Supply lines

One of the things that made me the most nervous a couple of weeks ago was the difficulty of ordering food online. We routinely order a number of things that our grocery store doesn't stock, so when the grocery stock aisles got iffy and I wanted to avoid crowds anyway, my first recourse was to Amazon. It was disquieting how many things suddenly were out, from beans to rice to canned anything to almost any kind of cleaning supplies. I checked again today, though, and found supplies almost in an ordinary condition.

I've been using the local grocery's curbside service. It's clunky; you get a delivery date that's a week out instead of same-day. Once you choose your items, there's a very limited ability to add anything else you may think of. Substitutions and outages are still common. Still, there's minimal personal contact, which is safer not only for us but for the workers. Considering the conditions they're operating under, they're doing a great job and trying hard to be both conscientious and flexible. Our lurking neighbors (hello, lurking neighbors!) are being even more careful than we are, minimizing risk to themselves and to the 99-year-old materfamilias onsite.

Most of the county is being at least fairly careful. There is a growing resentment of outsiders who arrive from who-knows-where having practiced who-knows-what hygiene. My own feeling is that it's more important how we all act in public than whether we've been here for a short or long time. It's all about the hands and the face, and overcoming that careless tendency to think it's no big deal to be in public with a fever or a cough.

The local restaurants are trying to hold on by offering take-out and delivery. Controversy is brewing over whether it's best to support the ones offering discounts, or the ones imposing surcharges. Again, my own feeling is that it's more important to keep the restaurant enterprises together, so they can preserve jobs, than to supply the community with cheaper entertainment. If we just want cheap food, we're all able to cook at home. Food supplies became inconvenient for a while, but never to the point of hunger; mostly we just had to be flexible about substitutions. Because Mr. Tex and I cook most of our food at home anyway, we didn't feel the disruption nearly as much as many did.

4 comments:

Grim said...

The employee salaries should be coverable by the gigantic CARES act signed last Friday, but who knows how long it will take to get a disbursement?

David Foster said...

Instacart is available here; handles orders from multiple stores. Works pretty well. At this point there is about a 5-day delay from order to delivery, but once you are in the queue you can modify/add to the order up to the last moment.

Texan99 said...

We can add up to four hours before pickup, but only four items total.

ymarsakar said...

The system is based on "just in time". AMazon has their own figures for warehousing and what not.

But the system can adapt as the demand rockets up.

Every week or so, people are getting resupplied. This isn't the apocalypse humanity thinks it is. It is an ending, of a sort, but it is very beneficial depending on which side of the dark vs light war people are on.

The revolutionaries of the dark have managed to fever out that fear, shock, and disruptions to the security status quo allows them to turn light to dark. But the dark can be turne dto light, if the status quo is disrupted in the same fahsion.