The Great Grape-Nuts Grab

I knew. I just knew. It was sometime in November or early December. Frankly, it's all such a blur now.

Regardless, this was well before last week, when both the New York Times, the newspaper of record, and CNN, the world's most watched news source, reported on the global shortage of Post Grape-Nuts.

Fake news, you say? Trust me, it is not. It turns out this is a story upon which the country finds common ground. It has also been reported by Fox Business, Vice, USA Today, MSN and so many others.

Don't believe them or me? Check the cereal aisle in your grocer next time you are there.

At some grocers, you will see a deep, empty, hollowed-out column amidst all those other so-called cereals, an inverse memorial of a sort, while at others, they will have shamelessly scooted boxes over as if to erase any memory of the travesty that has befallen us all.

Well, maybe not all of us. Maybe not even that many. Perhaps you are one of those who think Grape-Nuts taste like gravel. In fairness, even as a Grape-Nuts lover, I imagine Grape-Nuts might, if not taste something like gravel, have the consistency of it, only a little less, well, gravely.

But, as I say, I love Grape-Nuts and this is how I ended up with 10, large, 29-ounce boxes you see photographed above as well as three not shown.

But first, before we get too far into this yarn, four quick items.

First, an apology. Like I say, I knew of this shortage a couple months ago but waited until now, until I had my Grape-Nuts, before writing this.

The responsible thing to have done would have been to speak up. Like those warnings at the airport, "See something, say something." Only this wouldn't have had the same ring: "Don't see something, say something."

Anyway, it was indeed a great act of selfishness at a time when our country deserves, is yearning for, shared sacrifice, a wholly selfish act the wounds from which only time can erase.

If you are a Grape-Nut devotee, my sincere apologies. But I ask: Would you have not done the same? Would you have not gone to the end of the Earth, or at least Amazon, to find yours? Have you not?

Second, a warning: The boxes you see photographed are being stored at a secure and undisclosed location. So, don't get any ideas. I'm not sure how extreme the torture would have to be for me to spill my guts but . . . Well, um, probably not that severe.

Third: I broke no laws in making this purchase. To my knowledge. Though I will ask your opinion about what I believe to be an ethical dilemma in a moment.

Fourth, a confession: I eat my Grape-Nuts without milk. Talk about eating gravel. The sound in your head is pretty close to deafening.

Why, you ask? As a vegan, I don't drink milk and have chosen for no particular reason not to use any of those white-colored liquids that result from squeezing cashews or soybeans -- what the "Got Milk?" crowd might encourage you to call "nut juice" -- on my cereal. Or gravel, depending on your point of view.

Now, at long last, to how I ended up with all those 29-ounce boxes of Post Grape-Nuts at a time of bottomless scarcity.

My first tipoff was that both the Grape-Nuts and the private label version at my local grocer, the Nutty Nuts, had been missing for a couple of weeks. My first thought, at a time of great innocence, was that perhaps my grocer, in my store, had dropped them for lack of an appreciative audience. The world can be cruel sometimes, and shelf space is valuable.

So I visited a second store in the same chain. No Grape-Nuts. No Nutty Nuts. Then a third store, this time in a different chain. No Grape-Nuts, just that gaping hole like a child without front teeth.

So, I hit the internet. Nothing immediately apparent but with a little sleuthing, I did find an article from 2009 in the Wall Street Journal on a previous reported shortage. It was there that I learned that Grape-Nuts -- whose rather simple ingredients include neither grapes nor nuts -- were all made in one California factory. Not far from where lots of this country's grapes and nuts are actually grown.

Here's a great passage from that article:

"On the factory's fourth floor, all day every day, objects with the proportions of hewn firewood and the heft of cinder blocks hurtle along a conveyor, dive into a steel chute, disappear down a black hole -- and emit what sounds like a startled scream.

