- That would make sense if other DiGiorno's pizzas were also sold out, but this particular flavor is the only one that no grocery store seems to have.
- This particular pizza is just one of the many seemingly random items that have disappeared from grocery store shelves since the pandemic started, illustrating that the odds and ends of everyday life cannot be taken for granted.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories .
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My unsuccessful 2-week search for a DiGiorno's frozen pizza has driven home the feeling that life as we know it is no more
I've been trying to get my hands on a DiGiorno's original rising crust supreme pizza for weeks, but it's been sold out everywhere.
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It's not delivery, it's DiGiorno but thanks to the pandemic, I've given up on finding out exactly what that means.
I've been trying to compare DiGiorno's original rising crust supreme pizza against delivery supreme pizza to investigate the brand's claim of being as good as delivery. But for the past two weeks, everywhere I've looked has been sold out of it.
On Sunday, March 8, I flew back from Madrid after a two-week vacation.
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Still tipsy on vermouth, olives, and Iberian ham, I'd stuffed my suitcase with Moroccan cookies to bring to the office on Monday. I was ready to hug my coworkers and get cranking on some fast-food taste tests.
Then on Monday morning, I woke up to a Slack message from my editor. Our CEO had sent out an email advising employees who'd just traveled abroad to work from home for 14 days. Two days later, the office closed indefinitely, and not long after, all nonessential businesses were ordered to close in New York.
Working from home, I started a delivery pizza taste test only to discover that there were only two chains that delivered to my location. So I went to the grocery store, only to find an empty shelf where the DiGiorno supreme pizza should have been. I went back three times to the same story. Amazon, too, was sold out.
The weird thing is, the other DiGiorno pizzas are all in stock. Cheese, pepperoni, hand-tossed crust supreme, pan pizza supreme, cheese-stuffed crust supreme. The only DiGiorno pizza that seems to be completely missing from grocery freezers is the original rising crust supreme pizza.
The strange and persistent unavailability of this pizza mirrors the unexpected absence of other mundane staples.
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coronavirus panicked shoppers empty shelves
John Lamparski/Echoes Wire/Barcroft Media via Getty Images
Americans aren't using more toilet paper per capita than they used to, unless the rest of the country knows something I don't. Yet toilet paper was one of the first items to disappear from store shelves thanks to panic-shoppers.
Flour and yeast have also become hard to find , which makes sense. Stay-at-homers are turning to baking as grocery trips become few and far between and free time at home abounds. I've also had little luck finding rice. Skim milk, eggs, pasta sauce all those scarcities make sense to me.
But why is one particular type of DiGiorno's frozen pizza also on that list?
I wouldn't question the scarcity of the original rising crust supreme if other frozen pizzas were also out of stock. Frozen food is perfect for the house-bound. But freezer shelves are stacked with DiGiorno's other pizzas.
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Life goes on, with or without that particular pizza. I have food, a room, and a job that pays for both.
But as an American millennial, I'm used to always-stocked grocery stores and the near-instant gratification of Amazon Prime. I'm used to having every product in the consumerist pantheon at my fingertips, including DiGiorno's original rising crust supreme pizza. Even if I've never previously chosen to eat one, that option was always there before.
DiGiorno's pizzas are easy to take for granted. They sit in stubborn stacks in the freezer aisle of your grocery store, waiting for the begrudging grab of a beleaguered parent on a weekday night. They appear in cheesy late-night TV commercials, reminding you that, "Oh yeah, DiGiorno is still a thing."
The pandemic has pared down our usually reliable unlimited selection of products, and that feels strange even if it makes no functional difference in our lives. There are gaps on the grocery shelves that many of us have never seen before, nor conceived of as something that could happen in our lifetimes.
Eventually, those gaps will be filled. It may take time, but this pandemic is teaching me patience, if anything.
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I know now that "normal" cannot be taken for granted, and neither can mass-produced frozen pizzas. And in the absence of both, I turn to delivery.
See Also:
- Thousands of former Costco sample servers have reportedly been laid off as the 3rd-party company that staffs them shuts down operations
- The Drive-Thru: Employees at Hobby Lobby, office supply stores, and fast-food chains speak out about working during the coronavirus outbreak
- Amazon is turning away employees with temperatures over than 100.4 degrees and slashing up to half their pay
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