The pharmaceutical company I work at (we literally invented modern toothpaste and toothpaste in a tube back in 1850) has a shelf upstairs where they store all the extra product and rejects - Made an extra six boxes when they come twelve to a case? Can't send half a case, toss it on the shelf. Printed the wrong Lot Code on the labels? Oops. On the shelf.
We get to take home anything on the shelf.
I haven't paid for toothpaste since I started three years ago.
One time I brought home a box of 100 large soap packets, made for industrial use - each packet mixes up into a
gallon of liquid soap. The one time I actually did it just to see what it was like, it took me a month to use it all.
So I think I'm good on soap, lol.
Right now, I have four and a half rolls of good toilet paper left, and eight rolls of the nasty stuff that leaves lint all over your butt. Being the only one in my house, I should be good for another month and a half on the good stuff and maybe even three on the low quality stuff.
I
am down to about four rolls of paper towels, though. Have to do something about that sometime in the next month.
Food-wise, there doesn't seem to be much problem yet at the local supermarkets with anything other than meat and paper products, and I don't generally buy much fresh vegetation except for onions, potatoes and an occasional green pepper. I usually make a large pot of either soup or pasta with meat sauce for dinner and eat that all week, so as long as I can find some sort of meat around once a week I'm good. A package of hot dogs and a bag of frozen french fries will make four meals for me. I buy a pound and a half of cheese and a loaf of bread for lunch at work.
Having lived on peanut butter and ramen noodles for extended periods while I was unemployed for several long stretched over the past few years, it'll take some fairly major consequences from this virus thing to really make me worried about running out of food.
(Fun story: Once upon a time, the arcade at the local casino used to have a thing where after you'd spent a certain amount of money there, they upgraded your card so that you got a certain number of free games every time you came in. I used to play Fruit Ninja on the big touchscreen, and it paid out one ticket every ten points. I used to consistently score eighty or more tickets every game, and thus I'd end up with eight hundred tickets with my ten free games every day. Stopping in every day after work, I'd end up with at least 3500 tickets a week. In addition to the normal junk prizes, you could also drop major amounts of tickets to get things like video games, game
systems, or even ask the manager to custom order you stuff. It took me six months, but I actually got a laptop
entirely with free tickets. (If I'd actually chosen to invest some money in it, I could have had it in half the time for about $50...)
Relevant to this topic, for several months I was pretty much dead broke as my unemployment just barely covered my bills. And so, each week, I'd spend 3000 tickets to buy a $30 Burger King gift card, and then every night for dinner I'd go buy two or three of the 10-pc. chicken nuggets which were $1 apiece at the time. One card would get me nine or ten meals.
I was quite literally earning my daily bread with my exceptional skill at Fruit Ninja...

)