something that's missing: dishwasher detergent. That aisle looks as empty as the TP and bread aisles did a few weeks ago.
 
Matthew said:
Something that's missing: dishwasher detergent. That aisle looks as empty as the TP and bread aisles did a few weeks ago.
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Maybe the masses have become aware that detergent is as effective as soap at killing coronavirus. Or maybe people are just eating more of their meals at home before the stay-at-home orders, hence more dishwashing at home. It may have taken this long for people to run out of the supply that they already had on hand.
 
Matthew said:
I'm seeing more and more TP on the shelves others are brands I've never heard of, but it's there.
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Hard to prove price gouging with off-brand stuff... $7.99 for 4 rolls at the local Smart and Final the other day. Profit is not a dirty word to me, but.............. :mad:

Edit... just checked the package...
 
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jordane93 said:
Has anyone ordered anything on amazon lately? I ordered a gift for my brother’s birthday on March 25 and the estimated date of arrival is April 26.
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They are quoting much longer delivery times, but we've been ordering lots of stuff from Amazon (house project stuff), and even with the warnings about delayed delivery, it is still getting here pretty much instantly.
 
SCCutler said:
They are quoting much longer delivery times, but we've been ordering lots of stuff from Amazon (house project stuff), and even with the warnings about delayed delivery, it is still getting here pretty much instantly.
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I checked today and it didn’t even show the items shipped yet.
 
There are other online merchants, besides Amazon. We're so used to looking there only, that we forget.
 
I ordered a mortar and pestle set off Amazon last week which showed the normal two day prime. The next day I got an email saying Amazon had declared by purchase non essential and would delay shipping for four to six weeks.

Friday, my girlfriend threw a box at me while I was on the couch. It was my order five weeks early! :rolleyes:
 
SCCutler said:
They are quoting much longer delivery times, but we've been ordering lots of stuff from Amazon (house project stuff), and even with the warnings about delayed delivery, it is still getting here pretty much instantly.
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If you are selective on which vendor you select within Amazon's network, you can sometimes get it delivered sooner - basically depends on how many hops it needs to go through to get to your doorstep. I was ordering a stupid $5 spring to fix the mower deck and the part number was available from one vendor with expected delivery in two weeks. Looked through the other vendors for the same part number and found one that delivered in two days for the same price. Just gotta work the system a bit. :)
 
Ruby Tuesday Restaurant here is selling surplus food supplies and also toilet paper. Place an order for take out and get up to 5 rolls of toilet paper for extra 99 cents per roll. You can also purchase a box of frozen sirloin steaks or canned vegetables, etc.
 
Doug Reid said:
Ruby Tuesday Restaurant here is selling surplus food supplies and also toilet paper. Place an order for take out and get up to 5 rolls of toilet paper for extra 99 cents per roll. You can also purchase a box of frozen sirloin steaks or canned vegetables, etc.
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Include toilet paper with your food order? That sounds like something Taco Bell should have jumped on years ago!
 
Went to the grocery store today. Still no toilet paper, but nearly everything else was available. Some things were a little more sparse than usual, but I got everything on my list.

Bunch of buttheads.
 
Girl at the fbo this afternoon said they had a jet in from Florida yesterday, and the pilots came back from lunch with several packs of tp, overjoyed that they found some, as they still can't get it at home.
 
Around here things are now more about day of the week than time of day. Over the last few weeks Monday and Wednesday afternoons have had a good supply of toilet paper and Friday afternoon didn't. This weeks trip on Wednesday had toilet paper, eggs, milk, some flour, normal in-store bakery bread and packaged bread, decent supply of frozen vegetables, didn't check meat; only thing I missed was my favorite boxed pasta side.

I think one advantage is that by now we're usually up to our ears in tourists, without them even if we're not getting full grocery shipments we have a smaller population also.
 
Hmmm... Looks like even Amazon is having a hard time filling TP orders. I ordered a case of Chuck Norris TP a month or so ago, and it arrived in three days. Now they have a date in June.

