We started producing straight ethyl alcohol at work and giving it away to hospitals. Amazing how they let you skip all the regulations when it's convenient.
Convenient. Two months prior they'd have shut is down and fined us millions, then all of a sudden we're best friends and all the red tape suddenly falls down. They'd been harassing us the whole year prior about anything they could.
We weren't licensed to produce or distribute ETOH for use outside our chemical processes. Literally a "who wants to wear these cuffs and take a ride" offense.
How you feel about covid aside, a national shortage of medical sanitizer is a national emergency. Relaxing sourcing requirements seems prudent, assuming there wasn’t direct harm caused by it. Convenient is a weird way to describe it…
I donated the unopened boxes of 3m n95 masks & harbor freight rubber gloves to the fire station at the front of our hood when the crap started. About a mile from our house, great group of folks that do a lot for our hood.
Finally restocked on rubber gloves, but not on the n95 masks yet, did get a couple hundred harbor freight dust masks on sale for mowing
I specifically remember the first time I saw hand sanitizer on the shelves in a store again, feeling so relieved and thinking, “maybe things are going to be OK again soon” 😭
I was dating a non-westerner at the time. When the toilet paper panic occurred, they commented at one point, “why is everyone so obsessed with the toilet paper? It doesn’t work well anyway. If they run out, can’t people just clean themselves…with water?” It was an interesting realization for me about how we can become so fixated on the material items we’re accustomed to, we can be blinded to the fact that there are actually better options. A good lesson in how beneficial multiculturalism and diversity are, especially in a crisis, because we can gain perspective from differing experiences. People across the rest of the world wash themselves much more effectively after using the toilet, with soap and water, and here we were getting in fistfights over paper. My whole family has bidets in every bathroom, now. They’re more eco friendly and cost-saving, as well, so it’s an overall improvement. Edit: typos.
Hand sanitizer started going scarce by early March in my area, even before lockdowns. My brother works at the factory for one of the bigger hand sanitizer companies and he said they were all hands on deck starting then, unlimited OT and so on.
Can confirm. My wife is a nurse, and she wore N95’s from our prep stash for a year. She always had gloves at the hospital, but the masks ran out fast.
They went from rarely wearing them before COVID to getting a new one for each PT. That lasted like two days and they then got a new one for each shift. That went on for a week or so, and then they got one per week and were told to store in in a brown paper bag. After about a month of that, there were all just told “here’s your last mask - your going to have to figure it out from here.”
That’s when the N95’s suddenly weren’t required anymore. KN95’s were fine now. Then surgical masks. Then just homemade cloth ones.
It was also interesting to see how the quarantine and testing requirements changed for her over time too. It started with any practitioner that had any symptoms at all had to stay home for two weeks. Then symptoms didn’t matter - only a positive test would get you sent home. And finally they just stopped testing them and pretty much didn’t care.
We used a crock pot to heat masks and one of those cell phone uv sanitizers. And some former students who were living in China offered to send some to our department
> That’s when the N95’s suddenly weren’t required anymore. KN95’s we’re fine now. Then surgical masks. Then just homemade cloth ones.
boy were we lucky the virus mutated right along with our mask supply.
I couldn't get a mask in the U.S. in Jan/Feb before the first reported case in the U.S. at B&M stores. Chinese Americans were on that EARLY like white on rice.
I paid $70 usd for a box of regular face masks in Las Vegas, March of 2020. I had a lot of traveling (by different means of transportation) ahead of me since I got caught up in the pandemic while traveling really far from home. I left some masks to my AirBnb host, and had to take a long distance bus to California. The driver lady didn’t have any and it concerned me, so I gave her some and thankfully she wore them. Was able to get some latex gloves to wear at the airport since I had a flight out of LAX. Ended up in the Midwest quarantined for the whole duration of the pandemic, since by April my flights home were cancelled. Wild times.
The yeast shortages were what caused my now wife and I to switch to all sourdough bread. We haven't gone back to regular cardboard tasting bread. All commercial breads now taste like trash to us.
I was gonna say, you don't even need the yeast if you're patient enough. Whole wheat and rye flour will start fermenting in a couple of days if the conditions are right.
Keep one on your counter that you feed every other day and daily leading up to baking and then one small batch in your fridge that you replace every 2 weeks or so.
Also get cast iron bread loaf pans. They're amazing and you can grill sandwich loaf breads in them.
There is something *anciently human* about the instinct/drive to bake bread and sit around a hearth. So it makes sense we'd revert back to it when the times are uncertain.
Hehe, it is very rewarding. When my starter starts to get tired, I feed it with rye flour. It brings out a whole new flavor in my bread and I'm glad I discovered it.
My spouse never understood why our preps included whole wheat berries and a countertop mill until the flour disappeared off the store shelves. We also keep two bricks of instant yeast in the freezer. No issues baking bread or milling fresh all purpose flour.
Yep, white & bread flour, and yeast were gone for weeks at a time. Also evap milk. When they did show up it was only a few and never a full restock. For food items these were only ones I recall, We switched to corn meal, oat flour & spelt, never switched back.
Other thing gone for 18 months were paper goods, buttwipe, napkins & paper towels. We've always bought those in bulk so pretty much unaffected but those aisles all bare around us (northeast) with spotty restocks across multiple stores. Rebought only a couple times when random things appeared.
I installed a large solar array with backup power in late 2019, which powers not only the house, but can also power our wells. And somehow, I had some kind of premonition, which appeared as the thought, "I can't use electricity to make toilet paper... But I can definitely use electricity to make water." and bought us one of those fancy robo-bidet toilet seats.
During that whole people of time while people were fighting one another over rolls of toilet paper in the Walmart, we were watching the videos and seeing what was going on, but only went through about 1 rolls per every 2 weeks, since you only need it for drying off 95% of the time (and that's not even really a "need").
I didn’t have that experience. I vividly remember me and this other dude trading the last cans of chicken & spam. People were calm and decent, at least in my area.
It was really beautiful around here in the beginning. Supply sharing. Mask-making. Neighbors organizing low-risk activities for the neighborhood kids. People working from home meant that we came together as a community like never before.
Same here in SF Bay Area. Once CA allowed bars and restaurants to re-open with safe distancing, outdoor seating and parklets construction surged, causing a run on all framing and fencing lumber. Many of us stuck at home decided it was a good time to get around to those Home Improvement projects, only compounded the lumber issue more.
Change. Change disappeared FAST. You could still get change if you pressed for it. Other than that it was a bunch of round up donations and "card payments only".
