I've seen my local supermarket doing that with toilet paper recently. They were out for as long as everyone else and now there are these massive blank cardboard crates filled with individually wrapped rolls like you would see in a hotel or office. So some clever buyer got creative with the supply chain which is awesome.
One of the local stores here in northern NJ has started doing that as well. They are doing the same with facial tissues.
Smaller stores are likely more agile in this respect, because they don't need to rely on the items having bar codes and entries in their central inventory system. That's what tends to hamstring large, centralized retailers.
I think big supermarkers are making things worse at the moment.
It was very hard to get basic supplies and food when all small shops were ordered to close, and only big supermarkets were kept open, and supplied by organised convoys.
This appears to be rational at first, but it only led to people all rushing to those few supermarkets the moment the convoy arrives, and them being emptied clean by first 50 something people.
It also led to wholesale bases being emptied by supermarkets, as they have the biggest buying power, and biggest truck fleets. Here, I heard that they went through more than 8 months supply of flour in just few weeks.
The situation got much better when small shops were let to open.
Both supermarkets, and wholesalers are of course very happy with that, but that left near nothing for small shops when they reopened.
In North America are non-supermarkets and non-warehouses even 5% of grocery retail? I think that restaurants being allowed to sell groceries would've been cool. But I don't see how mom and pop grocers move the needle at all here.
It's different in the cities. Especially large ones with reasonable immigrant communities. In Toronto, for example, a very sizeable portion of our grocery retail is via small grocers. The prices are cheaper (they source from small farms that supermarkets can't logistically coordinate with) and the quality (especially flavour, but often shelf life too) is almost always better. There are also clusters of small grocers like Kensington Market where rare foods are available that you just can't get at a supermarket. Rare spices, cheeses, or even a real thick, old fashion greek yogurt (perfect for home made tzatziki). The one thing that the small grocers skimp on is presentation though. The fruits and veggies are less shiny or less washed.
But in smaller towns in North America it's getting rarer and rarer to see even an independent butchery, let alone veggie market or bakery.
>I think that restaurants being allowed to sell groceries would've been cool.
At least 2 restaraunts in my town do this. Order online, drive around beck (sometimes with a line of cars, but never more than a 5 minute wait), and they drop your food/tp/etc in the trunk. Much better than hitting up Safeway or Costco, and not really much more expensive.
> This appears to be rational at first, but it only led to people all rushing to those few supermarkets the moment the convoy arrives, and them being emptied clean by first 50 something people.
Wait, they didn't place restrictions on how many items individual customers could buy?
Around fifty people, each buying 2 bag of food, is all that's needed to empty an average load of a 40 feet truck.
> Wait, they didn't place restrictions on how many items individual customers could buy?
Barely did, and even when it was enforced, this didn't prevent panickers reliably rushing to supermarket all and every time the truck arrived to buy full bag of food, or two. People were literally running after that truck.
And the more people see that, the more people do that.
Even switching to food stamps wasn't able to stop that entirely until they got the trick with small shops.
> this didn't prevent panickers reliably rushing to supermarket all and every time the truck arrived to buy full bag of food
Please don't characterize buying a bag (or two) of food as panicking.
That is less than an ordinary amount of shopping at a time for me during times when there isn't a public health order to avoid going out. And I'm not shopping for half as many people as some people are.
Characterizing the reasonable and prudent behaviors, directly driven by the advice of public health officials as "panic" because it is exposing supply chain limitations is extremely harmful.
Nur Sultan city. Stuck here when I came to collect last payment from a delinquent client for whom we did a project half a year ago.
That was a very foolish thing to do just for a few thousand dollars
The very same situation was happening in some cities in China in first weeks of quarantine, before they also realised that.
After some reading, I realises that this did happen during great lot of modern day famines around the world. "Throwing food off the truck" seems to be a really counterproductive way to distribute food, because of it facilitating overconsumption by the few.
