Inventory report from the huge Meijer's supermarket in Southfield, Michigan

I enjoy grocery shopping once a week.  And I only report on this normally boring experience because the quantity of empty shelves are unprecedented in my 44 prior years of food shopping in Southeastern Michigan. 

The wife and I go shopping every Sunday morning at 7am to avoid crowds. At a huge store that's half groceries and half everything else, from clothing to TVs.  Often no waiting for checkout at 7am.  

Every week, for months, we've noticed more out of stock items.

Last Sunday, one tub of Philadelphia cream cheese was left, where there are usually 200.  No Post Raisin Bran Cereal in any size. No Hillshire Farm packaged deli meats.

At first, today, there seemed to be fewer empty shelves. 

But when I looked closer, I realized some out of stock items had been replaced by unrelated items, just to make the shelves look full. 

For example, about 30 feet of shelves usually filled with paper towels, were completely empty last Sunday. 

Today, the same shelves were filled with extra bags of sugar and flour, which were also fully stocked where they are usually located. 

We heard employees talking about "filling in the empty spaces" with whatever they had available.

There were about 50 Philly cream cheese tubs available, much better than one the week before, but not the usual 200.

There were only the small expensive size of Post Raisin Bran, but not the better buy family size and giant sizes. 

Better than no boxes last Sunday.

We needed one box, but bought three -- who knows if any will be available next week?

None of our favorite ACE brand bread, that comes in from Canada, was available.

The variety of Cranberry drink the wife wanted was out of stock, for the first time ever.  No skim milk. And one or two other items were missing.

In the soda pop aisle, I noticed a lot of empty spaces on the shelves -- something that I've never seen before. 

The out of stock problem is still getting worse, but the store is trying to disguise their empty shelves by filling them with whatever they had stored in back room inventory.