Until the World Stops - L.A. Witt Page 0,22

goose bumps under my shirt. As I pulled into the grocery store parking lot, my stomach knotted a bit more. Considering the rest of the town was devoid of life, it was odd to see the parking lot…not full, but with at least two dozen cars. A middle-aged couple was on their way out with two shopping carts that were overflowing with groceries.

Maybe they were just stocking up. People did that.

Except social media was full of pictures and videos of people panic-shopping, ransacking store shelves and going to blows over hand sanitizer and toilet paper. That hadn’t set in here—not like it had elsewhere—but as I parked and walked into the store, I could see signs that it was starting. Carts laden with non-perishables and pushed by obviously worried shoppers. Signs warning about limits on certain items. Some shelves stocked normally. Others completely bare.

My stomach twisted as I continued through the store. I didn’t want to be one of those panic buyers, but at the same time, maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to stock up on things that we wouldn’t want to run out of. Have some extras on hand in case stores ran out of something and—as several ominous articles on social media had warned—supply chains were disrupted or delayed.

That, and the more we had at home, the less we’d have to go out. I wasn’t too proud to admit that I was scared of getting sick with this thing, and the experts kept recommending social distancing. Stay home as much as possible. Avoid being around people besides those who lived with you. Even the Navy was making noise about issuing lockdown orders and restricting people to home, work, and minimal essential outings.

With that in mind, front-loading on groceries seemed like the smart thing to do. Not buying fifty giant packs of toilet paper or enough bottled water to ballast an aircraft carrier, but a little extra of the things we normally bought so we’d have less to worry about and fewer reasons to go out for a while.

So with that in mind, I went back to the beginning of the grocery store and started over, slowly making my way down each aisle and seriously considering what I should stock up on and what we could do without.

We still had half a bag of cat food at home, but I grabbed one anyway, and I opted for the forty-pound bag instead of the usual twenty-five. How were we doing on kitty litter? It wasn’t on my list, so we probably had enough, but one extra bucket seemed prudent. Instead of five cans of cat food, I picked up ten.

We were doing okay on all the paper products that everyone was snatching up in a panic. I spent a solid two minutes standing in that aisle, staring at the shelves that were still partially stocked. Where was the line between panic buying and being cautious? I didn’t want to go all doomsday prepper, but I also didn’t want to be kicking myself two weeks from now for not spending a few bucks “just in case.”

Oh hell. I’d always been the type to err on the side of moderate caution. So, I grabbed a pack of toilet paper and another of paper towels. Not giant packs, just enough that if the grocery store ran out for a while, we’d be good. That wasn’t panicking. Was it?

Right then, a woman came down the aisle and jammed five large packages of toilet paper into her cart on top of what looked like ten or twelve bottles of hand sanitizer. Someone else turned the corner and made a beeline for the Charmin, and I decided that was my cue to move along.

Okay, yeah, I wasn’t going to feel guilty for getting ahead of the panic and making sure Casey and I were reasonably stocked.

I kept moving through the store, and by the time I was done, the shopping cart was full, but not overflowing. It basically looked like it would have if I’d put off grocery shopping for a month or so (or I’d been too broke to go shopping) and was finally catching up. I still couldn’t decide where that landed me on the spectrum between prudent and panicking. Someone could seriously release a manual any day now that explained how we were all supposed to navigate all this bullshit, but there was nothing to go by except what everyone else was doing, how much was left, and how likely it