Used to do this when I worked at an agricultural supply company, spent many an hour in the warehouse filling consumer-sized bags of ag-grade fertilizer from a jury-rigged hopper. Probably paid my summer's salary with only a couple days of that work, you could resell 5 cents worth of fertilizer for $20. Apparently made your lawn grass grow like weeds.
When I was in business school, the school was just introducing PC use for projects and had setup a computer lab with PC-AT compatibles as I recall. Yes, I'm dating myself.
Anyway, in addition to making pretty good money as working the desk as a lab consultant if people had any questions and to just keep an eye on things, I sold individual floppy disks. I don't remember the numbers but basically I could place a bulk 100 diskette order for maybe a tenth the price that individual diskettes were sold for in the campus store. It was a nice profitable little side gig that took almost zero effort.
> Our grocery chain has been buying rice and flour in bulk from restaurant supply houses and repackaging them in 1lb bags. Pretty agile if you ask me.
I haven't seen that yet, but at least one grocery chain in my area was offering 25 lb bags of flour for sale about a month ago (or maybe they were 40-50 lb bags).
Haven't been back since to that store since to see if they're still doing it (been slowly rotating through the four we visit regularly), but flour has been available in 5lb bags so long as you're not too picky about the brand or type
We just finished our 25lb bag from the Ebola panic buying days... make sure before you buy a ton of flour you know what you’re going to do with it. Bread isn’t very good without yeast (good luck finding that), cakes aren’t very good with all purpose flour, pasta is really hard to make without a pasta maker, etc... sorry to be a downer but I’m kind of the opinion that while some flour is good, and it’s certainly good to learn how to use it, don’t expect to transform your kitchen into your favorite bakery. Also... this is just my perspective but Walmart and sams are rocking the supply chain... with some few exceptions we’ve not had to look hard for anything we want and their home delivery process is awesome. Amazon has done a great job too... i do not miss two day shipping at all... as long as I know it’s off my to do list and into their queue I’m good.
Mix flour and water and sugar and in a day you'll have a culture of natural yeast going and you can keep replenishing it as needed. There are also a variety of baking powder/soda breads you can make.
I've been baking cakes since I was about 13 and I have never used anything other than AP flour. OK. I've used bread flour in a pinch, being super-careful to mix it very little because of the high protein content.
Pasta: roll it out thin and cut with a knife. It really doesn't take that much longer. I did it like this forever until I got a pasta roller/cutter.
Not trying to be contrarian, but I felt to point out that nothing here is a show stopper, it just takes a little creativity/experience.
Besides yeast being almost-everywhere including the flour itself (the sourdough option others have mentioned) I will point out that you can also leaven your bread with the yeast from beer.
I've become a sourdough bread baker over the past three weeks, going from producing constructionnmaterials (dense bricks) to some of the best bread I've ever had.
Realized yeaast wasn't to be had for love or mone:
Spelt was a buy where other flours were cleared out at a natural food store. Last whole wheat was a half-kilo bag. I'll hit numerous stores, early in the day. Buy what's available though AP / whole wheat / specialty by preference.
Gourmet / natural food stores have tended to better selections. Ethnic food aisles often have flour where main selection is out, or specialty flours regardless.
Whole grains are also available. I've contemplated buying a mill.
Ironically, the KitchenAid I'd always coveted has proved all but wholly unnecessary for breadmaking, though the milling attachmnent is among the options available.
And, FWIW, I'm experimenting broadly with grains and augmentations.
Today's batch was 1000g flour (50% AP, 25% spelt, 20% WW (last of the bag), 5% einkorn), 25g salt, 80% hydration, 200g walnut pieces, 100g mixed whole spelt & eincorn grains (boiled. in salted water). OMFGood.
I've started a straight bleached white flour batch, basically to see what the worst possible flour might be.
Sounds great. We just broke out our kitchen aid which had sat dormant next to the bread machine for years. I didn’t know it had a mill attachment but I guess I’m not surprised.
