One by-product of the emptiness of certain aisles is now stopping our columnist’s canines in their tracks.
Joseph Mackereth
It’s been quite the year. I can’t remember a year when I was surprised so much in just about every way, and in almost every category of life. For example, I was stunned that grocery shopping became a competition sport.
Grocery shopping has always been so easy for me. I memorize the floor plan, write a shopping list that matches the aisle progression, and get out as efficiently as possible. I make sure I shop on a full stomach, otherwise I will buy every box of Little Debbie snack cakes in the store, and I keep my coupons organized in my official coupon holder.
I kind of enjoy grocery shopping, because I have done a ton of market research in the past and I have to try every new product that hits the market to evaluate it. Finding a brand new product in my grocery store is like finding a quarter on the sidewalk. It’s a small thing but it brings me joy.
One of my favorite games as a child was playing grocery store. I had a tiny little book shelf that I stocked with empty boxes of cereal, oatmeal and detergent. I had a plastic cash register that had a drawer that opened and everything. I even had a sheet of stickers and I changed prices on products regularly. I would amuse myself for hours, doing everything I’d seen in the big grocery store. I’d rearrange the shelves, I’d count and organize the register drawer, I’d mark stuff on sale, I’d sweep because I’d noticed there was a lot of sweeping in grocery stores though I didn’t know why. I would place items in a box or bag after my transaction was completed. Hours of fun and my mother made sure I had everything I needed to play grocery store because it was hours of quiet. Win-win situation right there.
Then my organized, coupons-at-the-ready, find-the-new-product joyful grocery shopping excursions slammed right into the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. All of a sudden, entire shelves in the grocery stores were bare. New products? Pffffffft. More like any products?
The entire country became deeply southern in its reaction to hearing that we may have to stay at home because of a severe respiratory virus. Everyone bought milk, bread and especially toilet paper. Can’t get much more southern than that. Even if our pantries already looked like a subsidiary of Costco itself, we will head out in an emergency situation to get those three items. Milk, bread, and toilet paper are the holy trinity of preparedness and we are driven, like lemmings, to go get them at any cost if our routines are going to be even slightly inconvenienced by weather, illness or holiday traffic.
I myself have a small pantry so it’s never overly full. It took well over a month after lockdown for me to even consider buying toilet paper. I know the local grocery store doesn’t have any product on their paper aisle, but surely Amazon does. They have everything. They had nothing. How much toilet paper does the country have to buy to empty all the Amazon warehouses? They also emptied Target, Costco and every drug store I could find. I struggled to understand how a virus that attacks your lungs required so much toilet paper.
Once again, I think everyone became honorary southerners. Milk, bread and toilet paper are required, you know, in case society crumbled and we devolved into a barter system. Those three items would be worth millions of dollars in trade. So there was no toilet paper in any inventory anywhere.
I still had four or five rolls so I was not in crisis yet. Even if they all disappeared, I spent many a summer at my great-grandmother’s house and she did not have indoor plumbing. There was an out house and there was a Sears catalogue that served as both reading material and for personal hygiene. So if worse came to worst, I was ready to go all “Little House on the Prairie” if I had to. This would be a character-building experience, like the Girls Scouts only without the badges.
When we got down to three rolls of paper in the house, my dear husband got a little nervous. So he took it upon himself to save the day and find us some toilet paper. After many hours of earnest searching on the internet, he had success. He bought an entire case, 48 rolls, of scented toilet paper. Remember my great-grandmother? Well if she and 1,000 other great-grandmothers all opened their handbags in a very small room at the exact same moment, that’s the smell of my toilet paper. It is floral and sweet, and punches you right in the nose with the pungency of fake lavender that wafts out of this case.
I could cook fish for days in this house and you’d never know it. The toilet paper’s heavy perfume has filled my pantry and is oozing out into the hall. When the dogs head for the back door, they pass the pantry and it just stops them in their tracks. My pack seems to be saying, “Yeah, I got to pee but what is that smell? Is great-grandma here?”
The story above appears in our September / October 2020 issue. For more like it subscribe today or log in with your active BRC+ Membership. Thank you for your support!