Shelves at a supermarket in South Bristol were looking bare as an eight-day strike at the UK's biggest port continues. The Asda store on East Street, Bedminster, appeared to be short on several food and household essentials yesterday (August 22).
Empty boxes in the fresh produce aisles could be seen, together with sparsely stacked cabinets in the freezer section. Bananas and Yorkshire puddings were amongst those foods which were running out while shelves of toilet roll were also looking empty, in an echo of the panic-buying widely reported at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020.
But an Asda spokesman insisted that the bare shelves had nothing to do with the port strike, as the firm "does not bring food or groceries through [Felixstowe]". He suggested instead that the products had simply sold out, or the shelves were being cleaned.