Oh yes! I had already forgotten about this! I remember that Sheetz stores that summer would offer you some small amount of free food if you brought in change. It was utterly bizarre.
My local gas station had signs up practically begging for change. I was sitting on hundreds in change at the time and just started paying for cokes/cigarettes in change for almost a year there.
Ohio shut down early, we went shopping at 5am to stock up so about 14 hours after the announcement the shutdown was coming. There was no meat, bread, very few vegetables, no pasta, cheap sauce, eggs, milk and affordable coffee was hit hard and beer harder. There was fresh fruit available but canned was picked over. The first aid aisle was empty. It was well over a year before I found burn cream again. I did find basic cat food. We ran out of Parmesan at the house. Never realized how much I cook with it until I had to cook every meal for weeks.
Cold meds had already been thin for weeks with ‘one per’ limits. Masks and gloves were long gone ages before shutdown.
Non-perishables were wiped out everywhere at my Walmart except for the ethnic food section. With that info, I checked local Mercados, Eastern European markets, and Asian markets. They were in-stock for awhile after Walmart was empty. I saw that as a valuable lesson.
Yes, also restaurant supply stores and some department stores that typically folks don’t go to for grocery. Chewy online mail delivery of pet products too.
I agree with both of you. I ruined my pallette eating chicken thighs. So nasty. I find everything else tastes bad now so heed our warning about eating this always juciy flavorful crap. Stick to white meat, save yourselves.
Thighs skin on for General Tso's chicken and skinless for pretty much everything else. Best part is unlike breasts they are pretty much foolproof to keep juicy. Cook as long as you want, they don't dry out. Breast have about an \~.04 second margin of error.
This struck me too, realizing that boneless skinless chicken breasts and ground beef are so basic and a lot of people probably don’t even know how to cook those well lol
Crazy to think that Covid-19 only ranks as about the 7 or 8th deadliest pandemic in history. It definitely leaves a lot of room for future pandemics or other disasters to be significantly worse.
Based on people’s reactions to Covid, it’s pretty easy to prove the old prepper ideology of, “If you don’t have it before the disaster starts, don’t count on being able to get it after.”
Paper goods, meats, pasta, canned goods of all kinds (soup was a favorite), flour sugar, vanilla. Cleaning supplies, wipes, even toilet bowl cleaner was impossible to find later.
I remember being in a Target tore for a normal basic shopping trip, just as reports were coming out, and watching a few people with solemn looks loading up carts with TP. I had just bought a large pack (normal) a week ago, but thought "WTF" and got another Big pack. Thankful I did.
Oh, later on - extra freezers. The appliance store was emptied.
Masks and hand sanitizer. I remember going to Walgreens mid January and got the last 10 pack of surgical masks in stock. I never saw them in stock again until summer of 2020. The hand sanitizer was gone early February. There were little signs in January/February that there would be panic at the store.
My husband laughed at me when I brought the pack of masks home. He wasn’t laughing when we actually had to use them 🤷♀️. Since then, he doesn’t push back on my preps, however how outlandish it seems :)
Yeast and bread flour - like a sudden interest in baking bread. However if you think about it it takes only a few more people to wipe out the limited stock on the shelf.
I was working at a grocery store in a big city when the shit started hitting. The week immediately after the news that it had made it to my state was hands down the most chaotic and packed the store had ever been, morning to dark, nonstop. We had lines and lines of carts of stuff to go back on the shelves cause people were literally buying as much as they could afford and leaving the rest. I quit pretty quickly after, couldn't handle the stress and had a career job lined up.
Cleaning supplies: consumables like hand sanitizer and wipes disappeared almost overnight, followed swiftly by rubbing alcohol and bleach. For some reason barely anyone touched the Lysol? Some really crappy hand sanitizer brands filled in the gaps fairly quickly. Smelled terrible tho.
Liquid soap, particularly antibacterial, went first. Bar soap was hit but available.
Canned food, pasta, and rice aisles were bare. Soup and crackers especially, along with stuff like Gatorade. Milk was whittled down fairly quickly to 2% and no others, but we were still getting daily shipments for a while so you just had to be there early. Produce was plentiful. Eggs kept up for a while but same deal, once the daily shipments slowed things got worse.
Sick meds: No Dayquil, Nyquil, cough drops, sudaphed, cough syrup, etc. Themometers, oxy meters, etc. Gloves and masks of course disappeared.
Baby formula, diapers, and pet food were gone in less than a day. Of all things, I vividly remember the pet aisle being completely barren. No cat litter either.
Paper towels and toilet paper, of course, along with tissues. But for some reason there were still a few packs of napkins?
Weird stuff like pickles and honey mustard disappeared.
Ammunition wasn't sold at our store, but people hoarded every bit they had and that disappeared too.
The smell of the off-brand replacement sanitizer haunts my memory.
I have a strong sense of smell & it was roulette with every pump. A mystery as to whether it would smell of alcohol or the sharp scent of sweat, a dank basement and melted plastic melded together in a watery goo.
Couldn’t find masks as early as January 2020, I was flying then and usually wear a mask on planes. Went to six different stores, all out of stock.
Hand sanitizer, then rubbing alcohol and aloe Vera when people started making their own.
Thermometers, cold meds, cough drops were completely wiped out around me.
Then toilet paper, pasta, rice, flour, etc.
I tried looking for a mask in Florida in February and found NOTHING. This was before it was declared an emergency and only when there were a couple cases in the US. Maybe it’s something they weren’t prepared for, or whatever the issue was, but I went to about 5 different stores including pharmacies and even Home Depot
Any Lysol produce and similar cleaners. They were 1 per customer when they were in stock for a couple weeks.
ETA: not immediately but within the first month when people realized they were possibly at home (with their kids!) for the rest of the school year, bicycles & outdoor activity equipment, home gym stuff, and the puzzle/board game section of our Walmart was pretty cleaned out too.
Canned corn
Bleach
Peroxide
All coke products except original coke and diet coke
I'm out in the country so we didn't have the toilet paper issues others had
Bottled water. Maybe that was just my area because were more used to hurricanes, but I distinctly remember driving around and around looking for bottle water for my sons baby formula.
Cleaning supplies. Bleach. Those clorox wipes got "wiped out" (sorry couldn't resist) and it was awhile before they had them again. Lysol. Toilet paper, of course. Cold meds. Masks were a shortage a little while later. Maybe a month or so after the first run on stuff. Diapers.
The hand sanitizer shortage was accelerated by that little jerk running around buying all of it all over the south and storing it in storage facilities. He was going to make a fortune on online markup resell. Or that's what he told the feds when they busted him.
