As officials warned Chicagoans of blizzardlike conditions set to bear down on the city and surrounding area Thursday, residents hurried to get their holiday grocery shopping done early, before icy roads and frigid temperatures were set to make doing so unpleasant, if not impossible.
“It’s unfortunately the perfect storm,” said Swetal Patel, managing partner at the Patel Brothers grocery chain, which has three locations in the suburbs and one in the city. Grocery store traffic in the area has been up at least 30% over regular holiday-week levels since Tuesday, Patel said.
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“Nobody wants to leave their house for the next two days,” he said.
An employee at Devon Market in Rogers Park said the grocery store saw an influx of people on Tuesday, more than was typical even for the holiday week.
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“I did notice that they also purchased their groceries for the holidays,” the employee said.
Around noon Wednesday, the parking lot at a Jewel-Osco in Uptown was busy but not full. A woman wearing a Santa hat loaded a case of water into the back seat of a car. She said she was preparing for the storm.
Inside, Heather Flamme of Buena Park perused the egg aisle. Flamme was in the midst of a pre-storm-and-Christmas multi-grocery-store tour: “I’ve already gone to Aldi, then I’m going over to Trader Joe’s. Yesterday I was at Whole Foods,” said Flamme, 48, who had family flying into O’Hare on Wednesday. “I’m just stocking up because I don’t want to come out again.”
Steve Otis, of Uptown, stopped by Jewel to pick up regular grocery items and a ham for Christmas Eve. A lifelong Chicagoan, he also planned to hunker down until the storm passed.
“If it wasn’t for the storm, I probably would’ve gone for most of my Christmas food items Thursday or Friday,” said Otis, 64.
Jacqueline Moreno, 22, shopped for essential grocery items at Jewel on Wednesday afternoon. A bartender and a server, Moreno is scheduled to work on Christmas Eve and plans to drive to the suburbs to spend Christmas Day with her boyfriend’s family.
She was just making sure she was covered, she said, “in case we can’t go out, or can’t go over there.”
The grocery store was running low on some items, like chicken, Moreno said, but was still pretty well stocked. Inside, the shelves for particular varieties of toilet paper, milk and eggs were looking depleted, but there did not appear to be shortages of essential items.
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Don Fitzgerald, co-CEO of Dom’s Kitchen & Market, which has locations in Lincoln Park and Old Town, said through a representative Wednesday morning that the specialty grocery was not seeing a storm-shopping push yet, but expected to see it materialize later in the day.
Joe Kolavo, chief operating officer of Pete’s Fresh Market, which has locations across the city and suburbs, said Pete’s was also not seeing panic-buying, though foot traffic was up significantly in advance of the snowstorm.
“I just think we’re seeing people moving their plans up a couple days,” Kolavo said. “We’re not seeing like we did at the onset of the COVID lockdowns when people were buying cases of water, toilet paper, things like that.”
Patel concurred.
“The storm is going to hit, then the storm’s going to go away, and life gets back to normal on Saturday afternoon,” he said.
