Empty shelves and a world of uncertainty

Stong's has been my go-to grocery store in Dunbar for many years. Until now, it has survived the coronavirus scare virtually unscathed, but all that changed on Monday. Many of its shelves were bare. Photo by John Denniston.

Perhaps because of a weekend of ever-changing, increasingly bad news, shoppers cleaned out many sections. The bread shelves were particularly hard-hit. Photo by John Denniston.

The clouds of the coronavirus storm have been gathering on the horizon for months, but for me, they broke open Monday in my little local supermarket. For there, on shelves as familiar to me as those in my own kitchen, I found ….vacancy. Row after row of racks that for years have reliably supplied my kitchen staples were bare. Gone was the chicken in all its varieties – whole, ground or in parts, marinated or plain. The racks holding the bread John and I have settled on after long experimentation were empty. So were the shelves I can usually rely on for rice and any kind of pasta a new recipe might demand. One jug of the kind of milk we use remained, a lone sentinel in the dairy section. I don’t use many canned vegetables, but they were wiped out too, the shelves vacuumed clean by voracious new forces.

All of which is nothing new. I have been reading about picked-clean supermarket shelves as long as stories about COVID-19 – first in China, then in Italy, then everywhere – ­ have been appearing. Bare shelves first showed up in Dunbar a couple of weeks ago, when toilet paper vanished from my local Shoppers Drug Mart, but I saw it as kind of a joke: my fellow residents were protecting themselves from the virus by filling their basements with toilet paper!

The grocery-store shelves didn’t seem funny, though. Nor did the mood of my fellow shoppers, all grimly focused on their own survival supplies. Usually, we all profess a friendly politeness, but this time, when a shopping cart bumped another or blocked the way, there was none of the customary exchange of apologies or chit-chat about the narrow aisles. Instead, a grimace, and a downward glance at supplies collected and still to be found.

Empty shelves are an inconvenience and nothing approaching the medical disasters raging in areas hard-hit by the coronavirus. But they’re a sign that things have changed, even in staid old Dunbar. We’re all in a world of uncertainty now.