By Noah Zucker

The COVID-19 pandemic may feel normal to many Delawareans by now, but at the same time a year ago, anxiety surrounding the shutdown’s beginning was palpable statewide, particularly in local grocery stores.

A run on products, from toilet paper to hand sanitizer and disinfecting wipes left sections of shelves in many major chains empty and at times, entire aisles were devoid of stock. Some stores today continue to limit the quantity of paper products and cleaning supplies that a shopper can purchase.

“Dry grocery will (typically) get anywhere from two to three deliveries a week,” said Matthew Pennell, who was the manager of the Byler’s location in Dover at the time. “When that first week hit, in Dover we were up to about 10 tractor trailer loads.”

He said the industry was not ready.

“I think the biggest problem was that nobody was prepared for it. There was definitely a stockpile of products available, but you just weren’t able to access it quick enough, especially with the way people were buying.”

For weeks, Mr. Pennell said keeping the shelves stocked with staples such as bread, milk, rice and flour was a challenge.
“Our normal stocking at that time was from six in the morning until 2:30” in the afternoon, he said. “We switched to an overnight shift shortly after that to try to get the floors back to where they were.”

To this day, a full year later, Byler’s stockers are still working the graveyard shift to make sure customers aren’t left looking at empty shelves.

An academic perspective

Brandon McFadden, a professor of food economics at the University of Delaware, has been reflecting on the events of March 2020 on a national level. He said the crisis boiled down to a few factors.

“The food system was set up to deliver half of our calories away from home, and we had a pretty abrupt shift to consuming all of our calories at home,” he said.

The pre-COVID market was more oriented toward large-scale commercial buyers.

“Things for institutional buyers, like a hospital or a school or even a restaurant, are packaged differently than they’re packaged for grocery stores,” Mr. McFadden said. “Anybody who’s ever worked in a restaurant knows you don’t get a dozen eggs.”

It took distributors a few weeks to catch on.

“Everything had to catch up a little bit and you had to try to find ways to break down” bulk packages, the professor said. “The supply was there, it was just ready to be shipped in a different format and sold in a way that people were no longer consuming.”

On top of these supply chain issues, many consumers were buying with haste.

“There were also behavioral things going on,” Mr. McFadden said. “There’s uncertainty and fear.”

The uncertainty, he said, surrounded whether goods would be available in the near future, and the fear concerning the pandemic and being around other people who may have been contagious.

The professor said there’s no consensus on whether consumer behavior at the outset of the pandemic was rational.

“People will conjecture different things on whether that panic buying was really rational or irrational because in a time of uncertainty, like it was at the beginning of the pandemic, it can be difficult to know what the future is going to look like,” he said. “It’s very difficult to disentangle what might be a rational reaction to uncertainty and what crosses the line to just irrationality.”

But some of the outlandish behavior could certainly be attributed to a herd mentality.

“If somebody walks in the store and you see everybody has toilet paper in their basket, one of the first things you’re probably going to do is go get some toilet paper because everybody else is getting it,” Mr. McFadden said.

Toilet paper

The toilet paper issue in particular caught on fast. Within days, stores across the country were completely cleaned out.

It got to the point where Mr. McFadden said his local Costco began selling pallet-sized bricks of toilet paper normally reserved for institutional customers and businesses to anyone who could get them home.

Surprisingly, Mr. Pennell said the toilet paper problem didn’t hit Byler’s until a few weeks after the chaos began.

“We didn’t experience a lack of toilet paper like a lot of companies did because we have our local warehouse nearby,” he said. “It took us about three to four weeks before we ran out of our supply of toilet paper.”

Of the Byler’s situation, Mr. McFadden said, “It sounds like they were better prepared because they’re just a smaller operation and seem to be closer to their suppliers and maybe don’t have to worry about such a large supply.”

He said some in his field are looking into whether it makes more sense for the nation’s food system to be more local.

“Somewhere like a larger retailer is going to have a lot more access to things, but they have a lot more stores they need to spread it out to as well,” he said.

But Mr. McFadden said it was a supply issue just as much as it was a distribution issue, even for the big national corporations.

“A lot of the things that went off the shelves were going off the shelves in a lot of places, and a lot of things being left on the shelves were left on the shelves in a lot of places,” he said. “There was a lot of panic, but it was pretty focused on certain things.”

The professor said he believes this will lead companies to “narrow the number of products they’re carrying and the types of products they carry.”

Mr. McFadden had no data about interactions between customers and essential workers, but he said that masks and other COVID-19 issues quickly became a point of contention as the pandemic was politicized.

“It definitely does create a situation where there’s more of an opportunity to have a negative interaction,” he said. “A lot of it was stemming from mask protests essentially.”

The professor referred to one incident that happened at a Family Dollar in Flint, Mich., last May when a security guard was shot and killed over an argument that began with him asking a customer to put a mask on.

But Mr. Pennell said his customers at Byler’s have been polite for the most part.

“They were very gracious,” he said.

“The worst part was when the state started the shutdown and regulating how many people could come in the store. That’s where we had more conflict,” Mr. Pennell said. “We never had to call the local authorities for that, but that’s when we started having some issues. Some people didn’t want to stand outside and wait.”

But the kindness he witnessed was the most memorable.

“When people started getting stimulus money… customers were buying gift cards and handing them out to people. That was a pretty cool thing for us to experience,” Mr. Pennell said.

His workers, he said, deserve a great deal of credit for the store’s perseverance.

“Our team members here, I can’t say enough about what they did and are still doing,” Mr. Pennell said.

Looking forward

There was “no doubt” in Mr. Pennell’s mind that something like this could happen again, but Mr. McFadden wasn’t as sure.

“We could have another pandemic. Will we be more prepared next time? Absolutely,” he said. “After what everyone just lived through, I don’t see how it could be worse, if that makes sense, because we live in a new world now. We know so much now that we didn’t before and we took so much for granted before that we don’t know.

“The food industry just lived through this, so I think they’re way better prepared… I would imagine now there are specific contingency plans in place for things like this,” Mr. McFadden said.

“The way things go in our world, you just don’t know anymore,” said Mr. Pennell, who is now an assistant manager.

After almost 25 years at Byler’s, a career that started when he was 15, Mr. Pennell is moving on to become a full-time pastor at Maranatha Fellowship in Dover. He will carry the lessons of this trying time to the pulpit.

“You can’t live in fear,” Mr. Pennell said. “That’s one thing I learned through this. You can’t let fear dictate.”