They came. They saw. They bought.
And bought and bought and bought.
They bought, at times, merely because they could. One woman purchased eight bottles of ranch dressing. A man in his 30s cleaned out our supply of rigatoni.
“I haven’t eaten pierogies in 20 years,” another man told me. “But it’s what you had.”
Despite deliveries throughout the night, swaths of shelves were bare. Not just sanitizers and paper goods, but frozen vegetables, frozen fruit, pizza rolls, meatballs, and chicken nuggets.
Wave after wave of customers came in, hour after hour, through the night. There seemed no letup, and it’s difficult to see one anytime soon. In the early morning, as the register lines grew longer, a dazed man wandered from one empty cooler to another, mumbling, “It’s so sad. It’s so sad.”
People were frightened and frantic, and yet eager to talk about shared anxieties. They said the world had gone crazy, then acknowledged that they had gone a little crazy themselves. March madness had moved from the basketball court to the grocery floor.
Those who wanted to avoid dense crowds (rightly) shopped in predawn hours. A pale woman undergoing chemo treatments requested that her items be rung up with the scanner gun, so the cashier wouldn’t have to touch anything.
Despite the race for rare finds, most customers were patient and grateful. They saw how hard the cashiers were working, ringing up cart after overflowing cart. They saw the night crew bringing out skids piled high with sought-after products. Sometimes the guys couldn’t even get goods on the shelves before customers started taking them from the shipping boxes.
There was a rush to the back of the store as word spread that toilet paper had arrived. “I’ve never had people come up to me before and ask the price of my toilet paper,” a customer marveled.
One man bought tins of Spam. “My dad, who survived World War II, told me that whenever there’s a crisis, load up on Spam,” he said.
The staples were almost universal. Peanut butter. Rice. Canned beans. Flour. Eggs. Milk. Boxes of mac and cheese. Any sort of pasta. Tuna. Cereal.
People are preparing for the long haul. We just don’t know how long that haul will be.
A suggestion: remember those who are most vulnerable. One customer said his mom was 92, had a strict diet and couldn’t shop for herself. He had stopped by the store the day before and couldn’t find the items she needed. He returned the next day and was able to codge together a few foods she could eat.
This is the opposite of buying eight bottles of ranch dressing. The very nature of a pandemic is that we’re all in it.
Note: The day after this onslaught, Wegmans announced that it would curtail nighttime shopping hours. Staff will continue working through the night, to clean and restock.