I thought I’d better go to the supermarket again today because we have some serious snow in our weather forecast and I didn’t want to run out of groceries and have to tackle a snowstorm.
I expected the store to be crowded–people buying gallons of milk, heaps of batteries, whole carts-full of toilet paper–the usual pre-snow shopping panic. But I was surprised to find the store all but deserted this morning.
That’s not what’s supposed to happen!
This is a mystery. Have people learned not to believe the forecasts? Or was I just too early to meet the crowd?
We’ll see what happens tomorrow.
I had a similar experience — even at the gas pump. Of course, I went out at 9am, after going to 7am Mass, so the panic shoppers may still have been in church, or may have done their panic buying yesterday. But the shelves weren’t cleaned out as though the panic-locusts had been through, so maybe people are hoping for the same false alarm that we got two weeks ago.
Anyway, I have plenty of food in the house for me and Iggy, and gas in the car in case we need to make a trip to the (shhhh … don’t even think it too loud) vet.
No storms expected here, but I did some grocery shopping today. I stopped by the local Wally World and, for the first time in quite a while, the checkout lines were short. I’ve found that timing is important. For instance, at noon on a Sunday, the stores are crowded by people just out of church. Fridays are usually crowded from midday, onward, and 5:00 PM or so on any weekday can be busy with people shopping on their way home from work. Mid-mornings are safe, any day but Saturday.
I’ve always preferred to avoid crowds when shopping, and the panic of the last two years has only reinforced that preference. On a couple of occasions, I was forced to stand in long lines to check out and that got very old in a hurry.
I also remember pre-snowstorm crowds in grocery stores when I lived in Colorado. The variable weather in Colorado’s Front Range usually gave us several dramatic snowfalls from mid autumn through March, and suburbanites would empty the stores of baked goods before a snowstorm whose effects might last 16 to 20 hours, before the Chinook Winds melted all the snow. Personally, I think of was a rationale for pigging out on pastries.
We had our first snow of the winter yesterday, 3.” Our town is full of trees and bushes so it was a winter wonderland driving to church this morning. The snow will be gone in a day or two – that’s the way I like it.
My early years were spent in snow country, where the snow that fell in the autumn stayed on the ground until spring, but then my family moved to Colorado, where snow lasted 1 or 2 days, and then melted. That was a breath of fresh air. I remember the first time I saw kids riding their new bicycles on Christmas Day; something that would have been unimaginable in the northern tier states. Snow is not even an annual event where I live now, but I miss the snows we had in Colorado.