Seattle panic

I'm sure everyone's heard by now of the Seattle coronavirus scare that's upending everyone's lives in this region, and many other parts of the country. For my part, I've been stuck working from home for the last week and a half, and now classes have been cancelled/moved online through the end of April (which really sucks, since there were some classes I was really looking forward to next quarter!). As the hits keep coming -- we're currently on step 11 of 13 on the state's list of emergency strategies, with the remaining two amounting to basically an Italy-style mass quarantine/lockdown -- and reports of rampant panic shopping, I decided to check out how my local stores were faring.

To start out, here's the grocery cart corral at the Ballard Fred Meyer. This store's busy on a normal day -- which is why I don't normally shop here -- but I've never seen it with the cart well completely empty! And it's not like they just didn't have the staff to bring the carts in from the parking lot (which is a common complaint of mine with the Ballard Safeway), as the parking lot cart corrals were nearly empty too -- no, they were just almost entirely out of carts!

The produce selection was starting to dwindle a bit, with much of the stock being bought up as fast as the employees could load the shelves. Also visible here is something I hadn't noticed before -- the Urban Mix-style beverages sign in the deli, which looks a little weird mixed in with the Marketplace decor's distinctive font.

This view down the back wall should give you an idea of just how busy this store was! You can also see how the dairy section, and all the endcap displays on the left, were starting to look a bit bare.

Probably the emptiest part of the store was the pasta and sauce aisle, which was stripped down to a few bits of fancy or just straight weird stuff. (The section of chickpea pasta just out of frame to the left was completely untouched!)

The "clean hands" section of the health and beauty department was looking rather empty-handed today! Luckily, hand soap is something that I have more than enough of, as I bought a couple giant refill bottles from Walmart not long before this whole panic. Speaking of Walmart, it looks like they've turned off online ordering for pretty much anything coronavirus-panic-related, either saying it's "in-store purchase only" or simply saying it's out of stock.

Here's the money shot of this whole thing -- the extremely bare toilet paper/paper towels/tissues aisle. During the remodel this aisle was changed out to have warehouse-style shelving, something that Fred Meyer was taking advantage of to allow them to just dump the pallets in the aisle as soon as they came off the truck. (It looked like they were doing that for some other high-demand items as well, even if it meant putting stuff right in the middle of the aisles -- I suppose the crowds would clear it all out quickly enough anyways!) Anyways, this store had plenty of paper towels, but was clear out of any type of toilet paper, which seems to be the number one panic-buying thing nationally. And I wouldn't be surprised if the paper towels are almost gone by the time I'm writing this, a couple hours later, seeing how fast they were going while I was there!

Here's one of the hastily-made signs posted throughout the store announcing restrictions on all sorts of different things that people are trying to massively stock up on. These restrictions have been in place for over a week now, but even with that demand has clearly far exceeded supply.

This is kind of a random picture, but I found it interesting how empty the vision department was compared to the rest of the store (and compared to normal for that matter). The real point of this picture, though, is to show the old signage left over from before the Marketplace remodel!

Leaving the store, it became obvious just how packed the parking lot was here. Normally the part over by the grocery entrance is full but this area is deserted -- this time, the entire parking lot was full, with a few cars even circling to find parking. I have to say, living somewhere where I can easily walk or take the bus to the grocery store is awesome, especially at busy times like this. Ironically, the banner (on the brick section) that was flapping around in today's strong winds was something about flu shots -- a disease that's all but forgotten about with the whole coronavirus thing.

Jumping up to my Ballard Safeway, I found a fairly full parking lot, so I was a bit worried about what I would run into inside the store.

Fortunately, heading inside, I found a store that was pretty much normal in terms of shoppers as well as stock levels. The produce department here was looking perfectly presentable, which makes sense as it seems rather odd to panic-buy perishables. But hey, who knows with Seattleites...

The pasta section here was looking much less bare than at Fred Meyer, but still much more so than normal. It probably doesn't help that Safeway was running a decent sale on their brand pasta at the same time as the panic-buying, since the selection often starts to run dry during sales even in normal times. Luckily, it's another thing that I'm in no danger of running out of, since I always stock up when it comes on somewhat better sales than this.

Paper goods were  again the big story, with the rather generous 5-per-person limit leading to both sections being completely wiped out. On the paper towels side, this revealed more first-generation Safeway delivery ads, showing that they aren't limited to Greenwood -- I wonder how many Safeways have these hiding behind normally well-stocked shelves.

Since I still kind of needed toilet paper, I decided to venture across to the neighboring, always-empty Target, which had toilet paper listed as available on its website. They did -- fully 8 tiny packages of it! Target had the most aggressive restrictions of one per shopper, which is probably why they still had something today; still, I'm sure this little bit of stuff is long gone by now!

So, that's it for me for now. How's everything going in your parts of the world?