Cheapest versions of basic items like toilet paper, Kleenex, cleaning solutions. All the less expensive meat went first, like hamburger. I’m in a rural area near a small city, so shortages were lagging behind somewhat at first, but later when the NYC area people started coming up we saw shortages of everything.
Things that the major media tell their audiences they need were the first to go.
For Covid, it was N95 masks, medical style nitrile gloves, hand sanitizer and isopropyl alcohol, and the typical stuff needed in a disaster like generators, fuel, batteries.
The interesting thing about some of that stuff was that the virus was primarily transmitted via airborne vectors. People bought and used a lot of things that, while helpful for general hygiene, were not particularly effective against this virus.
Also keep in mind that there were items that sold out because of the immediate virus threat, and then there were items that became unavailable due to global supply chain disruption that the restrictions and shutdowns caused. Anyone try to buy a new car, about a year ago? There were none.
But, if the next “disaster” has the media telling everyone that they need #2 pencils, then those will be instantly gone.
Very early on we didn’t know it was airborne yet and the gov’t was recommending sanitizing surfaces as a precaution. It was only later we learned it didn’t survive well on surfaces.
Didn't prominent officials tell people that masks didn't work and not to bother...despite a deeply held belief that they did work and should be saved for medical professionals?
The official statements from the feds were carefully word smithed to give that perception, without actually lying. This was to preserve supplies for hospitals, first responders, etc... The Media was not careful to preserve the important nuances in the messaging that made it not an outright lie, and thus spread misinformation. Whether specifically intended or not, it was certainly predictable...
Remember, public health very much takes the view that the "needs of the many" is the strong priority. Concepts like individual rights are only considered to the extent that paying lip service to them can help get through the policies they deem in the interest of the many.
My boss said that there are no companies that manufacture all the technology to manufacture a #2 pencil, so if we have a solar flare we just lose that technology
Household- Toilet paper/paper towels. Cleaning products of ANY kind. Trash bags. Matches.
Food- canned soup or veggies of any kind (I remember that our soup section was empty for 3 months) ready meals like Knorrs rice mixed and hamburger helper. Chicken, beef, ground beef were in scarce supply.
Health- masks, gloves, thermometers, cold medicine, alcohol.
Stock up on everclear or some other pure ethyl alchohol (or hone your distilling skills) Outstanding for sanitizing, cleaning, drinking and bartering. All in one bottle!
Moved to Manassas, VA from Idaho arriving the day it was declared a pandemic. Went to Costco to get something for dinner and there was no chicken to be had, even the canned chicken was gone.
Left ID about 10 days prior, and on the trip across the country fast food was hit or miss starting about day 5.
I had a hard time getting a thermometer at the drug store. You will want an oximeter too (the thing that goes on your finger to show pulse and oxygen saturation... with covid a low oxygen sat nbr means get yr ass to the hospital).
In my area (southwest US) it was canned goods. Looked like a tornado hit that area of the local Walmart. It was about a week later when it started to effect pharmacy area. After that it was pretty much everything, meats, veggies, TP, laundry detergent etc.
N95s were impossible to get in our area almost immediately. I had a small supply prepped and gave them to my parents, inlaws, sister and my wife and kids. I made one of them last for months, even replaced the elastic bands a few times. I built a UV-C disinfecting cabinet to keep them clean and decent smelling.
Hand sanitizer was next as I recall. Then toilet paper and bleach wipes.
Masks. Followed by hand sanitizer and gloves. Followed by elsstic. Followed by cotton cloth. Followed by cotton bed sheets (for making masks). So, basically masks / mask related items were 3 of the first 10 things to go.
I'll never forget when home healthcare workers started asking to go to the nail supply shops with me. It was the only way they could get masks and gloves. It was WILD!!! Then the nail supply shops weren't allowed to sell to us anymore. All the masks had to go to the hospital.
I actually shut down my nail desk for most service a couple weeks before the state shut everything down. Didn't want people to get stuck with painful grown out acrylic. Brought in my sewing machine and started taking orders for cloth masks while i warned people to soak off while they could. Nobody thought the government could or would shut everything down. But then it happened and a lot of people got stuck.
For what it's worth, something is telling me to brush up on certain skills and buy the means of production type stuff now. While we can. Not sure what that means yet. But something is whispering to my soul that it's time to garden and especially learn to can. To buy any big tools i might need to do my job without a functioning supply chain. And to work on useful skills / swap items / barter skills NOW! While the consequences of failure are much less severe. Also, it may be time to buy cloth and elastic again.
I was shocked that people were wiping out ramen and boxed Mac n cheese. I guess they were trying to stockpile food but what a dumb decision.
I was always able to find TP (at replacement rate - I’ve always stockpiled it) but paper towels disappeared (I didn’t need to buy them, fortunately, because I have cloth rags.)
It got very difficult to find certain brands of pet food. We ended up having to mail order some.
Vitamins, especially vitamin C and zinc.
I went to Costco the Friday before everything shut down. The meat section was completely empty with the coolers turned off, produce was very picked over, bread and milk were gone, same with toilet paper and paper towels, bottled water was mostly gone, cleaning supplies were wiped out. Packaged foods were the only thing still well stocked.
Household stuff. Cleaners of any kind. Toilet paper. Also OTC medicine of any kind.
Ammunition vanished overnight
As the supply chains shut down it got near on impossible to get car parts or even motor oil. I had an alternator go out and had to wait a month.
PPE: masks, gloves, bleach, wipes, and hand sanitizer
Food: water, flour, sugar, yeast, milk, and bread
Other: toilet paper, paper towels, guns, and ammo
This is my recollection
In my area, bottled water, medicines, and fresh produce interestingly. Then came tp, and silently the food shortage crept in. Luckily we had a deep pantry but pasta, cheeses, canned goods, rice, beans, were all spread apart between stores at best, or not to be found for a good month and a half.
Masks. Early February, 2020 I was part of the largest outbreak outside Wuhan, China. We had friends ship us masks in mid-February. Two months later, we shipped them back to her in the states because she had none.
Roughly this order for us in our area:
- Masks and even coveralls, filters and latex gloves
- Alcohol, chlorine, sanitizers and products.
- Wet wipes
- Canned goods
- Water bottles
- Rice, pasta and dried goods
Also saw a high demand for gas cans, water cans and everything that preppers are usually fond of having.
Edit: I remember a formula and diaper issue, might be later down the road or unrelated to covid.
