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Comment by wahern | Hacker News Reader

This panic buying is so ridiculous. If there's one thing the U.S. still does better than any country in the world, it's produce mass quantities of food. There'd need to be an apocalypse before we had trouble stocking grocery shelves over any sustained period of time. Plus, the buying patterns are totally illogical. All I see are people snapping up perishables; nobody's baskets are full of canned foods. How are people going to eat more perishables than they normally do? Are they all using this opportunity to improve their diet?

sigh

I told my wife three weeks ago that if she was worried she should start stocking up at the grocery store. But, alas, she didn't start caring until everybody else did, and then fought it out with people at Costco.

double sigh

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There are people panic buying, but stocking up now is a good thing. I'm not afraid of US food production halting. I am afraid of weekly grocery trips.

> All I see are people snapping up perishables; nobody's baskets are full of canned foods. How are people going to eat more perishables than they normally do? Are they all using this opportunity to improve their diet?

my guess is that people are actually buying more non-perishables than perishables, but the supply chain has a much deeper buffer of non-perishables, so it appears the opposite is happening.

> There'd need to be an apocalypse before we had trouble stocking grocery shelves over any sustained period of time

I live in Chicago, which is one of the major nodes of the US food distribution network. I'd seen lots of photos of empty store shelves on Friday night as panic-buying set in.

I went to my local grocery store on Saturday morning and the shelves were full of everything but toilet paper. Workers were constantly bringing pallets of food out to restock as people were buying tons of food. Nobody was panicking, everyone was polite; I think the overwhelming availability of food was a calming effect.

Costco and Aldi manage their own distribution networks and may not be seeing the benefit of the hundreds of independent distributors that have this under control.

I'd like to hear about experiences in Houston - that's another huge node. My guess is that things are fine there too.

Is it ridiculous? Think this way. You have three small kids and four parents who are barely selfsufficient in best conditions. Now you know pandemic comes and people will be buying everything out.

Now, the question: will you go and buy a stock to last you couple of weeks or are you "listening to reason"?

I suspected what was coming and bought enough to last us couple of weeks the weekend before the panic here in Poland. She said I am panicking but, alas, we saw no meat anywhere for the past week.

It’s the opposite in the UK, with the exception of oranges fresh produce is fine and things like pasta, rice, baked beans and frozen fish fingers are long gone

Interesting.

I should qualify: I'm in San Francisco and have been to two different grocery and several convenience stories over the past few days.

I was in one convenience store today and I noticed the owner had stocked some shelves normally filled with cookies and snacks with different kinds of canned beans. My first thought was, "smart". My second thought was, "sigh but they're the only completely full shelves in the store".

Really weird in our local Sainsburys this morning - pasta and toilet paper shelves completely empty also no tomato soup. But plenty of everything else!

> fresh produce is fine and things like pasta, rice, baked beans and frozen fish fingers are long gone

This is exactly what I noticed in the local super market in Boston as well.

at sprouts in the bay area, i went to the grocery store on sunday and they had almost everything. they only ran out of some organic dried beans but the shelves were mostly stocked pretty well.

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