Operation Sindoor Panic buying begins at grocery stores

Post Operation Sindoor conducted by the armed forces in the wee hours today and drills for blackout conducted in Jalandhar, residents of the city took to panic buying at supermarkerts and grocery stores on Wednesday.

By noon, there were long queues of customers standing with their carts waiting to buy food items and grocery at some supermarkets in the city. People chose to buy items like wheat flour, rice, pulses and other daily use stuff in bulk quantities so that they could store stuff for more than a month.

Owing to rush, the buyers said the stores had become suffocating and it took them longer to pick stuff. Sonia, a buyer at the popular D Mart store on the Model Town road, said, “It took me 2.5 hours to purchase the stuff and get the billing done. The store managers put up extra counters too but still it took me an hour in the billing queue. Under normal circumstances, all monthly purchase is done by me within half an hour.”

The customers also said some shelves got empty and they could not get all the stuff they wanted to purchase. “There were so many customers inside the store that the staff were not able to get time and space to replace stuff on the shelves. I wanted to buy 20 kg of wheat flour but could get only a 5 kg sack”, said Harbhajan Singh, another buyer.

The customers who came around 2 pm found the entrance to the store shut. The shutter of the store was pulled down by the staff as it had become too claustrophobic inside. There was hardly any space available for the buyers to move about with their trollies. During this time, the buyers stood in queue patiently for the shutters to be pulled up again. The staff at the store said they had a tough time managing more footfall. “We have to keep a check on the number of people entering the store at a given time. So we were closing and opening the store intermittently”, they said.

Jalandhar