I live on Long Island NY and honestly haven't seen empty shelves here. What I have noticed are some odd sales that don't follow the usual sales cycles - e.g. February is canned foood month. A large chain is running a sale on canned veggies for 77 cents a can. Odd when people generally buy fresh food in June.
Another odd one was Swift pre-seasonred ribs for $1.99/lb. With Swift closing two plants, the low price is unexpected.
Happily, I seem to have gotten through to my son (but not his wife). A blessing to have him living on the second floor of our home after my husband passed in January. He was actually talking about expanding our compost pile considering the upcoming food shortages. Sometimes they're listening when you least expect it.
I saw a video a few months back on youtube from a guy who delivered to the big box stores. Never said who he worked for though and I'm not sure who the channel was, just popped up in the feed. Anyway he was saying that stores would be filling up with merchandise, overstocked even because all the backorders from covid, supply chain shortages, AND the shipping container snafu last year are all catching up at the same time. He also said that the shipping container items have been sitting in those containers on docks and in yards for the past year so a lot of the merchandise is close to be out of date. The stores will need to get the product moved before expirations so expect good sales. His advice was stock up while you can for cheap because after that there would be nothing to replace the old merchandise and the stores would be empty. I'll have to see if I can find that video to link.
Would love to see that