Anyone non-panic buying?

Psycho Sonny said:
I have found our local supermarket albeit making the most money it ever has is employing less and less checkout staff. There was one till open and about 20 empty last visit. They are pushing scan and shop and self serve checkouts.
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all my local supermarkets apart from Iceland seem to be self service forced on people.

maybe one till will be open and the rest is just self service, they won't open a till if a queue forms at self service...

then your 1 full basket is too much for the small packing area provided...

when you pack a basket the heavy stuff goes in the bottom right? you don't wanna squash your vegetables etc...
but you need the heavier items scanned first and now your playing tetris again because the packing area is probably smaller than your basket and has no actual walls.

soon we will be at the point where no one is waiting around the self service area for when the machine needs an attendant, morrisons is already half way there.

buying 2 packs of ibuprofen? thatll be a 5minute wait
 
Mr Badger said:
Slight aside here, but supermarkets are probably behind the banks on this. For years there has been a relentless drive by already profitable banks to close branches and get customers to do things for themselves, mostly online. There used to be eight banks and building societies along my local high street and now there is just one. Not much consideration for old folk that don't want to adapt to new technology and prefer to use cash and cheques and pay bills in person.
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Although I sympathise with people, old or otherwise, who prefer to pay bills with cheques or in person, a bean counter just looks at the bottom line, (I’m as old as the hills, but do banking online.)
 
Jean-F said:
Although I sympathise with people, old or otherwise, who prefer to pay bills with cheques or in person, a bean counter just looks at the bottom line, (I’m as old as the hills, but do banking online.)
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One of mum’s friends insisted that she drove all the way to the town where her district council’s offices are and pay her council tax there. It’s about a 20 mile round journey. She didn’t even pop into the supermarkets there as cheaper and more variety than the poxy co-op in the village.

My mum and a few friends said why not pay at the post office in the village?
 
We've always kept enough food in for a couple of weeks, just seems easier. If something is not available (very rare so far, apart from the height of the pandemic when everyone went mad...) we just get something else.
I do know people who seem to shop every day, for that days food, I find that a bit weird really but each to their own.
I don't particularly remember a time when the gas supply went off, unlike electricity, so for that reason we have a gas hob.
Also, the usual camping gas canisters and cooker if the **** really did hit the fan. Even then I don't believe it would be for long.
 
cheesefest said:
One of mum’s friends insisted that she drove all the way to the town where her district council’s offices are and pay her council tax there. It’s about a 20 mile round journey. She didn’t even pop into the supermarkets there as cheaper and more variety than the poxy co-op in the village.

My mum and a few friends said why not pay at the post office in the village?
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My mum refused to have things on Direct Debit and made my Sister go to certain places to pay her bills or send a cheque.
It was about a year from her death in Dec 2019 when she finally gave in and had things on Direct Debit.
This then caused so much trouble when she died because company 's w ere still taking money and it took my Sister until a few months ago to get money back from certain firms.
 
Modern industry, getting rid of resilience in the name of efficiency. I'm fairly certain its was only last year that our local supermarket had some sort of point of sale outage and they were back to cash and credit card cheque only for about 8 hours. That kind of backward compatability will be impossible with self scan as most of them seem to accept cards only. The World has a way of throwing us the odd googly and old systems are almost always more resilient than new. But resilience is old hat we don't need that, just in time is fine, it's not like people will irrationally act against their own interest.

edit: thought cheque wrote credit card Doh!
 
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amigafan2003 said:
Does that help?
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To some extent, yes.
Prepping makes some sense... but while I could more easily go take what I wanted off other people, I don't think we can afford to become actual Preppers even on a small scale. I could probably manage camping in the forthcoming wasteland, but we'd really only have the one hideaway fortress, which would just be the current house with some reinforcement.
 
Uther said:
I do know people who seem to shop every day, for that days food, I find that a bit weird really but each to their own.
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I do this, simply as it keeps my options open as to what I what I eat in the evening. I'm still deciding what to buy for this evening for example, not sure what I fancy.

I also won't freeze meat as it seems to alter the texture somewhat, chicken breast is particularly noticeable.
 
I recently had to throw out a load of frozen food due to having no power for a while.

I also find frozen food seems to lose its quality moderately quickly, so if I was to stock up it would be tinned food, and I still have a fair amount of that from when the pandemic started.
 
chrcoluk said:
I recently had to throw out a load of frozen food due to having no power for a while.

I also find frozen food seems to lose its quality moderately quickly, so if I was to stock up it would be tinned food, and I still have a fair amount of that from when the pandemic started.
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Yeah, I don't stock up on frozen food because as you say if you have a power cut for more than 48hrs it's all useless.
 
Just got a Tesco shop delivered, for the first time in over a year everything came! Toilet roll, water, even the Christmas goose that I was sure wasn't going to come! Well pleasantly surprised, must be nowhere near as bad as the papers are making it out to be.
 
I’m not panic buying, I’m inflation proofing :cool: my 5000 loo rolls and ten tons of pasta are out performing the ftse so far this week !
 
don't know what the problem is. My fortnum and masons fortnightly hampers have been arriving with zero subs. My Panama Emerelda Special COffee beans have never run out of stock, but then I guess that's because the peasants can't afford to panic buy them at £60/125g. Nothing better than drinking that coffee and then washing it down with a nice bottle of Krug Grande Cuvee.
 
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