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How are your grocery stores looking?


Carrie12345
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I’m trying to gain some perspective. I haven’t been inside Aldi in over a month, maybe two, until yesterday. Now I’m wondering if we’re just experiencing shipment issues from southern weather, or an overall issue.

It was sort of disturbingly bare yesterday. Produce, bakery, cereal, sauces and dressings, chocolate, meats, dairy, frozen... The “specials” aisle (not the aisle of shame, though that was low, too) didn’t even have a top shelf. There WAS plenty of hummus and many hams, but it seemed like everything else was less than half stocked to almost completely gone. Some dairy shelves had just a few lonely items, and the refrigerator behind was basically empty.

But, again, I haven’t been inside in a while, and it’s the ONLY store I’ve been inside in many months.

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I don't shop at Aldi, but the stores I do shop at have been fairly back to normal for the last few weeks, with the exception of Clorox/Lysol wipes. There are disinfecting wipes, just not always the brand names. Bounty paper towels were also in very short supply here for awhile, and they can still be spotty. But there's always plenty of other brands/store brand available. All in all -- fairly normal.

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In our area things have been normal since last summer/early fall at the latest.  On any given day they could be out of something - Trader Joes was missing our preferred frozen pizza, one week the grocery store was out of the bagged cut broccoli pieces, another week they were out of our preferred bagged salad, one week in the fall they were low on dried beans - but there doesn't seem to be any lack of food.  They had the usual missing stock as they sold out during holidays, but there hasn't been a situation where whole categories of food were missing since early summer.  

That being said, while I do go to Trader Joes and Whole Foods sometimes, our main 'regular store' is a regional chain.  Even during the height of 'we can't find food' they seemed to usually have stock.  They have all of the normal national and seasonally imported items found in any big store, but a lot of their suppliers are as local as they can get - summer tomatoes are from a few counties over, much of the milk from regional dairies (there is a different 'name brand' in TN compared to SC, for instance), with both being well know local producers.  I wonder if that helps, although, like I said, TJs was stocked except for the red box pizza last week, and they said that it was one of their best sellers so they were waiting for it to be available again.  

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I have not been in the stores lately because we do curbside pickup from Walmart and Aldi. We have a Walmart order ready for pickup today and for the first time in awhile, we’re not able to get a large number of items because they’re out of stock — bananas, tea, sausages, a toothbrush, English muffins, avocados, etc. We had quite a few substitutions, too. 

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We have two small grocery stores in our town, a Save a Lot and an IGA. They have been back to normal since last summer. Like someone else said, occasionally you'll notice one random thing not there. I thought it was a little funny last week, my dd that works at the IGA came home and said that dh would be disappointed, they had hung up a notice saying that due to something somewhere (I can't remember) mushrooms might be in short supply for the next few weeks. When I went to the store, under the sign there were tons of mushrooms stacked up, and they were marking them down when not selling fast enough. Weird.

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We have two Aldi stores in my city, and one (since last year) is regularly out of many products, especially if you shop at the end of a busy day. The other one is fine except for the usual Aldi randomness that always happens of one or two things being unavailable.  So clearly it's not an overall distribution problem? I've wondered if the store more frequently lacking products has poor management, or if has gotten a lot busier and can't keep up with stocking (maybe also a management issue). 

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Our stores (east Texas) had been normal for some time. But then we had a winter storm and things changed. We stopped by the grocery store to get fresh produce Saturday (roads were starting to clear up some in our area), and there was some fresh produce, eggs, bread, but no milk of any kind and very little lunchmeat - meat selection was very thin too. I've seen on FB that many stores have been getting shipments on Sunday, so I imagine things will be back to normal soon.  I've regularly seen wipes the past month or so - but the prices are way higher than they were a year ago! We also have a huge surplus of hand sanitizers - many are being put on clearance - along with masks. 

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I was at Walmart on Saturday, and many of the food shelves were looking bare. I assume that the winter storms delayed shipments. Also, our state still hasCovid restrictions on businesses which means most of the grocery and big box stores are not allowed to have workers at night to stock while the stores. It is a real pain to try to shop around pallets of items while shelves are being stocked.

I am not particular about brands, so I didn’t notice that, but the paper and plastic section was low enough to cause me to make different choices than I had planned.

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I live in central NC, and most stores seem to be back to normal, but our local Food Lion is consistently out of many things.   I don't know if its the Food Lion chain as a whole or just this particular store, but it's almost a joke to go in there looking for particular items or specials.  

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Stores in my area had mostly recovered. The bare shelves of the past week have been due to winter weather.  It is a combination of people buying extra in anticipation of storms, delayed deliveries, and low staffing due to unsafe driving conditions.  Items from local warehouses get restocked fairly quickly.  Delivery of items from more distant locations is affected by weather conditions in multiple locations.   I expect that crops freezing before harvest and spoilage due power-outages at warehouses will affect availability of some items for several months.

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My Aldi was great yesterday. I noticed that Aldi in particular can run low on items during certain times of the week in general, so maybe you went at a bad time?

