Search and Discord!
In the early days of the Coronavirus pandemic in the month of April in the United States, sanitation became a number one priority for preventing the spread of this virus. Many cleaning products such as hand sanitizers and sanitation wipes were cleared and were nowhere to be found. Heading to the toilet paper aisle in any store and the shelves would be barer than you have ever seen them, not even the paper towels and napkins were spared. Millions became desperate looking for products that were all too common just a month ago.
”For weeks in April I couldn’t find a single bottle of hand sanitizer in Atlanta, so I tried to settle with just alcohol and putting it in a spray bottle, but they had taken all of that too.” This was the problem of a mother of two, Patty Weaver. “I had to drive all the way out to Smyrna to find even some Clorox wipes and some 50% alcohol bottles, I couldn’t even find 60% or 71%, people are acting crazy as hell.”
The options for overcoming these hurdles are slim, and with coronavirus cases on the rise once again the same issues and more will arise very soon. Your options are to drive far out from the main cities and populated areas to find supplies, with a slim chance of what you are needing being there. Or driving to stores every day before opening to check if supplies are in stock, however due to an increase in demand and under supply of truck drivers, you cannot accurately predict when supplies will restock for anything in the store at any day. Speaking with a current stocker at Target confirmed these complications.
“ We usually expect a supply truck on Tuesday’s, but honestly now we don’t know when the trucks will arrive until the night of, and sometimes they don’t even arrive until the afternoon. We also don’t know what’s in them until it’s out of the trailer on the ground.”
With this much chaos to take into account visiting a store and a job to hold down if you haven’t been furloughed, it can boil down to random luck if you can find what you need without having to pay for it online. Along with the worry of being overcharged and the extended waiting time of delivery. But humanities greatest strength comes forward once again, adaption, and new websites and applications are being used for people in not just Georgia, but all of America to know exactly when any high demand item is available. Nowinstock is one these websites, it was previously used to keep account of the availability of electronics and collectibles in stores and online. But is now being used to notify individuals of health necessities through email and text.
Along side this website is a phone application that Nowinstock has implemented into their notifications called discord. Discord was originally invented five years ago with the purpose of being used as a gaming Instant messaging community, but has grown into a community for education and business purposes as well. Now, it has an important purpose in immediate notification through the app of availability of products such as hand sanitizer and wipes. Messaging a fairly new administrators for these notification channels, Justin, he had been a long-time user of discord and was able to describe this application before COVID-19.
“Before this corona mess, most people used discord for game information and messaging like for Pokemon Go for raids which I’ve been apart of since 2016, but also for things like school meet ups for people with common interest and things like that. But I volunteered to be one of the administrators for this supply channel to help people (and myself), find much needed supplies.” Taking the time to download the app for myself, I asked Justin to invite me to his channel.
There, options for being notified of multiple cleaning supplies were optional,even a Nintendo Switch, another highly sought after product. These are but a portion of things available for users to be notified promptly of available necessities in connection with many other sites. So take a look around and spread the word if you find an even better site or app.