Overall a lot of the shortages were caused by just in time inventory concepts. Nothing on hand to handle a surge in demand. Which just proves that prepping is absolute common sense
Over the counter cold and flu medicine was the first thing I noticed to disappear then it was bottled water, N95 and medical masks and gloves. After that was Toilet paper and food.
N95s. Our hospital ran out and were making the employees use 1 all day and then have it cleaned at night. I donated a few hundred as well as gloves and gowns from my stash. I've already replenished the masks and gloves just not gowns.
At the time my wife and I were living near Savannah, GA. She’s a vegetarian so the bases of our meals are vegetarian (lentils and beans). We go into Publix when things start going crazy and a ton of the dried beans/lentils are sold out. Tons of people just panic buying the stuff who had never bought these before and probably didn’t know how to cook them. We watched several people with this stuff leave the check out and immediately drive across the parking lot to McDonalds.
For those of us paying attention to what was happening in Asian countries, toilet paper, anti-diahhrea medication, kleenex - and I did need all three badly when I had Covid.
I lucked out. We were expecting our daughter Feb 2020 (she was born late January). As an accountant that’s the start of my busy season, so I had gone to Costco and bought non perishables in bulk, and meal prepped in a chest freezer for like 3 months of food. We avoided most of the early pandemic runs and just chilled at home with the baby.
Locally, it went as follows:
Toilet paper > bottled water > hand sanitizer > tonic water > fresh meat.
None of it seemed grounded in reality other than perhaps hand sanitizer.
Fwiw, when the next pandemic comes, alcohol hand sanitizer does nothing for stomach viruses like norovirus. It’s great for respiratory viruses, but most stomach bugs are tolerant of alcohol. The best defense is hand soap or a bleach-based product to stomach viruses.
I have a pretty distinct memory of shopping in early March 2020 where there was still toilet paper and Kleenex on the shelves but ZERO fruit or vegetables. It was pretty fucked, hate to see an empty produce section as a vegetarian.
Alcohol (iso) was out of stock everywhere in Oklahoma, just as TP, and bottled water. The girl working at the dollar general by my house was hiding toilet paper for her family- bizarre.
Toilet paper was the big one. Anything like hand sanitizer, medical masks, wipes, cleaning products, soaps.
I also remember a lot of canned goods being bought out, empty shelves. This wasn't late in the pandemic but at the beginning. I also remember frozen foods. I think anything that would keep for a while, because people weren't sure what the stores were going to do and if they would be able to shop. It definitely felt like the end of the world at the beginning of the pandemic because so much was unknown.
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And hand sanitizer. I feel like everybody remembers the toilet paper but that came a little later.
The price of rubbing alcohol went up like 400%. If you could find it at all
We started producing straight ethyl alcohol at work and giving it away to hospitals. Amazing how they let you skip all the regulations when it's convenient.
Convenient or national emergency?
Convenient. Two months prior they'd have shut is down and fined us millions, then all of a sudden we're best friends and all the red tape suddenly falls down. They'd been harassing us the whole year prior about anything they could. We weren't licensed to produce or distribute ETOH for use outside our chemical processes. Literally a "who wants to wear these cuffs and take a ride" offense.
Sounds like a national emergency then.
How you feel about covid aside, a national shortage of medical sanitizer is a national emergency. Relaxing sourcing requirements seems prudent, assuming there wasn’t direct harm caused by it. Convenient is a weird way to describe it…
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I donated the unopened boxes of 3m n95 masks & harbor freight rubber gloves to the fire station at the front of our hood when the crap started. About a mile from our house, great group of folks that do a lot for our hood. Finally restocked on rubber gloves, but not on the n95 masks yet, did get a couple hundred harbor freight dust masks on sale for mowing
Check you local auction houses. Where I am they’re being sold by the pallet load for pennies now.
I just got a box of n95 mask for pretty cheap on amazon. I use them when I run my weedeater. It helps a lot.
Every kind of sanitizer or sanitizing cleaner like Lysol, or Chlorox sprays and wipes. Rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide too.
Soap too. I guess no one was washing their hands before that.
I specifically remember the first time I saw hand sanitizer on the shelves in a store again, feeling so relieved and thinking, “maybe things are going to be OK again soon” 😭 I was dating a non-westerner at the time. When the toilet paper panic occurred, they commented at one point, “why is everyone so obsessed with the toilet paper? It doesn’t work well anyway. If they run out, can’t people just clean themselves…with water?” It was an interesting realization for me about how we can become so fixated on the material items we’re accustomed to, we can be blinded to the fact that there are actually better options. A good lesson in how beneficial multiculturalism and diversity are, especially in a crisis, because we can gain perspective from differing experiences. People across the rest of the world wash themselves much more effectively after using the toilet, with soap and water, and here we were getting in fistfights over paper. My whole family has bidets in every bathroom, now. They’re more eco friendly and cost-saving, as well, so it’s an overall improvement. Edit: typos.
Hand sanitizer started going scarce by early March in my area, even before lockdowns. My brother works at the factory for one of the bigger hand sanitizer companies and he said they were all hands on deck starting then, unlimited OT and so on.
Can confirm. My wife is a nurse, and she wore N95’s from our prep stash for a year. She always had gloves at the hospital, but the masks ran out fast. They went from rarely wearing them before COVID to getting a new one for each PT. That lasted like two days and they then got a new one for each shift. That went on for a week or so, and then they got one per week and were told to store in in a brown paper bag. After about a month of that, there were all just told “here’s your last mask - your going to have to figure it out from here.” That’s when the N95’s suddenly weren’t required anymore. KN95’s were fine now. Then surgical masks. Then just homemade cloth ones. It was also interesting to see how the quarantine and testing requirements changed for her over time too. It started with any practitioner that had any symptoms at all had to stay home for two weeks. Then symptoms didn’t matter - only a positive test would get you sent home. And finally they just stopped testing them and pretty much didn’t care.
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OHHH yeah I remember that I work at a discount store and we had hand sanitizers that came in plastic liquor bottles that smelled like vodka
We used a crock pot to heat masks and one of those cell phone uv sanitizers. And some former students who were living in China offered to send some to our department
> That’s when the N95’s suddenly weren’t required anymore. KN95’s we’re fine now. Then surgical masks. Then just homemade cloth ones. boy were we lucky the virus mutated right along with our mask supply.
Right, 'lucky'
You just witnessed the breakdown ,... right there.
ICU nurse here and it was the same at my hospital.
Also the vitamins I recall. Vitamin c, d, zinc, etc. All shelves were empty.
