Wary shoppers cleaning up on ‘that virus thing’

Earlier this week I encountered an old friend at the supermarket. She was pushing a cart stuffed with rolls of paper towels.

“Got a major oil spill in your kitchen?” I asked.

“Stocking up,” she replied. “There might be a shortage of paper towels due to that virus thing.”

“It pays to be prepared,” I agreed. It wasn’t until she was out of the parking lot that it occurred to me to wonder how all those paper towels were going to help her get through “that virus thing.”

But stocking up on stuff has become a knee-jerk reaction whenever there’s some sort of dire prediction. The last major one was in 1999, when Y2K loomed and experts warned that virtually everything in the world was going to stop working, so we needed to have plenty of water on hand to survive. I didn’t worry about that, but my wife bought several jugs of water, just in case. We wound up using them to water our geraniums in 2007. (Not that I’m downplaying the importance of having water on hand. Without water you can’t make ice and without ice you can’t make a decent vodka tonic.)

Just about every time the forecast calls for half an inch of snow the weatherpersons on television warn that we better run out and buy a two-week supply of water and an oil generator. I’m not sure why. If there’s enough snow to keep us from getting to the store to buy more, can’t we just melt that and drink it? And even if I had a generator, I wouldn’t know how to use it and probably would wind up asphyxiating everyone in our house. And the people next door.

And batteries. Everyone is supposed to have plenty of batteries on hand. I guess that’s so we can listen to the news on our radios. But the last battery-operated radio in our house was a boom box.

A lot of the items people are rushing to buy this time are medical things, such as surgical face masks, hand sanitizers and thermometers. But there also are reports of shoppers ramming their carts into each other as they race through the store stripping shelves of everything from peanut butter to protein shakes. So far, there’s no conclusive evidence that peanut butter will do anything to prevent coronavirus.

Still, as an analyst declared in a USA Today story last week, “We expect categories like canned soup, peanut butter, canned meat, cookies, crackers, pasta, pasta sauce, protein shakes, frozen food, and canned vegetables to benefit the most from stockpiling.”

So instead of buying water, batteries and paper towels, I think I’ll just buy stock in peanut butter companies.