The all-time First World Problems tweet. https://t.co/tFosdwa06v
— Naomi Paiss (@NaomiPaiss) April 25, 2022
Historically, “first world problems” was a refrain about people complaining about frivolous things.
E.g.:
“The store has 50 shades of red lipstick but not the exact shade I like.”
Or
“I have Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Direct TV but there is nothing good on to watch.”
It doesn’t, or at least it didn’t, cover “I can’t buy fruits, vegetables, and cheese at the grocery store for my children.”
Now, defenders of the Biden Administration want you to know that of you are unable to buy nutritious, healthy food, like fresh fruits and vegetables for your children, you are a whiny American who doesn’t understand how tough life really is.
That will not fly.
We are several generations removed from food shortages.
American agriculture and industry conquered this problem when we applied the war effort to American farms during WWII and we’ve never looked back.
America is the land of plenty, at least where food is concerned, where you can get just about anything you want whenever you want.
And in two years that has been ended.
Bare shelves and fresh food being considered luxurious are not things Americans are or want to become used to.
I can’t wait for this to become a mainstream Democrat message.
Venezuelans complained about the Maduro Diet.
This Administration will tell you that the Biden Diet is a good thing, and this President deserves praise for fighting the obesity epidemic.
To be fair there is a point to what has been said it is a first world problem to complain about not having the expansive list of choices of a particular product category like the above tweet mentions an inability to obtain large plums but it says nothing about small plums or a particular size bag of mozzarella cheese but it doesn’t mention anything about other brands of mozzarella cheese smaller or larger bags in the mozzarella cheese. Outside of our first world superpower status you may not have 12 different choices for canned peas, you may just have one choice. True shortages is the inability to obtain any peas or apples, not the inability to obtain one particular particular variety of apples you want When you go to the store and they only have one kind of apple, we’ve left the first world but we have not reached true shortages.
The privileged class has passed beyond First World problems and into Cloud Minder problems, e.g., “Billy didn’t ask what pronouns I’m using today! My life is RUINED!!!!”
Meanwhile, those who live in the real world are stuck dealing with real-world problems, like trying to make the family budget work when prices keep rising, trying to keep a business going when the things we need in order to make our products have gone from always-in-stock to “maybe we can get you some by 1Q23 if nothing else goes wrong in the world”, and so on.
Those who were already on the edge financially, well, I really don’t know what they’re doing now. Much of the change in society is opaque.
And anyone with dietary restrictions and a limited budget is gonna have a lot of trouble coming up. Some categories of specialty foods have gotten very scarce the last couple of months, with no visible explanation. (Being able to digest just about anything vaguely foodlike does have its advantages.)
The Cloud Minders are utterly incapable or relating to any of the problems that exist outside their bubble (see also: their Newspeak definition of “freedom of speech”). They also have a colossal case of hubris, and sincerely believe that they are as deities, capable of micromanaging the world down to the last detail if only the rest of us would get out of the way.
And just earlier I saw another article promoting eating bugs. Almost as if there’s a narrative they’re pushing.
The elite love to eat bugs. Once in a while. As novelty items, professionally prepared by specialist chefs.
Eating bugs as an everyday thing because you can’t afford real food is another matter entirely.
… I guess all the commoners are meant to aspire to the exaltedness of “They who live up a tree / And feast on grubs and clay.”
The local international market/fancy food store (think Trader Joe’s crossed with Chuck E. Cheese with a bar and a section dedicated to cookware) has a couple shelves of candy-coated bugs, and may even have some sort of bug-based flour or protein powder. They’re novelties.
Because the same store sells “People for the Eating of Tasty Animals” t-shirts.
Ah, yes – candy-coated bugs!
Now as I think of it, I actually bought a package of chocolate-coated ants many years ago, to take to a picnic, because what is a picnic without ants?
I’ve also encountered some manner of candied crickets or grasshoppers or some such, but didn’t partake.
Complaining that Polly-O cheese is not available when there are substitutes is a first world problem. Complaining that the store has no mozzarella cheese is not.
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However, valid point(s). In the US it’s not OK to just assume foodstuffs are in scarce supply. If a shop is out of something, it should just mean you have to pop into the one across the street for it. But, that is not the narrative pushed here.
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They are trying to shame you into accepting food shortages as a way of life.
First: One item being out is one thing. Multiple items being out is very different.
Second: I’ve been grocery shopping recently in which both the name brand and generic are out.
I’ve seen the aisles noticeably staged with multiple shelves displaying the same item, one unit deep, so that at a glance there are no empty spaces.
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When you see six shelves of mac & cheese one box deep, then six shelves of ketchup one bottle deep, and restockers desperately arranging things to look fuller and relabeling shelves so it looks like it’s always been that way, you know there’s a problem somewhere.