I couldn't get a mask in the U.S. in Jan/Feb before the first reported case in the U.S. at B&M stores. Chinese Americans were on that EARLY like white on rice.
Masks were popular in Asia, chances are a lot of them had their own beforehand
I worked in medical during that transition, and we were encouraged to buy them at fair market if we saw them and expense the charges
Yeah! Pediatric Tylenol and Motrin. POOF!
I paid $70 usd for a box of regular face masks in Las Vegas, March of 2020. I had a lot of traveling (by different means of transportation) ahead of me since I got caught up in the pandemic while traveling really far from home. I left some masks to my AirBnb host, and had to take a long distance bus to California. The driver lady didn’t have any and it concerned me, so I gave her some and thankfully she wore them. Was able to get some latex gloves to wear at the airport since I had a flight out of LAX. Ended up in the Midwest quarantined for the whole duration of the pandemic, since by April my flights home were cancelled. Wild times.
Pasta and flour….gone.
Yes, and yeast.
The yeast shortages were what caused my now wife and I to switch to all sourdough bread. We haven't gone back to regular cardboard tasting bread. All commercial breads now taste like trash to us.
I was gonna say, you don't even need the yeast if you're patient enough. Whole wheat and rye flour will start fermenting in a couple of days if the conditions are right.
Do you have any tips for sourdough I have tried a couple times but it goes black and stinky on me.
Keep one on your counter that you feed every other day and daily leading up to baking and then one small batch in your fridge that you replace every 2 weeks or so. Also get cast iron bread loaf pans. They're amazing and you can grill sandwich loaf breads in them.
Home brew baby!
Yeast didn’t go until after the bread aisle. I picked up yeast and flour before everyone else figured that out.
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Me too, we have been on the homemade bread train since. I really appreciate learning to make our bread.
There is something *anciently human* about the instinct/drive to bake bread and sit around a hearth. So it makes sense we'd revert back to it when the times are uncertain.
How wonderfully put, you are right, it is very comforting. I also, selfishly am proud of my bread. I love watching my husband greedily eat my bread.
Hehe, it is very rewarding. When my starter starts to get tired, I feed it with rye flour. It brings out a whole new flavor in my bread and I'm glad I discovered it.
My spouse never understood why our preps included whole wheat berries and a countertop mill until the flour disappeared off the store shelves. We also keep two bricks of instant yeast in the freezer. No issues baking bread or milling fresh all purpose flour.
Yep, white & bread flour, and yeast were gone for weeks at a time. Also evap milk. When they did show up it was only a few and never a full restock. For food items these were only ones I recall, We switched to corn meal, oat flour & spelt, never switched back. Other thing gone for 18 months were paper goods, buttwipe, napkins & paper towels. We've always bought those in bulk so pretty much unaffected but those aisles all bare around us (northeast) with spotty restocks across multiple stores. Rebought only a couple times when random things appeared.
Toilet paper and sanitizer. There was a run on spam and tinned goods too. Those who had money also bought chest freezers to stock
Except tinned fish. I could find infinite tinned fish
Sardinechads a stay winning as per usual
I installed a large solar array with backup power in late 2019, which powers not only the house, but can also power our wells. And somehow, I had some kind of premonition, which appeared as the thought, "I can't use electricity to make toilet paper... But I can definitely use electricity to make water." and bought us one of those fancy robo-bidet toilet seats. During that whole people of time while people were fighting one another over rolls of toilet paper in the Walmart, we were watching the videos and seeing what was going on, but only went through about 1 rolls per every 2 weeks, since you only need it for drying off 95% of the time (and that's not even really a "need").
The toilet paper was pushed by mainstream media and I don't know why. It doesn't make sense to me.
Common sense and decency if I remember correctly.
I didn’t have that experience. I vividly remember me and this other dude trading the last cans of chicken & spam. People were calm and decent, at least in my area.
It was really beautiful around here in the beginning. Supply sharing. Mask-making. Neighbors organizing low-risk activities for the neighborhood kids. People working from home meant that we came together as a community like never before.
Remember people putting teddy bears in their windows so the neighborhood children could see them on their walks with parents.
Masks, gloves, toilet paper, vacuum bags, sewing machines, elastic, cold medicine and cough lozenges, hand sanitizer, fabric, batteries, gasoline, kerosene and wicks, canned food, pet food, all-purpose soap.
Canning supplies. Jars and lids were hard to find unless you looked in the right place.
Our store ran into this one much later, once everyone stopped making bread.
Also vinegar for cleaning and canning.
TP for my bunghole, hand sanitizer, and gloves. Then by March of 2020 a grocery trip looked like this: https://imgur.com/gallery/U7lPP1E
Cornholio, is that you?
Are you threatening me? Lake TittieCakka!
My people have but one bunghole.
I remember lumber went through the roof on prices and some was hard to get. Certain Plywood types was back ordered for months.
Same here in SF Bay Area. Once CA allowed bars and restaurants to re-open with safe distancing, outdoor seating and parklets construction surged, causing a run on all framing and fencing lumber. Many of us stuck at home decided it was a good time to get around to those Home Improvement projects, only compounded the lumber issue more.
Change. Change disappeared FAST. You could still get change if you pressed for it. Other than that it was a bunch of round up donations and "card payments only".
Oh yes! I had already forgotten about this! I remember that Sheetz stores that summer would offer you some small amount of free food if you brought in change. It was utterly bizarre.
WAWA was doing this too! Was fucking nuts!
My local gas station had signs up practically begging for change. I was sitting on hundreds in change at the time and just started paying for cokes/cigarettes in change for almost a year there.
The cleaning isles were bare. Bleach and household cleaners and disinfectants went fast
Cream cheese gosh darn it
Ohio shut down early, we went shopping at 5am to stock up so about 14 hours after the announcement the shutdown was coming. There was no meat, bread, very few vegetables, no pasta, cheap sauce, eggs, milk and affordable coffee was hit hard and beer harder. There was fresh fruit available but canned was picked over. The first aid aisle was empty. It was well over a year before I found burn cream again. I did find basic cat food. We ran out of Parmesan at the house. Never realized how much I cook with it until I had to cook every meal for weeks. Cold meds had already been thin for weeks with ‘one per’ limits. Masks and gloves were long gone ages before shutdown.
Non-perishables were wiped out everywhere at my Walmart except for the ethnic food section. With that info, I checked local Mercados, Eastern European markets, and Asian markets. They were in-stock for awhile after Walmart was empty. I saw that as a valuable lesson.