The shortage isn't hard to understand, though, even aside from the hoarding. Paper pulp is made primarily from sawdust, shavings, and wood chips from sawmills (plus a relatively small amount of post-consumer recycled paper), not whole trees. With both new construction and renovations way down, there's less need for wood, which means less work for sawmills, which means less sawdust, shavings, and wood chips for paper production.

On the positive side, subscriptions to printed newspapers and politicians' newsletters, I am told, are way up.

Rich
 
They had some TP in Sam's Club (Kingston NY) this morning, but I got there right after they opened. They had maybe 10 pallets of the soft stuff with the teddy bear logo, two pallets of a no-name 2-ply, and a pallet of the big-azz rolls about a foot in diameter that they use in public heads. Limit of one case on each.

Rich
 
My local HEB is almost back to normal. The TP is in the paper goods aisle again and the guarded, wait-in-line area is gone. Most everything is back in stock...
 
RJM62 said:
Hmmm... Looks like even Amazon is having a hard time filling TP orders. I ordered a case of Chuck Norris TP a month or so ago, and it arrived in three days. Now they have a date in June.

The shortage isn't hard to understand, though, even aside from the hoarding. Paper pulp is made primarily from sawdust, shavings, and wood chips from sawmills (plus a relatively small amount of post-consumer recycled paper), not whole trees. With both new construction and renovations way down, there's less need for wood, which means less work for sawmills, which means less sawdust, shavings, and wood chips for paper production.

On the positive side, subscriptions to printed newspapers and politicians' newsletters, I am told, are way up.

Rich
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New housing is booming around here. Has been going for several months. I don't think the 'majority' of the pulp wood comes as excess from sawmills, either. There are dedicated pulp-wood plants that haul in wood specifically grown for harvest by the train-loads. There is no shortage of manufacturing - it's that people somehow have the dumb idea that what they really need to beat this virus is toilet paper so they hoard it as soon as it's available. This is 100% consumer driven.
 
Our TP is in good supply now in Southern Ontario. It is flour shelves that are empty now!
 
Doering said:
Our TP is in good supply now in Southern Ontario. It is flour shelves that are empty now!
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Wife just got back from picking up the grocery order. We were able to get TP on this order for the first time in 3 weeks (luckily we had just bought a 'mega pack' before this whole thing started). It's funny seeing how the product shortages have shifted over time.

Immediately there was a run on flour and sugar. I guess everyone decided to become Suzy Homemaker.
Then there was a shortage of yeast. I guess the newbies learned that you can't really make bread without a leavening agent.
NOW, there is a shortage of Bisquick and frozen pizzas. I guess the transition from "I'm going to learn to cook!" to "Oh crap... I didn't know I needed that ingredient." to "This sucks.. All you're getting is pre-mix pancakes and frozen pizza." has come full circle.

The one that is a little worrisome is the shortage of flour. That stuff is likely production planned like a commodity - very flat and consistent consumption rate from year to year. If there is a spike in the demand for consumer-packaged flour, it's not like the flour makers can just get some more wheat to make flour - once the silos are empty, it's a waiting game until next growing season.
 
CJones said:
Wife just got back from picking up the grocery order. We were able to get TP on this order for the first time in 3 weeks (luckily we had just bought a 'mega pack' before this whole thing started). It's funny seeing how the product shortages have shifted over time.

Immediately there was a run on flour and sugar. I guess everyone decided to become Suzy Homemaker.
Then there was a shortage of yeast. I guess the newbies learned that you can't really make bread without a leavening agent.
NOW, there is a shortage of Bisquick and frozen pizzas. I guess the transition from "I'm going to learn to cook!" to "Oh crap... I didn't know I needed that ingredient." to "This sucks.. All you're getting is pre-mix pancakes and frozen pizza." has come full circle.

The one that is a little worrisome is the shortage of flour. That stuff is likely production planned like a commodity - very flat and consistent consumption rate from year to year. If there is a spike in the demand for consumer-packaged flour, it's not like the flour makers can just get some more wheat to make flour - once the silos are empty, it's a waiting game until next growing season.
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Don't worry. They'll come up with a five-year plan for that.

Rich
 
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