The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Retailers see record number of customers in ‘stock-up frenzy’
Across Connecticut, fear of the coronavirus has resulted in packed shopping carts, long lines at registers and empty store shelves as people stock up on supplies and prepare to hunker down at home.
But this time, retailers are seeing a rush that pales even in comparison to typically busy shopping periods, like the days lead
ing up to Thanksgiving, said Wayne Pesce, heads of the West Hartfordbased Connecticut Food Association, an industry group that promotes retail grocers and their suppliers.
“This is unprecedented,” Pesce said Friday, noting a spike during the previous 48 hours. “I’ve been on the phone with all my members. You name the chain — large regional suppliers to small independents to single store owners. Everybody is facing the same supply chain issue right now . ... It’s eggs. It’s water. It’s canned goods. It’s across the store.”
That also includes the unusual urgency for large quantities of toilet paper rolls, a practice chronicled in social media posts that is surprising some retailers and shoppers alike.
Tom Cingari, Sr., whose family operates ShopRite supermarkets in Stamford, Norwalk and Danbury, said “every (sales) record was shattered” on Thursday.
“Our company is 80 years old,” Cingari said. “And we did volume never done in the history of this company.”
The rush to the stores has resulted in temporarily empty shelves, leaving some shoppers with limited ways to get the products they need and opens the door to price gouging. It has also concerned advocates for the homeless and disabled, who note that these populations already often have limited options when shopping.
The ‘stock-up frenzy’
Lauri DeMichele, a New Haven resident, was one of the people looking for toilet paper on Friday at Goodie’s Hardware in East Haven, but she noted it was just another item on her regular shopping list.
She said she realizes people are panicking but does not believe people can stay in their homes for weeks.
“I think that it’s ridiculous that people think we are going to run out of things or that we are going to be stuck in the house with nothing,” DeMichele.
Bob Abbate, who admits he tends to “err on the side of caution,” also didn’t undertand the “stock-up frenzy.”
He found empty shelves Thursday evening when he visited his hometown Trumbull Stop and Shop to pick up something for that night’s meal.
“I was going to see what was for dinner,” Abbate, who runs a marketing firm in downtown Bridgeport, said Friday. “Apparently nothing. The only thing left was roasted chickens. All the beef was gone, the (raw) chicken was gone. Pasta.”
And the demand is coming from households of all incomes, urban and suburban.
Alex Pena, whose family runs Gala Foods, a small market on Bridgeport’s East Side, said he typically only gets large midday weekday crowds at the start of the month when lower-income residents receive food stamps.
But as of 1:40 p.m. Friday Pena estimated at least 300 customers were packing his aisles.
“Do I have some empty shelves? Yes, I do,” Pena said. “People are panicking . ... I guess they’re just preparing for the worst.”
ShopRite in Danbury also saw more customers filling the aisles, with one couple on Friday filling two carts with more than $300 worth of food and other products.
ShopRite imposed fourper-person limits on certain “high demand” products like household cleaners, hand sanitizer and soap, and medicines that treat a fever. Cingari said one reason was to prevent people from buying up the stock for self-profit.
“They’ll wipe you out and go sell it on the street for five times the price, so it’s not right,” Cingari said.
Even the small Hilltop Food Market in Stratford was out of “anything that can kill germs,” said owner Bill Mudre, who has also noticed a few more customers than usual.
Some customers have visited the stores wearing medical masks.
Pesce said other busy shopping times of the year like Thanksgiving are predictable.
“We ramp up. Supply chain ramps up. You get through it,” Pesce said.
Preparing for the worst
But in this coronavirusdriven case, Pesce said, the rapidly growing concern and the rash of related closures and cancellations to reduce human-tohuman contact have strained the usual process of producing, shipping and stocking goods.
“A lot of people are staying home, whether not going to work or a restaurant or a theater or some event,” Pesce said. “That’s driving this surge in demand ... I got two kids in college. They’re home now for three weeks. We need more food, more paper products.”
