If you wandered into a grocery store last night, chances are you encountered a larger than normal number of cracked-out shoppers stuffing their carts as if they'd never see another grocery store again. Common convention says that milk and toilet paper are core staples for faux-apocalyptic preparedness, but when I wandered into the Lakewood Whole Foods last evening both items were still spilling off the shelves. In fact, other than what seemed like a few more customers than normal in the store, everything seemed pretty typical until I got to the produce section and saw the bananas had vanished. Only a bunch or two of those weird red bananas remained.
I didn't know that bananas were something that people kept on hand in case of hard times, so I started poking around the store to see what else had been snapped up by these cautious Dallasites. Here's what I found.
Onions were hit as hard as the bananas, unless you like the red kind. This one makes sense because a dry store onion will keep for ages. You could stock up now and be ready for the rest of the sort-of-emergency events of the winter season.
Salad greens I get. They're easy enough to turn into a quick and easy side dish.
But carrots were absolutely decimated.
Unless you want to buy them 15 pounds at a time.
The meat counter was more interesting. It was completely stocked except for all of the ground beef, fatty, grass-fed or otherwise.
Beer drinkers on the other hand, were totally well-stocked.
Saltines: gonzo.
Water was hit pretty hard, though I should note the bottles of Fiji brand water looked most untouched.
And canned beans were hit hard across the board, with pinto beans being the most popular.
Based on my experiences in Whole Foods, I learned three important things. For one, drinking is important, especially in times of atmospheric distress. Secondly, (and likely because of that alcohol consumption) Whole Foods is unusually social before major weather events. And finally, every time the weather media goons predict the end of the world, Dallas swims in homemade chili.
And some of them put beans in it.