 

ETA: Last night I went to Target and I could not find about half the things on my list. I think it might have to do with the winter storms and shipping problems.

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The only thing I still have trouble finding are some cleaning products. My grocery store has trouble getting toilet cleaner for instance, and has had no ammonia since early 2020. I was able to find both at Home Depot, they just don't end up in the grocery store yet. Foodwise, things seem to be back to normal--occasionally out of something on my list, but it's usually there the next time. We were not impacted by storms in our local area.

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Ours was low on fruits and veggies after the last round of storms.  I didn't go, but friends and family sent me pics of bare shelves snd bins.  I think its sll just shipping delays due to bad roads.  I'm planning to pick up a few things maybe tomorrow,  but not go get normal groceries until Friday!

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We just had a dangerous ice storm/lots of snow on top of it when we usually hardly get anything. My dh and youngest went to the grocer yesterday and it needed to be restocked. They were able to get quite a bit on their list though. Key word: their list, not mine lol.

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In the Houston burbs, I've been doing field research on just this topic. Yesterday, my Walmart pickup was awful. 6 random substitutions (really, head scratchers) and 8 items eliminated including the milk and buns I desperately needed. They let me cancel, though, so I didn't pick up the few things I would have wanted.

Then, in desperation, I girded myself to visit every grocery store in my town. Luckily the first store I visited, a tiny, old fashioned Kroger had water, milk, produce, deli meats and eggs. The only thing they were out of was buns. Their freezers were bare because they lost power and had to throw away all their stock. 

Today, I stopped at a big Kroger Marketplace and got eggs and buns. They had at least some of every category although their shelves were half empty and they limited customers to one each of bread, milk, eggs and water.

I've got everything I need for the week! What a relief!

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2 hours ago, OH_Homeschooler said:

My Aldi was great yesterday. I noticed that Aldi in particular can run low on items during certain times of the week in general, so maybe you went at a bad time?

I read somewhere that Aldi restocks produce on Wednesdays.  Maybe that's also their general restock day.

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2 minutes ago, chiguirre said:

In the Houston burbs, I've been doing field research on just this topic. Yesterday, my Walmart pickup was awful. 6 random substitutions (really, head scratchers) and 8 items eliminated including the milk and buns I desperately needed. They let me cancel, though, so I didn't pick up the few things I would have wanted.

Then, in desperation, I girded myself to visit every grocery store in my town. Luckily the first store I visited, a tiny, old fashioned Kroger had water, milk, produce, deli meats and eggs. The only thing they were out of was buns. Their freezers were bare because they lost power and had to throw away all their stock. 

Today, I stopped at a big Kroger Marketplace and got eggs and buns. They had at least some of every category although their shelves were half empty and they limited customers to one each of bread, milk, eggs and water.

I've got everything I need for the week! What a relief!

I was glad to see that after the storm last week (TX), two of my stores were limiting these items.  They seem to have learned from last year's Covid panic.

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15 minutes ago, DoraBora said:

I read somewhere that Aldi restocks produce on Wednesdays.  Maybe that's also their general restock day.

It's store specific.  I have 2 aldi's within 10 minutes of me.  One gets shipments on Monday's and Thursdays and the other gets shipments on Tuesdays and Fridays.  

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Things had been fairly normal here, but leading up to our winter weather in Texas, things became picked over.  There were no bananas in the stores when things hit.  I went in the store on Friday and there were no eggs, milk, sandwich bread, toilet paper, steel cut oats, or Hellman's mayonaise.  The meat and fish counters were completely closed down.  I purchased the last bag of bread flour in the store.  Frozen pizzas, canned chilli, tuna fish, canned soups, and pastas were very picked over.  I didn't even look for bottled water.  In the meat section there were some packages of chicken legs, a little bit of ground meat, pork roasts, bacon, sausages, and hams.  There was a bit of salmon and frozen shrimp.  

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On my order from last week, I had six items not available to order, four that were substituted, and several that weren’t there at pickup: lactose free milk, cilantro, Serrano peppers, and other produce...

We had extensive power outages and ice in my part of the world last week. I suspect we had a hard time both in getting shipments in and with high demand.

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I did my grocery pickup order today.  The only things they substituted were:  they were out of peach chobani yogurt, so they gave me black cherry (which was fine, but I wish there'd been a way to say then that I didn't want the OTHER black cherry four pack yogurt, so now I have a lot of cherry yogurt) and they were out of medium shredded cheese so they gave me mild cheddar, which was also fine.  They did not ask, but substituted lime for key lime La Croix, which is NOT fine and pisses me off, but I can totally understand a person who is not a major fan of La Croix not realizing that they taste quite differently.  

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Not back to normal here. Last month for 1-2 weeks no citrus, oranges, grapefruit, lemons. Then limit 1 per customer on eggs and butter. Produce has been sporadic of what is available. When I called to ask- I am told that its a nation wide shortage. But on the plus side I was able to get Clorox wipes for the first time in about a year. 

