SUPPLY SIDE SURVEY: Our weekly visit to the supermarket

 Meijers huge supermarket in Southfield, Michigan.

7am Wednesday, one hour after the store opened.

The store is filling bare shelves with whatever they had in their warehouses.  Those products are spread wide in shallow rows on the shelves to fill space. 

A display of hundreds of boxes of breakfast cereals when you first walk into the store.  (And then in the usual breakfast cereal row, not one box of Kellog's raisin bran cereal to buy.)

First stop was for Meijers unscented laundry detergent. Not one container in the store. First time in decades.

Next stop for tubs of Philadelphia cream cheese. About 65 of them, rather than the usual 200. Not any flavor I wanted.

Next stop for 2 liter diet Dr. Pepper soda pop on sale for $1 each.  I wanted 3 but bought 6. Left the remaining bottle for other customers only to prove I am not a hoarder!

Next stop for packages of thin sliced salami. The brand I wanted was out of stock. I tried another brand. Wanted two 7 ounce packages, but bought four, not knowing what I'd find the next week.

Next stop for ACE bread from Canada. Surprised to finf four loaves. Bought three of them, and will freeze two.  Enough for three weeks.

Next stop for ground beef, for making enough spaghetti sauce to keep the wife happy for many months. We freeze most of it. The cheapest ground beef (25% fat) was $5.69 a pound, only if you bought three pounds. It had been $3.99 a pound the last time I made spaghetti sauce.   

What I will remember for a while is about 90 Wishbone ranch salad dressings in 30 rows, three bottles deep. 

And a huge display of hundreds of five pound bags of sugar where paper towels used to be located.  

44 years of weekly trips to Michigan supermarkets -- with nothing to report on for the first 43 years. 

2021 is a most unusual year!