Have you been to the grocery store recently? Well if you have, you have seen shelves completely empty or close to it. The last time I saw shelves at the store this empty was when the coronavirus had first happened and we were going into quarantined. According to CBS News, “Compounding the problem is inflation. The rate jumped 7 percent since December 2020.”

The shelves being empty doesn’t have to do with people taking a lot of supplies at a time because most stores have implied the rule where you have a purchase limit on items due to the coronavirus. The low supply demand is coming from the West and East Coast due to travel and snow storms. In the West Coast a lot of produce growers are having a tough time getting trucks to load the produce and take too stores because they are charting more than they use to due the higher oil prices. Even though they rase their prices the work employees still have to pay them because they need supplies in their stores, so this results to higher prices in items. In the East Coast there has been some snow and ice storms as we have experienced. With the uncooperative whether the past two week have delayed food deliveries because the truck drivers couldn’t drive because of the bad conditions.

With the unfortunate events to the New Year, the Marshall fire has also impacted product availability. The Marshall fire was something no one expected to happen and cause many families to lose their home, but with this happening it caused a lot of people to stock up on items more than usual because they don’t have much and they need a lot of supply just to get by and live as comfortably as they can. Even before this happened a lot of stores were already going out of stock with items and now shelves are completely empty.

This supply shortage as well as many other things are to blame the coronavirus and with this new Omicron-variant coming into play it’s just so much worse. During the holidays families get together and hangout to have a good time but sometimes the result of the hang outs don’t go as plan and may lead to them getting Covid. We see how fast this virus can spread and a lot of people that are getting it are produce growers and workers. When produce growers get Covid it isn’t good because then they can’t work and make produce for stores. Workers getting Covid is just as bad because many employees can be out at one time and if stores don’t have the employees it can be hard to stock up the shelves and get everything out for the people.

There is still groceries and products available in stores, maybe not the same ones that you are used to buying but maybe this is a way of getting out of your comfort zone and buying new products until stores can restock their shelves.