By the third week of March 2020, visiting the local grocery store had become a precarious undertaking. Part of it was the sheer strangeness of distanced shopping. I had become acutely aware of my physical distance from other people. Soon I noticed them eyeing me from behind their carts with a similar wariness.
In the produce section, I hovered a body length or two behind fellow shoppers, waiting for them to bag their bundles of bok choy, unsure how much buffer was considered polite. Nobody wanted to risk the skirmishes over the last rolls of toilet paper we’d seen in videos circulating online; purchasing small cabbages should never be an event that goes viral.
Things grew even stranger in the meat section, where paper signs affixed to refrigerated cases told customers they could have only a few pounds of ground beef and pork at a time. Likewise at the milk case. When I finally got to the canned beans section, it was picked clean; my neighbors had apparently decided legumes would get them through the biggest, weirdest public health crisis any of us had ever seen.
Across the country, the story was the same: Once-common food items became difficult to obtain. Grocery delivery services were suddenly impossible to book and rarely yielded a full order when they did arrive. Grocery stores shelves weren’t completely bare. But they were short on many items I’d come to expect would always be available.
The quantity limits and distancing rules were an inconvenience for office workers confined to work from home. For those already struggling with poverty and those who had abruptly found themselves unemployed, the situation was more dire.
This story is from the May 2021 edition of Reason magazine.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the May 2021 edition of Reason magazine.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
'Smoking Opium Is Not Our Vice'
America’s first drug war was driven by xenophobia against chinese migrants.
THE LIBERTARIAN MIND OF DAVID BOAZ
Threats to freedom, Trump vs. Biden, and the wins libertarians can’t seem to acknowledge
DARE TO Fail
THERE’S NO SUCH thing as a universal millennial experience, but DARE comes close.
CULTURE WARRIOR IN CHIEF
THE MODERN PRESIDENCY IS A DIVIDER, NOT A UNITER. IT HAS BECOME FAR TOO POWERFUL TO BE ANYTHING ELSE.
Progress, Rediscovered
A NEW MOVEMENT PROMOTING SCIENTIFIC, TECHNOLOGICAL, AND ECONOMIC SOLUTIONS TO HUMANITY’S PROBLEMS EMERGES.
HOW CAPITALISM BEAT COMMUNISM IN VIETNAM
IT ONLY TOOK A GENERATION TO GO FROM RATION CARDS TO EXPORTING ELECTRONICS.
50 Years of D&D: You Can't Copyright Fun
THIS YEAR MARKS the 50th anniversary of the original edition of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), the granddaddy of tabletop role-playing games and one of the urtexts of nerd culture.
The Pupil Panopticon
BIG BROTHER—and Parent, and Teacher— are watching.
Congress Could Swipe Your Credit Reward Points
A PLOT TO kill credit card reward points has bipartisan buy-in, with lawmakers framing the effort as an attempt to curb stillstubborn inflation.
Regulators Killed a Lifeline for Roombas
IN JANUARY 2024, Amazon terminated its agreement to acquire iRobot, the company that manufactures the Roomba robot vacuum.