Dina Murphy, of Greenwich’s Riverside neighborhood, has three children, ages 16, 13, and 9, whose classes were canceled at least for the next week.
“It’s not a stocking up, hoarding stuff type of thing,” Murphy said Friday. “The kids are home now and they’re going to be eating more food at home . ... And they have friends over, too.”
Murphy is also preparing for an even bigger worse-case scenario — that the schools will not reopen in a week or so.
“It’s 100 percent going to be longer than that,” she said, citing the uncertainty over how Connecticut — and the nation — will contain the coronavirus pandemic, and when.
“We don’t know what we’re dealing with — the scope of the problems we’re confronting,” said Fred Carstensen, director of the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis at UConn. “And we’re in semi-lockdown already. It’s not ‘panic-buying’. It’s ‘We want to have enough food in the house that we can go for a week without having to go shopping.’”
Carstensen also noted that photos of empty store shelves on the news and circulating on social media create a sense of urgency. Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton, for example, posted a photo of nearly empty shelves of a local store’s paper products aisle.
Irina Scafidi, of Norwalk, said she visited ShopRite Friday because of Thursday’s media reports about busy supermarkets.
“I said, ‘I better go tomorrow,’” Scafidi said as she picked up some justrestocked toilet paper. “Everybody’s doing it, and I would feel silly if I didn’t.”
Dr. Patrick Kelley, distinguished fellow in nursing and health studies at Fairfield University, said “there’s some prudence in selective stockpiling of things” — particularly if people are trying to reduce trips to the store to cut back on public interaction.
At the same time, Kelley said, buying up items like bottled water “is kind of ridiculous” given the water supply is fine.
“There is so much unknown so they’re (shoppers) perceiving all kinds of calamities that will never happen,” Kelley said. “They’re responding to things that are just their imagination.”
“(But) you could end up with some serious imbalances if certain things weren’t rationed,” Kelley continued.
Pena, like other stores, has been selling lots of toilet paper, water and “a great amount of chlorine wipes, hand sanitizers.”
“I’ve been ordering from our suppliers. They don’t have any in stock,” Pena said.
Considering others’ needs
Donna Romano, director of communications with the Bridgeport Rescue Mission, said cleansers are crucial for the population that agency helps and for staff — and similarly quickly becoming unavailable.
“We do have a supply on hand, but our concern is that we will go through that quickly,” Romano said. “And on our Facebook page we’ve been asking for ‘wellness kits’ — baggies filled with hand sanitizer, bar soap, gloves, (anti-bacterial) wipes, and cough drops. All items each of us in the community are finding hard to purchase for our own homes. But we need those things now more than ever at the mission.”
Romano added that
“food is always a concern” and that under normal circumstances donations are low this time of year.
Timothy Phelan, president of the Connecticut Retail Merchants Association, urged the buying public to be considerate.
“Buy what you really need,” Phelan said, and do not take shortages out on staff.
“They’re working, doing the best they can,” he said.
Cingari said ShopRite’s warehouse in New Jersey “has hired thousand of extra drivers, thousands of extra trucks in the last couple days to help maintain this volume.”
Phil Magalnick, a Stamford resident and vice president of the Connecticut chapter of the National Federation of the Blind, said he is worried about the disabled population’s access to groceries and supplies through store delivery services. Magalnick said “most of us in Connecticut rely on public transportation” to go shopping and, because of coronavirus, are now falling back on ordering from home.
“I went to re-order paper goods and I saw yesterday, today and tomorrow there’s no available delivery items,” Magalnick said. “I’m really concerned a lot of people with disabilities who rely on these services are really going to be left out.”
Pesce said, “We’re seeing the online and delivery is as crazy as it’s ever been. We’re trying to keep up with that, too.”
“This will pass,” Pesce said. “The supply chain will catch up on itself.”
“I tend to think that in a few weeks things will settle down,” Kelley said. “I’m not saying necessarily the outbreak won’t be a problem. But I think people will come to be more comfortable about what is going to be threatening in their life and what is not.”