I could stand to loose a hundred pounds. My grandkids, not so much.
And part of this is indicators. Yes, it would be wonderful if every item I wanted was in stock when I wanted it. Not being able to get the brand of oranges I want is not a shortage, it might indicate a shortage.
We use a rule of thumb about is there a shortage, we have three different regional grocery chains near us. The one we use most often has good quality at a good price. The next store has higher quality, more luxury items at higher price. But if you shop coupons and sales, it will always have some items that are cheaper than our go to store. Issue is that if you buy anything not on the list of cheaper items you will be paying more. Finally there is a third store that is also on the high end.
If our preferred store is out of an item for 2 weeks in a row we will check the other stores. Only if all three are out do we consider it a shortage.
Our family uses three different coffee creamers. Mine (normal), my lady’s (dairy free), daughter’s (got to be different). On any given week our preferred store will be out of one of them. As far as we can tell they don’t have the transportation needed to get everything from distribution center to the supermarket. Therefore they rotate which of the same sort of things gets transported. So one week it is my creamer that gets shorted and the next it is my lady’s and so forth.
We are starting to see shortages. We are also seeing prices go up. Our local dollar general just raised the price of a pack of hotdogs by 25%.
I’m worried about food shortages. I’ve invested north of $300 in our garden so far this year. That’s 5 yards of topsoil, seeds, starter trays, starter soil and a few other things. This is to augment the garden stuff we already had. We are expecting to harvest a few hundred pounds of food from our garden this fall and we will preserve it for the long haul. Canning, dehydrating, freezing and other means.
We are starting to see shortages. We are also seeing prices go up. Our local dollar general just raised the price of a pack of hotdogs by 25%.
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We haven’t seen shortages yet, not as you define them (which IMHO is a perfectly reasonable guideline), but we have been seeing price increases across the board. Our local dollar stores are now buck-and-a-quarter stores, too.
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We just discovered something you might find useful: If you or your wife shop at Walmart and have ever placed an online “Pick-Up” order using a credit or debit card, their site tracks and lets you see all the purchases you’ve ever made with that card, the date of purchase, and how much every item costed. IOW, you can look up how much things used to cost, and compare apples-to-apples what it would cost to make an identical order now. Other stores’ sites may do this, too.
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We just did a stroll down “memory aisle” (see what I did there?), and let me tell you, a 10-15% increase in food costs is the extreme low end. Most of the items we buy — particularly fresh and frozen things — have gone up 30-40% since last year, and ~50% since two years ago. For example, a frozen pizza we like was ~$3 in 2020 (and hadn’t significantly changed up or down in forever), was around $3.40 in 2021, and is now about $4.50. That pizza is not the exception; it’s the rule.
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We’ve always had a garden and canned/dehydrated/frozen the harvest, but last year we really expanded it, and this year we’re expanding it further. With fertilizer prices skyrocketing because Union Pacific is restricting transport (where is Pete Buttigieg when he’s needed this time?), we’re learning to make our own compost to feed it. Where we used to garden for fun, it’s quickly becoming a financial necessity.
You should also compare portion sizes, package weights, and unit volumes. You might have been buying 32 oz. cans of coffee, but now, you’re only getting 30 oz. cans for the same price.
I’d live to know what store and what service that’s from. A company’s own service is likely to have a better handle on what’s in a store than a third party, but even tracking the inventory at your own stores is a hard problem.
It’s worse if order fulfillment is limited to what’s on the shelf vs. what might be in the backroom.
Eh, this is nothing new. I worked in a Supermarket Deli about a decade ago, and one winter, our supply chain got seriously messed up because the area got hit with major snowstorm after major snowstorm for a couple of weeks on end, which meant that the trucks couldn’t get from the suppliers to the transshipment centers to the stores, so we were out of most of our popular products. We always had something in stock, but rarely the exact products customers wanted.
Holy. Freaking. Carp. From the way people reacted, you’d think a) they were actively starving to death, and b) The Supermarket was deliberately starving them. Because God forbid someone be forced to choke down store-brand Swiss Cheese and boiled ham instead of the premium-brand No-Fat, No-Salt Swiss and Honey Glazed Ham off the Bone that they usually buy.
Several products I regularly buy are periodically out of stock. First world problem, or a canary in the coal mine?
this week’s Examples:
Real Sugar Pepsi. It is in stock for a month, then out of stock for a month or three. Plenty of other Pepsi and Coke flavors are available, but not MY Flavor.
Campbells Chicken Gumbo Soup. (I also remember the regular 10/$10 Campbells Soup sales last year. Now it is 4/$5 or 3/$5 on sale, and $1.79-$2.29 regular price.)