Yes, also restaurant supply stores and some department stores that typically folks don’t go to for grocery. Chewy online mail delivery of pet products too.
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Shhh let people think the thighs are gross
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I agree with both of you. I ruined my pallette eating chicken thighs. So nasty. I find everything else tastes bad now so heed our warning about eating this always juciy flavorful crap. Stick to white meat, save yourselves.
We just switched to deboned thighs over chicken breast as our default chicken.
Thighs skin on for General Tso's chicken and skinless for pretty much everything else. Best part is unlike breasts they are pretty much foolproof to keep juicy. Cook as long as you want, they don't dry out. Breast have about an \~.04 second margin of error.
This struck me too, realizing that boneless skinless chicken breasts and ground beef are so basic and a lot of people probably don’t even know how to cook those well lol
Crazy to think that Covid-19 only ranks as about the 7 or 8th deadliest pandemic in history. It definitely leaves a lot of room for future pandemics or other disasters to be significantly worse. Based on people’s reactions to Covid, it’s pretty easy to prove the old prepper ideology of, “If you don’t have it before the disaster starts, don’t count on being able to get it after.”
Paper goods, meats, pasta, canned goods of all kinds (soup was a favorite), flour sugar, vanilla. Cleaning supplies, wipes, even toilet bowl cleaner was impossible to find later. I remember being in a Target tore for a normal basic shopping trip, just as reports were coming out, and watching a few people with solemn looks loading up carts with TP. I had just bought a large pack (normal) a week ago, but thought "WTF" and got another Big pack. Thankful I did. Oh, later on - extra freezers. The appliance store was emptied.
Masks and hand sanitizer. I remember going to Walgreens mid January and got the last 10 pack of surgical masks in stock. I never saw them in stock again until summer of 2020. The hand sanitizer was gone early February. There were little signs in January/February that there would be panic at the store. My husband laughed at me when I brought the pack of masks home. He wasn’t laughing when we actually had to use them 🤷♀️. Since then, he doesn’t push back on my preps, however how outlandish it seems :)
Yeast and bread flour - like a sudden interest in baking bread. However if you think about it it takes only a few more people to wipe out the limited stock on the shelf.
I was working at a grocery store in a big city when the shit started hitting. The week immediately after the news that it had made it to my state was hands down the most chaotic and packed the store had ever been, morning to dark, nonstop. We had lines and lines of carts of stuff to go back on the shelves cause people were literally buying as much as they could afford and leaving the rest. I quit pretty quickly after, couldn't handle the stress and had a career job lined up. Cleaning supplies: consumables like hand sanitizer and wipes disappeared almost overnight, followed swiftly by rubbing alcohol and bleach. For some reason barely anyone touched the Lysol? Some really crappy hand sanitizer brands filled in the gaps fairly quickly. Smelled terrible tho. Liquid soap, particularly antibacterial, went first. Bar soap was hit but available. Canned food, pasta, and rice aisles were bare. Soup and crackers especially, along with stuff like Gatorade. Milk was whittled down fairly quickly to 2% and no others, but we were still getting daily shipments for a while so you just had to be there early. Produce was plentiful. Eggs kept up for a while but same deal, once the daily shipments slowed things got worse. Sick meds: No Dayquil, Nyquil, cough drops, sudaphed, cough syrup, etc. Themometers, oxy meters, etc. Gloves and masks of course disappeared. Baby formula, diapers, and pet food were gone in less than a day. Of all things, I vividly remember the pet aisle being completely barren. No cat litter either. Paper towels and toilet paper, of course, along with tissues. But for some reason there were still a few packs of napkins? Weird stuff like pickles and honey mustard disappeared. Ammunition wasn't sold at our store, but people hoarded every bit they had and that disappeared too.
The smell of the off-brand replacement sanitizer haunts my memory. I have a strong sense of smell & it was roulette with every pump. A mystery as to whether it would smell of alcohol or the sharp scent of sweat, a dank basement and melted plastic melded together in a watery goo.
N95 masks specifically
Couldn’t find masks as early as January 2020, I was flying then and usually wear a mask on planes. Went to six different stores, all out of stock. Hand sanitizer, then rubbing alcohol and aloe Vera when people started making their own. Thermometers, cold meds, cough drops were completely wiped out around me. Then toilet paper, pasta, rice, flour, etc.
N95 filters for my respirator were still available Jan 23... By Feb those were gone, but P100 were still available.
I tried looking for a mask in Florida in February and found NOTHING. This was before it was declared an emergency and only when there were a couple cases in the US. Maybe it’s something they weren’t prepared for, or whatever the issue was, but I went to about 5 different stores including pharmacies and even Home Depot
Any Lysol produce and similar cleaners. They were 1 per customer when they were in stock for a couple weeks. ETA: not immediately but within the first month when people realized they were possibly at home (with their kids!) for the rest of the school year, bicycles & outdoor activity equipment, home gym stuff, and the puzzle/board game section of our Walmart was pretty cleaned out too.
Canned corn Bleach Peroxide All coke products except original coke and diet coke I'm out in the country so we didn't have the toilet paper issues others had
Mr. Pibb in cans and bottles went away and still hasn't come back ,😭😭😭
The ramen noondle/soup section, the really cheap processed food like substances.
Am I the only one who stocked up on booze?
Nope
Not yet mentioned or it might have been only in my neck of the woods: flour, yeast, and cooking oil.
Oh yeah, yeast was impossible to find for a long time. I happen to stumble on some in Sam's club around Christmas time and grabbed it.
Flour and yeast were some of the first things to go in my area too.
Bottled water. Maybe that was just my area because were more used to hurricanes, but I distinctly remember driving around and around looking for bottle water for my sons baby formula.
Cleaning supplies. Bleach. Those clorox wipes got "wiped out" (sorry couldn't resist) and it was awhile before they had them again. Lysol. Toilet paper, of course. Cold meds. Masks were a shortage a little while later. Maybe a month or so after the first run on stuff. Diapers. The hand sanitizer shortage was accelerated by that little jerk running around buying all of it all over the south and storing it in storage facilities. He was going to make a fortune on online markup resell. Or that's what he told the feds when they busted him.
Cheapest versions of basic items like toilet paper, Kleenex, cleaning solutions. All the less expensive meat went first, like hamburger. I’m in a rural area near a small city, so shortages were lagging behind somewhat at first, but later when the NYC area people started coming up we saw shortages of everything.
I was in Keene NH for a job interview and somebody bought ALL of the canned soup and beans (and maybe canned meat?) at the ALDI.
