Month: March 2020

Look at this antique pasta I scored at the grocery store. It was in the very back of the product slot.

May 1822, brothers. I’m going to list in on eBay and see what I get.

Brian J., were you taking the last bundle of pasta because you’re stocking up for the coronavirus pandemic?

Ssssssh, gentle reader. Hopefully I am stocking up to donate these foodstuffs to the local food pantry in a couple of years.

Also, my locally owned grocery chain, feeling pressured from the new Walmart Neighborhood Markets and Hy-Vee, runs a little thin on the inventory at all times, so the stock on their stocked shelves doesn’t reach very deeply at the best of times and can look a little like panic buying has occurred on the day before the new load comes in. On Thursday, for example, they had vast empty space on the bread shelves where sandwich buns go, so it looked like there had been a run on them. But hotdog buns and sliced bread were solidly stocked. So maybe the weather last weekend lent itself to more grilled burgers than the ordering algorithms had anticipated.

So one doesn’t have to stock much up to clear them out of a product. I do it routinely in buying my beautiful wife’s favorite chocolate, which I ensure we have a good backlog of in case of emergency.

When I give you an investment tip, gentle reader, I’d recommend you short it.

As I mentioned, I bought Limited Brands (L) when it brought Victoria’s Secret (Intimate Brands, Incorporated / IBI) back in house (and I had bought IBI because it produced a product I like).

So when I learned that a new lingerie shop was opening in town:

The Battlefield Mall announced a new lifestyle apparel retailer is coming soon.

Aerie, owned by lifestyle clothing and accessories label American Eagle Outfitters, offers teens and young adult shoppers alike a wide variety of undergarments, active apparel, loungewear, swimsuits, accessories, sleepwear and more. Most recently, the brand has been applauded for promoting body positivity and female empowerment through its campaign #AerieREAL.

I bought a stake in AEO immediately.

And I’ve lost 10% on it already.

I am such a child of the 1980s that I keep pouring small amounts of money into traditional brick-and-mortar mall stores, but it’s not worked out well for us. For much of the last decade, I expected retail sales to take off when the economy rebounded. However, it has not been so good to most of my holdings.

I’ll have to take matters into my own hands and go to the shop to buys lots of product for my beautiful wife.

Although my efforts to bolster JC Penney’s by actually shopping there has not worked out so well. But, hey, I have bought some good shoes there.

Every time I’ve come around the corner from my office to the den this week, I’ve seen a cat lying on the sofa.

And then I am instantly weirded out because it’s not one of our cats. And then, milliseconds later, I remember what it is.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go right now and put that game controller away.

“It’s highly unlikely,” I responded. “Good night.” And I put out his light.

He might have been looking for certainty, an assurance from his father that everything was going to be all right. Perhaps some parents do that for their children, apply absolute answers where statistics indicate a small chance exists, but I’ve never been that parent, and he’s gotten similar answers whenever he’s asked about bad men breaking in, fires, or the various other real world concerns he’s expressed in his thirteen years.

When he was afraid of monsters, though, he got a certain answer: Monsters can’t get you because our cats eat monsters.

I wish I could have offered him more certainty than that, but he’s becoming an adult now, and he needs to learn risk assessment and how adults deal with something unknown, scary, and possible but unlikely.

A pandemic threat hits me right in the primal fear. Personally, I think it’s from reading The Andromeda Strain when I was young and getting the willies from it and later reading The Stand and being part of the nineties zeitgeist that had a bunch of films about pandemics (Outbreak, 12 Monkeys, Virus, and the miniseries version of The Stand). I’m not sure I’ve actually seen any of those films, but when I was twenty-something, diseases were breaking out all over.

So I have a tickle of fear when I start hearing about epidemics of deadly infectious diseases. We were scheduled to go to Disney World around time of the hyped 2014 Ebola outbreak, and I considered cancelling our plans because, hey, where are a lot of travelers who might be carrying an airborne version of Ebola going? Florida.

I did not cancel, of course, and I’ve gotten a little less jumpy (internally jumpy, gentle reader; I do so try for the stoic ideal in demonstration anyway). I have considered this month When is it too early to keep the children from going to school and to cancel our vacation plans?

The answer, of course, is now. Although if it ever gets to be too late, I will wish I had acted on my paranoia sooner. It’s a rough life, being paranoid and lazy.

But I do think that this “outbreak” is overhyped, that the novel nature of it make it more newsworthy than the flu but it doesn’t look now like it’s anything worse. Perhaps it is; perhaps I am just scanning the headlines with unwarranted skepticism and reserve.

So my message to my children about how an adult handles, erm, concerns about things outside of his control such as COVID-19:

• You don’t know the number of your days, so live each one as best as you can and always say “I love you” to the people you love.
• If you’re concerned about future events, lay up some supplies that you can later donate if and when you’re feeling comfortable. Of course, it’s always a good idea to lay up some supplies even when you’re not concerned.
• Laugh at what you fear.

  

  Of course, this will come off as insensitive to people who are losing loved ones to the disease. As you know, I have some family members who are of an age to be at real risk for dying from coronavirus (or the seasonal flu). But I am the kind of unfeeling person who makes inappropriate jokes when his own mother lies in the ICU and the kind of guy who laughs at a funeral. So I can separate my laughter from my mourning. And, apparently, my fear of infectious disease.

So that’s the behavior I model for my children, anyway. I hope it comforts them in its consistency.