Working at a grocery store is something that as a young adult, who is also going to school, might seem ideal, but not so much during certain situations.

As the COVID-19 outbreak started, it has been quite an interesting and very difficult experience at work for the past three weeks. I have been working at a grocery store for the past year and I can confidently say it has never been this chaotic, especially during the first week of the pandemic.

In week one, my department received the news that we needed to maintain our distance and make sure we constantly washed our hands. This is when we all realized that things were going to get bad quick!

I think that in a matter of three hours, when first opening that day, the whole store got wiped out. The first two things that were sold out in less than an hour were toilet paper and water. After that, it was all the dry products that don’t go bad, like beans, rice and canned food.

Naturally, as someone that is witnessing all of this happening, you start to think to yourself that you need to also go out there and grab stuff for you and your family.

Thankfully, because employees were there an hour before the store opened to the public, my coworkers and I were able to buy everything we thought we needed to basically survive.

At the time no one really knew what was going to happen with the stores.

Everyone just thought that every single store was just going to close until further notice. There were no talks of “essential businesses” or anything until the government said that grocery stores would be classified as essential.

It needed to stay open to provide for the public.

I do not know if it has been obvious or not, but whatever the case may be, we, grocery workers are just as or even more worried and in a state of panic than the customers.

People were buying in bulk which was unfair for customers that were trying to also buy or just waited because they were busy or just unavailable.

But we still try our hardest to give out what we could! This before our store implemented the limit of items per customer.

It is very difficult for us to deal with this situation, especially when panicking customers are going off on us over something we cannot control.

Overall, it is great to help everyone and remain employed but I am also not a robot. I can’t just make things appear that you as a customer need, so bear with me. I hope this makes anyone that does not work in grocery realize that there is a bit more to this whole pandemic than simply just having a fully stocked store.