Dried beans and rice disappeared here from the shelves for quite some time. Even though people tended to shy away from Asian stores for awhile, (given COVID's origins) but even their pallets of 25-50lb bags of rice soon disappeared. However, the Asian stores did remain much better stocked with groceries than other grocery stores throughout the period of panic buying.A65453 wrote: ↑May 12th, 2021, 4:00 pmI was also surprised to see bare grocery shelves in April 2020. What was gone was interesting too: many of the frozen meals, canned soups, and almost no pasta or pasta sauce on the shelves. But dried foods were as plentiful as always. After that there was a shortage of flour as people got accustomed to staying home and took up baking as a hobby.
My family only keeps about a week of food at the house at any given time and we weren't really interrupted. Bought a few extra pounds of dried beans and rice just in case we needed to stretch a day or two before the stores restocked.
We also live in Texas and will be moving to AZ at the end of May. The freeze in February was a much bigger issue than Covid. We lost electrical power for four days and water for six due to three burst pipes in the house. I moved to Texas from AZ and am looking forward to getting back; it's a poorly run state.
I have friends and family that live between Austin and San Antonio. They were hit quite hard by the Feb freeze as were many in the middle states. A similar weather event in the AZ desert would be disastrous even from the narrow perspective that water lines here are not buried deep enough to withstand a hard freeze. Parts of the Phoenix metro did receive up to 4in of snow back in 1937. A similar snowfall event in modern times would shut the Valley down.
I was living in OK in the mid 1980's when they were hit with -10F temps. It actually froze the natural gas lines and everyone in town lost gas pressure, but the power stayed on. Most there (at that time) used natural gas as their only heating source. As in Texas, a few tried unwise heating alternatives and their family paid the price in carbon monoxide deaths. We were fortunate to have a plug in electric heater that got us through the worst of it.
Welcome back to AZ at the end of the month.