My daughter, who works in Morrisons, tells me that when she got into work today at 9.30am there were queues all the way down the aisles and the store was as busy as just before Christmas.
Now why would that be, I wonder? Oh yes, there are a few flakes of snow coming down so regardless of the fact that we all have freezers choc full of food (and probably at this time of year full with Christmas left-overs) and amply full cupboards, the UK populace thinks there is a strong possibility it may starve over the weekend, so is stocking up.
I never understand this seige mentality. For goodness sake they can't all have bottle feeding babies who can't have anything but milk, and so be needing to top up on formula and nappies! Most of them are bog standard normal families.
If I really put my mind to it here, we could live for a fortnight or more without having to go shopping for anything at all. Yes we might have to drink black tea if we run out of milk, toast may be in short supply and meals might have a few unusual combinations of ingredients, but by and large we'd get a balance of carbs, protein and the full balance of nutrition we need. Most of us in the Western world, despite our varying incomes, are pretty well nourished and could survive for quite a while on less food without any major detrimental effect upon our health. And we all eat too much most of the time, anyway. It would do us good to have a few days off the snacks and junk food.
And anyway, although supplies might be disrupted for a day or so if the snow really comes down and the main arterial routes become difficult, by Monday they'll be back to normal. There is too much profit involved for suppliers, distributers and retailers for them to allow anything else to happen.
These panic buying people need a dose of common sense, ideally administered anally! In their greed they are buying up supplies of basic food like bread, potatoes and milk thereby denying others their fair share which under normal circumstances they would get, because there's enough for everyone if we all just buy what we need. And I bet loads of it is wasted.
Personally, I have just taken delivery of my normal Tesco order, which was made at the beginning of the week before the snow forecast. It contains the normal amount of food we would need for dinner in the evening, packed lunches and breakfast whenever we are at home. I haven't supplemented it with an extra few pints of milk 'just in case' nor have I ordered extra of anything, because I know in my freezer I have joints of beef, fish, ready meals and frozen veg as well as rolls and crumpets (looking forward to toasting them in front of a log fire!). We'll be fine, in fact more than fine.
Perhaps I should add a law outlawing panic buying to my 'things I would do in 2013 if I were in charge' list. Trouble is, it's getting rather long!
I couldn't agree more. This really is a pathetic reaction to what will amount to no more than a few days disruption. Making panic buying illegal would certainly be on my 'If I ruled the world' list. I try to ask myself what these people are thinking? Admittedly, a certain amount of this is whipped up by the hysterical press banging on about 1 in 50 year blizzards and massive countrywide disruption, but even so, common sense needs to prevail. The problem is, that this sort of behaviour could actually lead to more problems than running out of bread for a day. The old and infirm are the ones most susceptible to the weather conditions and yet these are the very people who will suffer as a result of the panic. They can't get to the shops as quickly or as frequently and even if they do, they are likely to get barged out of the way by some fat, overbearing idiot who simply must have that last can of beans. The sad thing is too, that Canada is laughing at this. The only difference a snowfall makes over here to everyone's shopping habit is that they put a long pair of trousers on instead of the traditional shorts.....
ReplyDelete