Thursday evening. We chanced another trip to Walmart today: xgf came for the ride this time and stayed in the car. I needed to pick up a new microphone for my work laptop, and she didn’t like the sheets (too polyester-y, not cotton-y), ergo the second trip in a week.
It’s only been three days, but things already changed there: Walmart set up a metal fence barrier to keep the line into the store from spilling out into the parking lot. They also had little printouts reminding people that they were hiring. (10,000 openings, thought they didn’t specify if that was in Canada or worldwide.) This time, it took 30 minutes to get into the store. On the upside, they finally opened up more than two checkout lines, so there was no need to wait for the cashier this time around. (If there’s no Walmart where – or when – you’re from, it’s a running joke that they have dozens of checkout lines, but only a few would be staffed at any given time.)
I have this gnawing suspicion that things will get even weirder as the pandemic continues.
Oh well. There were no microphones in stock – presumably, all the other folks working from home (or trying to start their own podcasts, maybe?) bought them all. On the upside, they had eggs in stock, and we’ll be sleeping on freshly laundered, brand new, 100% cotton king-sized sheets, so at least xgf’s standard of living will go up a bit. The other bit of weirdness is that their grapefruit juice is still out of stock. It looks like a fundamental piece of the supply chain somewhere got broken. Are factories processing only orange juice now? Are there not enough workers in one specific region that supplies all the grapefruits? Mysteries never cease.
Off to bed – big day tomorrow. Leaving y’all with a picture of my brand new quarantine shopping setup.
Cumulative deaths in the US: 63,832; in Canada: 3,310. New words in the novel: none.
Grigory Lukin.com 