I've written here before about grocery shopping during the pandemic. Aside from one grocery trip we made just as things were starting to close down in the US, our supermarket has been pretty well stocked. Aside from a few key items, that is, including the all-important toilet paper.
We were lucky as far as these things go. I normally order our TP in bulk online. I had just placed an order before people started panicking. I felt fortunate that the timing had worked out so well in our favor, that we just happened to be running low on our previous package of TP. I also felt lucky that I was in the habit of buying it in bulk. As I told someone at the time as we discussed the situation, if there was a problem that required more than 24 rolls of TP in the immediate future, I didn't want to know about it.
Well. When I made that comment, I had a sort of loose schedule of toilet paper usage in my mind, one that was based on not being home all day every day. To be a tad indelicate, under ordinary circumstances, we use the bathroom at work, school, restaurants, other people's houses...all the while, not dipping into our own stock of TP. When we stay home all day, we necessarily only use our own bathroom and our own TP. A different TP usage schedule applies.
While I don't think (and fervently hope) we're not in imminent danger of running out of TP, the fact that it still has not reappeared on store shelves or in any meaningful quantity online concerns me. It concerned me to the point that I thought I should maybe start sourcing our next batch. This is not an easy task to square with official orders to stay home--checking out multiple stores in person didn't seem like the best idea. We looked at our supermarket when we were there buying groceries anyway, and we checked the 7-11 on our block, and none was to be found. I checked my usual sources online. There were a few false hopes there, where I tried to add TP that was allegedly in stock into my shopping cart, only to be told that they had just run out.
I was finally able to order some weird looking off-brand TP from Amazon. Even that sort of TP appears to be in short supply, and we can expect to receive ours anytime between April 24 and May 15. I'm kind of hoping that my giving in to buy it will be the signal to the universe that it's time for regular TP to become available again in the sort of abundance we're accustomed to. Until then, wishing everyone plentiful (or at least adequate) supplies of paper products of all kinds!
I hope the TP situation resolves soon for you. You can always use washcloths if necessary. Here in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, I've been able to buy toilet paper twice since this whole thing started (with 6 of us home, we go through it!). I've had to buy name-brand instead of store-brand, but at least they had some available. In the early days of COVID-19 hitting the US, there were shortages of staple foods like pasta, rice, lentils, and canned tomatoes, but those are all available here again. Frozen fruit and almond milk have been hit-or-miss; sometimes I can get them and sometimes not. The one thing I hadn't been able to get for the past month was a large refill container of liquid hand soap. We were just about out and I was going to buy some bar soap for washing our hands, when I found some a couple days ago. I did a happy dance in the store aisle.
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