Hoarding and Social Distancing.

Behold: the world's biggest roll of toilet paper, located at the "Ripley's Believe It or Not" museum in Branson, Missouri. (That's not a long drive from me.) It's got nearly twice the square footage of the base of the Great Pyramid in Giza. Toilet seats are displayed around it's circumference, for scale.

Starting to look pretty good right now, isn't it?

I may or may not have contemplated renting a big truck and heading over to that museum in the dark of night. Just saying.

We are in the midst of the worst crisis I've ever seen. I lived through 9/11, and even that wasn't this bad. To my knowledge, and given my past experience in the shipping industry, the supply chain that brings toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and similar items from the factory floor to the store shelves has not been completely incapacitated, and it certainly was not terribly impacted at the time the hoarding started around the week of Friday the 13th in March (when I should have been on my trip to the Little Rock Pen Show, by the way...but I've already ranted and wailed about that). So tell me..why, oh WHY, were people suddenly panic-buying toilet paper, and leaving the food shelves alone? COVID-19 is a tragedy indeed, but it's not, uh, that kind of virus. Nonetheless, here's what the store shelves looked like at my local Wal-Mart store's toilet paper aisle on Friday the 13th:

Unbelievable. It's like people were afraid there was going to be a zombie apocalypse, and there'd be no more toilet paper again, ever. I was nearly out of it at home when I saw this, so I kind of did panic. Not kidding...later that same weekend, I was bartering canned food with my sister for a few spare rolls of it. Fortunately, right before they also got laid off, both she & her husband were working for hotel & hospitality businesses in that same touristy town of Branson and were able to bring some home from work (with the blessing of their employers; never fear) so we still had access to a limited supply of it for a while.

It would seem that Branson, MO is a mecca for toilet paper, eh? Make of that what you will. :-)

Two weeks later, that very same sister got home internet service hooked up at the house she just bought. Talk about unfortunate timing... a brand new mortgage payment just as all of us, along with half of the USA, are under mandatory quarantine orders and have lost our jobs. She needed a laptop or something to use with it, as her old one was no longer working. My sister asked me if I had a spare mobile device she could use...? So...I traded her my old, but perfectly functional, 13" Chromebook...for 4 extra rolls of toilet paper. True story.

Such is the world we live in, now. This is our life, now. Unbelievable. My sister is good people; she'd have shared the toilet paper anyway. Trading expensive electronics for T.P. makes for a better story, though. I tell you folks, there is NO REASON to hoard toilet paper. All this does is prevent those in need from being able to buy it. Also, Halloween is going to be rough this year; just FYI...lots of teenagers will be sitting on a garage-full of it this fall. You are warned.

Food hoarding did begin at last, however. Even common canned vegetables are becoming hard to find. I was just at my local Wal-Mart today (it's a small town; there's not that many choices for where you can shop while staying within the Shelter-In-Place ordnance) and was actually able to find batteries, milk, and a few other things. Here's what the egg case, near the dairy section, looked like at the same Wal-Mart store earlier today:

They've also "roped off" the front of the store to limit one's entry and egress to only one set of doors to the building, until further notice. THIS is what really struck me as downright eerie.

This was taken at 2:00 PM today, when the store would normally be bustling with shoppers. The little blue signs atop the orange cones say "Please maintain 6 feet of social distancing." I'm afraid that's a catch-phrase that is going to define the entire decade.

On a side note, I suppose I'm "that weird guy" who sneaks camera-phone photos of public places for "suspicious purposes" (i.e. this blog), which probably made me look really odd to the armed city police officer who I nearly bumped into just after taking that photo. He was too busy doing his own urgent shopping to bother with the weirdo with the camera phone, fortunately... Don't laugh. But, dang, have you ever seen it like this in your life?

One bit of good news for the average consumer is that the gas prices are plummeting over this. Between no one really able to go to work or leave their homes, and some sort of disagreement between Russia and Saudi Arabia causing the Saudis to continue to increase oil production, gas prices keep dropping. Here's what it costs at a gas station near me:

I haven't seen it that cheap since I was a kid.

One more thing that I just have to share with you. I live in the Springfield area of southwestern Missouri, and my (former) commute to work takes me up and down Interstate Highway 65. Just south of town is a parcel of land owned by a local businessman who, just for fun, has an enormous 3,500 lb (1,588 kg) concrete statue of a frog sitting on it. This big fellow's name is "Toadally" ("like, totally"), and he sits a few yards off of the highway in full view of passing traffic. Every few weeks, there's a local tradition where Toadally gets decorated by mysterious, unknown forces who festoon the big guy, in good taste of course, with accouterments in the current vein of the times. He's been decorated as a froggy Santa Claus, and one time he was decorated with enormous rabbit ears and gigantic plastic eggs for Easter.

Well, here he is now. This is so darkly humorous that it made the front page of our local newspaper. Mind you, this fellow is about 7 feet tall.

The headline read, "Toadally is Social-Distancing". It went on to say "not to worry, he has tested negative for coronavirus."

Be safe, and hopefully we'll get through this soon.