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47 minutes ago, history-fan said:

Not back to normal here. Last month for 1-2 weeks no citrus, oranges, grapefruit, lemons. Then limit 1 per customer on eggs and butter. Produce has been sporadic of what is available. When I called to ask- I am told that its a nation wide shortage. 

There is plenty of oranges (different varieties), grapefruit, lemons, limes at my local supermarkets (chain stores and Asian supermarkets). I’m in Silicon Valley.

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I am in Texas and my daughter just got home from her shift at HEB. Things were really wild on Saturday and Sunday. She was scheduled for Friday morning, but couldn't make it out of the driveway because of the ice. She said that her store has managed to mostly stock up. They got city water turned on again on Sunday. The freezer section is pretty sparse and the deli and bakery sections are bare. The dairy section has limited stock. Otherwise they are in pretty good shape. They kept meat and eggs in stock all day. They've been bringing in pallets and pallets and pallets of water bottles because so much of the area is under either a boil water notice or has no water.

We were fortunate to actually have rolling outages rather than having no electricity at all and we never lost water and had no burst pipes. My area also has no boil water notice.

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16 hours ago, Spryte said:

I haven’t been in, but placed a large Costco order today, and they had everything we ordered.

I’m stuck on the aisle of shame.  Which aisle is that?! 🤣

Well, for me, that could be just about any aisle, lol. But it’s the more-frequent-than-seasonal aisle where you find all the items you didn’t know you needed at prices that would be silly to pass up!

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I've been avoiding going to the grocery store in person, though I do go occasionally for last-minute pickups that didn't come in our delivery (from a different chain). I haven't noticed any particular shortages at either store. I also have to make regular in-person trips to the pharmacy for a prescription that requires an ID and I haven't noticed any shortages in their grocery section either.

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I posted upthread about things being fine locally when I went last Wednesday (although it was a little crowded, likely in preparation for possible bad weather on Thursday), and I hadn't seen anybody posting about not finding stuff at the grocery store.  Today somebody posted about our closest Aldi, saying that it was low on stock last week, then somebody else said that the truck came over the weekend, and a third person said there were empty shelves today.  So, maybe an Aldi problem in addition to localized storm-associated issues?  

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So for us, I never shop Aldi on a Sunday, which it looks like you are talking about Sunday as well.  I find after people have shopped all weekend, by Sunday night, things are very bare.  I was out at ours on Sunday and couldn't get cat litter.  We had just had the two weeks ice and snow storm and roads that were unpassable, so the weekend was an extremely busy one as people were finally able to get out after the thaw.  So yes, shelves were pretty sparse looking everywhere.  I was at Walmart over the weekend too. But cat litter was the only thing I was completely able to not buy. 

Our stores have been closer to normal over the winter, but in general, just have less all of the time.  There is less seasonal inventory everywhere, which means there is almost none left by the time of the holidays and for after holiday sales which is what I shop yearly.  My shopping routines have been a constant learning curve over this past year.  

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Random things end up being out of stock for each grocery order I place. Not the same things, but random, just to keep it interesting I suppose. The high protein milk we get, the mass market canned dog food I mix in with the dogs dry food, vanilla flavored coffee k-cup, low sodium turkey, etc etc. Something new each time, lol. 

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No milk or eggs to be found since before the storm-- some isles bare and some well stocked. It is rather hit-or miss...

My oldest dd found fresh veggies, fruit and CHEESE!!!! for us at her local store (but no milk or eggs).

We just weaned the baby from formula to milk-- so now back to formula for another week! 

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9 minutes ago, Jann in TX said:

No milk or eggs to be found since before the storm-- some isles bare and some well stocked. It is rather hit-or miss...

My oldest dd found fresh veggies, fruit and CHEESE!!!! for us at her local store (but no milk or eggs).

We just weaned the baby from formula to milk-- so now back to formula for another week! 

Interesting...my dd attends college in TX and said there was no milk at the dining hall tonight - no chocolate, 1%, 2%, soy, or almond milk!  I was wondering if there was a supply issue.  

 

 

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I went to Walmart today and the only eggs they had were cases of 60 count.  That area of the shelves was completely 100% stocked.  Any other kind/size was completely empty.  Good thing 5 dozen eggs is nothing for us.  Aldi had eggs but they were about 75% higher in price and they've never lifted the limit of 3.

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On 2/24/2021 at 7:50 PM, Kassia said:

Interesting...my dd attends college in TX and said there was no milk at the dining hall tonight - no chocolate, 1%, 2%, soy, or almond milk!  I was wondering if there was a supply issue.  

 

 

There does seem to be a milk issue in TX.  A local coffee shop has had no milk, cream, etc.  Only oat, almond, or hemp milk.  They said they planned to get a shipment beginning of next week.

I just went to the grocery store--so a week passed our freezing weather (and up into the 80s this week). I have been surprised that we have been able to get a good deal of fresh produce, but milk product and egg choices were few, no Jiff peanut butter, no chicken bouilloun of any type, a lot of empty shelf space for canned goods, pasta, kleenex, herbal supplements, limits of two water, bread, milk, or eggs (I didn't check to see what water supply was available).  

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