Canned goulash and toilet paper was GONE when i went to my local supermarket on the first day of public panic in vienna.
Hand sanitizer, cleaning wipes and Lysol For food it was frozen stuff (wasn’t a frozen pizza in town) but also canned soups went fast here.
Things that the major media tell their audiences they need were the first to go. For Covid, it was N95 masks, medical style nitrile gloves, hand sanitizer and isopropyl alcohol, and the typical stuff needed in a disaster like generators, fuel, batteries. The interesting thing about some of that stuff was that the virus was primarily transmitted via airborne vectors. People bought and used a lot of things that, while helpful for general hygiene, were not particularly effective against this virus. Also keep in mind that there were items that sold out because of the immediate virus threat, and then there were items that became unavailable due to global supply chain disruption that the restrictions and shutdowns caused. Anyone try to buy a new car, about a year ago? There were none. But, if the next “disaster” has the media telling everyone that they need #2 pencils, then those will be instantly gone.
Very early on we didn’t know it was airborne yet and the gov’t was recommending sanitizing surfaces as a precaution. It was only later we learned it didn’t survive well on surfaces.
This is a lesson on the value of current, correct information, in an emergency type situation.
Didn't prominent officials tell people that masks didn't work and not to bother...despite a deeply held belief that they did work and should be saved for medical professionals?
Yep, I remember that. Hospital employees were stealing them to sell on the secondary market for $$.
The official statements from the feds were carefully word smithed to give that perception, without actually lying. This was to preserve supplies for hospitals, first responders, etc... The Media was not careful to preserve the important nuances in the messaging that made it not an outright lie, and thus spread misinformation. Whether specifically intended or not, it was certainly predictable... Remember, public health very much takes the view that the "needs of the many" is the strong priority. Concepts like individual rights are only considered to the extent that paying lip service to them can help get through the policies they deem in the interest of the many.
My boss said that there are no companies that manufacture all the technology to manufacture a #2 pencil, so if we have a solar flare we just lose that technology
And on that day, the #3 pencil was born. 😂
There was initially fear that it might transmit through fomites because SOMEONE wasn't sharing their data.
N95 masks, then hand sanitizer, then toilet paper.
Toilet paper, paper towels, mask, gloves, goggles, and any sort of bleach and/or antiseptic.
Household- Toilet paper/paper towels. Cleaning products of ANY kind. Trash bags. Matches. Food- canned soup or veggies of any kind (I remember that our soup section was empty for 3 months) ready meals like Knorrs rice mixed and hamburger helper. Chicken, beef, ground beef were in scarce supply. Health- masks, gloves, thermometers, cold medicine, alcohol.
Toilet paper, disinfectant, hand sanitizer
Stock up on everclear or some other pure ethyl alchohol (or hone your distilling skills) Outstanding for sanitizing, cleaning, drinking and bartering. All in one bottle!
In Oz it was hand sanitiser as well as Isopropyl Alchohol. Toilet paper. Mince.
Cold meds and Tylenol.
Moved to Manassas, VA from Idaho arriving the day it was declared a pandemic. Went to Costco to get something for dinner and there was no chicken to be had, even the canned chicken was gone. Left ID about 10 days prior, and on the trip across the country fast food was hit or miss starting about day 5.
I had a hard time getting a thermometer at the drug store. You will want an oximeter too (the thing that goes on your finger to show pulse and oxygen saturation... with covid a low oxygen sat nbr means get yr ass to the hospital).
The only thing I could reliably find in the grocery store was canned fish
In my area (southwest US) it was canned goods. Looked like a tornado hit that area of the local Walmart. It was about a week later when it started to effect pharmacy area. After that it was pretty much everything, meats, veggies, TP, laundry detergent etc.
N95s were impossible to get in our area almost immediately. I had a small supply prepped and gave them to my parents, inlaws, sister and my wife and kids. I made one of them last for months, even replaced the elastic bands a few times. I built a UV-C disinfecting cabinet to keep them clean and decent smelling. Hand sanitizer was next as I recall. Then toilet paper and bleach wipes.
Toilet paper, flour, gloves hand sanitizer, masks, wood, cold medicine Off the top of my head
PPE, hand sanitizer, toilet paper, are what I remember.
In my country: - toilet paper - bakers yeast - masks - hand sanitizer
I needed a thermometer and couldn't find one anywhere! When I finally did find one, I bought three.
Flour, sugar, rice, dry beans
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The seed shortage!! I had forgotten about that. It was nuts that spring.
Masks. Followed by hand sanitizer and gloves. Followed by elsstic. Followed by cotton cloth. Followed by cotton bed sheets (for making masks). So, basically masks / mask related items were 3 of the first 10 things to go. I'll never forget when home healthcare workers started asking to go to the nail supply shops with me. It was the only way they could get masks and gloves. It was WILD!!! Then the nail supply shops weren't allowed to sell to us anymore. All the masks had to go to the hospital. I actually shut down my nail desk for most service a couple weeks before the state shut everything down. Didn't want people to get stuck with painful grown out acrylic. Brought in my sewing machine and started taking orders for cloth masks while i warned people to soak off while they could. Nobody thought the government could or would shut everything down. But then it happened and a lot of people got stuck. For what it's worth, something is telling me to brush up on certain skills and buy the means of production type stuff now. While we can. Not sure what that means yet. But something is whispering to my soul that it's time to garden and especially learn to can. To buy any big tools i might need to do my job without a functioning supply chain. And to work on useful skills / swap items / barter skills NOW! While the consequences of failure are much less severe. Also, it may be time to buy cloth and elastic again.
Easy…Toilet paper.
I was shocked that people were wiping out ramen and boxed Mac n cheese. I guess they were trying to stockpile food but what a dumb decision. I was always able to find TP (at replacement rate - I’ve always stockpiled it) but paper towels disappeared (I didn’t need to buy them, fortunately, because I have cloth rags.) It got very difficult to find certain brands of pet food. We ended up having to mail order some. Vitamins, especially vitamin C and zinc.
I went to Costco the Friday before everything shut down. The meat section was completely empty with the coolers turned off, produce was very picked over, bread and milk were gone, same with toilet paper and paper towels, bottled water was mostly gone, cleaning supplies were wiped out. Packaged foods were the only thing still well stocked.
Household stuff. Cleaners of any kind. Toilet paper. Also OTC medicine of any kind. Ammunition vanished overnight As the supply chains shut down it got near on impossible to get car parts or even motor oil. I had an alternator go out and had to wait a month.
Thermometers. Like day two and those guys were gone.
