Sunday supply chain report from the supermarket - more empty sticks than ever !

My 44 years of grocery shopping in Michigan were never of interest to anyone else, but in recent months the empty shelves have been shocking. Worse than ever this morning.  We shop at 7am when the night time restocking is done.  There are several items I don't bother looking for anymore, since they have been out for several months.

Here's today's first hand report from the huge Meijers store in nearby Southfield, Michigan.

Filtrete furnace filters: 

-- Only one variety of 25" x 16" x 1" available, rather than the usual four or five choices. They were not the highest quality model I wanted, but I spent my $17 anyway. 

 

Philadelphia cream cheese in tubs:

 ---About 50 available, where there are usually 200

Two weeks ago there was one left, and we bought it

 

Chicken bouillon cubes 

- out of stock again

 

ACE bread from Canada 

- out of stock again

 

Hillshire Farms deli meats

 - mainly empty shelves, 

so we settled for the 

lower quality store brand

 

The soda pop row

-  Many more empty spaces than last week, which was the first time I noticed empty shelves in that row in decades of shopping in that store.  

Last week we heard employees discussing filling empty shelves with any extra products available, so they look better to customers. But this week I noticed more empty shelves than last week, and heard an employee being complemented for making some shelves look full by making the product display wider (when you grab the product, to put it in your cart, there's nothing stacked behind it). 

 

These are strange times in the supermarket !