Skip to main content

Empty Shelves

 A recent trip to the grocery store felt particularly sad. Most days, I am in and out trying to get through my list as quickly as I can. This evening I was not in a rush - it was after dinner and not too late. The supply chain disruptions have produced a variety of effects - empty shelves, prices of items sometimes double of what they used to be pre-pandemic. A young guy in the checkout line right before me had many boxes of ramen noodles, a bag of carrots and a bag of apples. In any other time I would have assumed that's what this person likes to eat but now I paused to wonder if he might have been priced out of things he does like to eat. I have adjusted my buying behavior to work around both what is available and how stuff is priced. 

Given my dietary choices, I might not be shopping for the most high demand (and therefore scarce and expensive) food, so I don't experience the impact nearly the same as many others. Since I had the time to browse around, I did notice people being far more deliberate about what they picked from the aisles. This is not the typical grab and run style that is popular with grocery shoppers on week-nights. This topic is being widely researched and there are many angles to explore. Are we stocking up on perishables more to have a sense of comfort and safety about food, are people switching to meat substitutes because its harder to afford, is pasta flying of the shelves because its comfort food and so on. Every food group could spawn its own kind of study. But being in the grocery store is not a happy experience these days.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...
25 comments
Read more