Imagine for a moment that it’s March 20th, 2020.

You live in the beautiful state of Utah, which is currently 120% above every other state in panic buying.

This means stores are quickly running out of home essentials.

One of those essentials being: toilet paper.

There’s almost a black market for this good.

With that context let me share the below recollection of my experience during this time.

I needed to go grocery shopping for some basic items. The store I went to did not have any toilet paper.

No surprise.

After purchasing some basic items I called over 5 other stores to see if they had any. Eventually I was given a tip that one grocery store had toilet paper.

The hunt was a foot.

However, this turned out to be false information. An employee at the store informed me that to secure such a precious commodity you needed to arrive at the grocery store before they opened.

So the next day I decided to head off on this adventure. I arrived at the grocery store at 6:50am, they opened at 7, and as I pulled into the parking lot was greeted with an already long line of shoppers (as pictured above).

I was around the 50th person in the line.

As the store opened, people beelined it to the toilet paper. By the time I got there, a single piece of paper declaring “one case of toilet paper customer” hung over six remaining cases.

I was lucky enough to grab one of the remaining six.

This is a simple account of an inconvenience at best.

There are so many situations that are happening at this exact moment which are much worse than that. Some people have never had access to toilet paper, the lack of clean running water is a much more pressing concern.

Our situation is not suffering in comparison. If anything this is an opportunity to be more grateful of what you do have and contemplate where you can provide access to more vital resources for others.