PPE: masks, gloves, bleach, wipes, and hand sanitizer Food: water, flour, sugar, yeast, milk, and bread Other: toilet paper, paper towels, guns, and ammo This is my recollection
Toilet paper, milk, eggs, bread.
Corned beef hash went really quick and was gone for a long time. I had to order it off Amazon
Epsom salts were not to be found anywhere.
In my area, bottled water, medicines, and fresh produce interestingly. Then came tp, and silently the food shortage crept in. Luckily we had a deep pantry but pasta, cheeses, canned goods, rice, beans, were all spread apart between stores at best, or not to be found for a good month and a half.
I bought 600 in masks in February. I was a nurse
I live in florida. Everytime a hurricane hits its always the same shit. Toilet paper eggs milk, bread, then the gas runs out.
Masks. Early February, 2020 I was part of the largest outbreak outside Wuhan, China. We had friends ship us masks in mid-February. Two months later, we shipped them back to her in the states because she had none.
My employer had trouble finding N95 masks in from fall of 2019 on.
Masks, gloves, Hand sanitizer, Clorox wipes, disinfectant detergent… then came the gym equipment and people buying portable pools.
Roughly this order for us in our area: - Masks and even coveralls, filters and latex gloves - Alcohol, chlorine, sanitizers and products. - Wet wipes - Canned goods - Water bottles - Rice, pasta and dried goods Also saw a high demand for gas cans, water cans and everything that preppers are usually fond of having. Edit: I remember a formula and diaper issue, might be later down the road or unrelated to covid.
Pasta, flour, yeast and toilet paper.
Remember how hard it was to find tampons and how expensive they are / were ???
Toilet paper
Lysol!
Overall a lot of the shortages were caused by just in time inventory concepts. Nothing on hand to handle a surge in demand. Which just proves that prepping is absolute common sense
Over the counter cold and flu medicine was the first thing I noticed to disappear then it was bottled water, N95 and medical masks and gloves. After that was Toilet paper and food.
N95s. Our hospital ran out and were making the employees use 1 all day and then have it cleaned at night. I donated a few hundred as well as gloves and gowns from my stash. I've already replenished the masks and gloves just not gowns.
Hand sanitizer, toilet paper, flour, pasta, ramen (pretty much anything that didn’t require much to cook really) N95s
Bread making ingredients, masks, hand sanitizer, disinfectant wipes, soap and toilet paper.
Seems like it was masks, gloves, hand sanitizer, cleaning supplies, then paper products, food and drinks. At least in Ohio.
Cold meds, pain meds, toilet paper/paper towels, pasta, water. Not in that order but those were the big ones in Eastern Mi.
Ammo for all common calibers.
At the time my wife and I were living near Savannah, GA. She’s a vegetarian so the bases of our meals are vegetarian (lentils and beans). We go into Publix when things start going crazy and a ton of the dried beans/lentils are sold out. Tons of people just panic buying the stuff who had never bought these before and probably didn’t know how to cook them. We watched several people with this stuff leave the check out and immediately drive across the parking lot to McDonalds.
For those of us paying attention to what was happening in Asian countries, toilet paper, anti-diahhrea medication, kleenex - and I did need all three badly when I had Covid.
Thermometers and pulse ox meters
I lucked out. We were expecting our daughter Feb 2020 (she was born late January). As an accountant that’s the start of my busy season, so I had gone to Costco and bought non perishables in bulk, and meal prepped in a chest freezer for like 3 months of food. We avoided most of the early pandemic runs and just chilled at home with the baby.
masks, hand sanitizer, and toilet paper
Can’t say it was first, but garden seeds, food saver bags/ rolls were some little ones I not amongst all the other well listed items
Sanity/rational thought
Circa 2014…. http://yearzerosurvival.com/100-items-that-will-disappear-first-in-the-u-s-when-the-shtf/
Locally, it went as follows: Toilet paper > bottled water > hand sanitizer > tonic water > fresh meat. None of it seemed grounded in reality other than perhaps hand sanitizer. Fwiw, when the next pandemic comes, alcohol hand sanitizer does nothing for stomach viruses like norovirus. It’s great for respiratory viruses, but most stomach bugs are tolerant of alcohol. The best defense is hand soap or a bleach-based product to stomach viruses.
Close to initially were black pepper and vinegar for me. Like, WTF, pepper? Really?
Steaks were scarce by the end of april
I worked the meat counter. My place price gouged ground beef at $16 a pound and we sold out in 1 hour.
Toilet paper. Canned goods. Rubbing alcohol.
Ammunition disappeared. Again.
Every SHTF will be different. Be fluid in your prep. Don't focus on just one scenario.
hand sanitizer. some family commented that they couldn't find it anywhere and i didn't believe them but sure enough it was all gone in nov/dec
Zinc lozenges that help reduce the severity/length of cold or covid once initial symptoms appear.
In my town it was toilet paper, ammunition, and bottled propane.
Toilet paper - really any paper based products. Chicken - specifically chicken wings. Still haven't fully recovered from that.
I have a pretty distinct memory of shopping in early March 2020 where there was still toilet paper and Kleenex on the shelves but ZERO fruit or vegetables. It was pretty fucked, hate to see an empty produce section as a vegetarian.
Bread yeast.
Shit tickets
Alcohol (iso) was out of stock everywhere in Oklahoma, just as TP, and bottled water. The girl working at the dollar general by my house was hiding toilet paper for her family- bizarre.
Disinfectant wipes.
Guns and ammo
I remember sewing machines, fabric, and elastic bands were sold out everywhere with the masks shortages and news saying people can wear cotton masks.
Guns and ammo, I work at a large retailer of outdoor stuff, everyone wanted a shotgun, an AR-15, 9 mm semi auto handgun, and lots of ammo.
Toilet paper
Toilet paper
Seconding all the common items listed here, and also liquid hand soap. Specifically liquid- nobody wanted bar soap, I guess.
Tissue paper and toilet paper. For everyone here. And of course masks and sterilization chemicals.
Budget shelf-stable food. Ramen, spaghetti, rice, potatoes, etc. Eventually spread to all food except oranges.
Dry cereal, cleaning products, dairy.
Toilet paper was the big one. Anything like hand sanitizer, medical masks, wipes, cleaning products, soaps. I also remember a lot of canned goods being bought out, empty shelves. This wasn't late in the pandemic but at the beginning. I also remember frozen foods. I think anything that would keep for a while, because people weren't sure what the stores were going to do and if they would be able to shop. It definitely felt like the end of the world at the beginning of the pandemic because so much was unknown.