All the while, Fernando Vargas, who has operated the Grape Nuts machine for 32 years, stands next to the chute in a hard hat yelling, 'Dropping the bombs! Dropping the bombs!' "

Anyway, now we are in early January. I decided to try to find some Grape-Nuts online. Visited Target's and Wal-Mart's websites, and Amazon. Found a third-party seller on Amazon that appeared to be, of all things, a hotel in California. Only condition: I had to buy 10 boxes. And, oh yea, the delivery would take a week or more.

Sounded a little odd. Hotel. Well, maybe they had a bunch left, since there were few people staying at hotels in the middle of a treacherous pandemic. Ten boxes? Well, maybe they bought in bulk and didn't want to break up a shrink-wrapped shipment. A week or more to deliver? That's a far cry from next-day delivery for an Amazon Prime member.

Was this a middleman, I wondered, someone without actual supply in stock simply trying to profit from my misery and the misery of so many others, a wretched soul now in a hunt for the elusive cereal?

So, I did what any self-respecting, reasonable, logical, rational person would do in this situation. I ordered 10 boxes of Grape-Nuts. The 29-ounce size. And I waited.

You think this story is over. Oh, no. Now comes the intrigue.

About a week later, I checked online to get a status report. Said the Grape-Nuts had been delivered. Three days earlier. What? Somewhat foolishly, I went out to my front door just to make sure. No boxes.

It can't be, I thought. Someone has stolen my 10, 29-ounce boxes of Grape-Nuts?

Went back to the UPS webpage, where I had found the tracking information. Discovered with a little digging that my Grape-Nuts had been delivered to an address in Missouri. Missouri? I live in Miami. I could have understood next door or across the street but Missouri?

So I contacted UPS -- by which I mean I actually spoke to someone, who informed me that the label with my name on it had indicated the package was to go to Missouri. It will come as no surprise to you that they wouldn't tell me to whom or where. Not that I would have tried to ... Oh, yes, I would have.

So, I went to reach out to this hotel in California, only to find out that their delivery reliability had dropped from 70 percent to 50 percent in the last month or so. I filed a complaint -- well, I actually pleaded for my Grape-Nuts -- but two days later had heard nothing.

It is now mid-January. I can only describe my mood as despondent, inconsolable. I was having a hard time focusing on even the simplest tasks. (I did continue to bath regularly.)

And now there is price gouging. It turns out, the prices online are, while not GameStop or Telsa ridiculous, a little out of control. Double the price I paid.

And then a box arrived, indicating it had come from, interestingly enough, Wal-Mart. A pretty big box. I tore it open. It was Grape-Nuts. I pulled them out from behind the bubble wrap, one by one. But there were only six.

Better than nothing, I decided. I quickly opened a box, poured a bowl and crunched away, that familiar deafening roar in my head like music to my ears.

The next day, another box arrived. Four more boxes.

At this point, two things occurred to me.

First, where to put 10, 29-ounce boxes of Grape-Nuts? Second, now that I had looked at the expiration date, could I eat 10 boxes of Grape-Nuts by the end of the year. (And then, I thought, what could possibly happen to this gravely cereal that would make them any less safe to eat after December?)

Now, if you are a careful reader, and no doubt you are, you know you have not reached the end of this tale. Earlier, I mentioned 11 boxes were in the photo, with an additional two not shown.

That's right, a day or so later, a third shipment arrived, this time with three boxes. (The photograph shows 10 because I had already finished two 29-ounce boxes by the time I look the photo and one was in the cupboard.)

Now, something else is occurring to me. I'm thinking I have hit a gusher, that I have cornered the Grape-Nuts market like the Hunt brothers allegedly tried to corner the silver market 40 years ago, that Grape-Nuts will be coming for days, weeks even. They didn't, of course.

But now to my ethical dilemma. I ordered 10 boxes but received 13. Should I return the three boxes? To whom? Worse yet, do I have someone else's three, 29-ounce boxes of Grape-Nuts?

By the way, Post says the shortage, which it blames on supply issues and increased demand during the pandemic, will be over in mid-March.

I'm not buying it. I'm also not buying, for the time being, any more Grape-Nuts. My cupboard is full. I mean that metaphorically, of course. All but one box at a time is stored, as I mentioned, at an undisclosed location.