As the subject tile says, this is a question for the south central Ontario members.
The context for this question is this: I heard from one of my family members that she couldn't find charcoal easily about a week ago down in the Fonthill/Pelham part of Ontario, down in the Niagara peninsula, and I mentioned that it seemed to be in stock up my way in Hamilton.
That changed sometime in the last week as I discovered today. I needed a couple of things at Canadian Tire and I've got my annual seafood barbecue tomorrow plus a chicken I did on the rotisserie today so I planned on picking up a bag of Royal Oak lump charcoal while there and it was cleaned out. The shelves were completely empty of charcoal. The store was totally sold out of Royal Oak, lump and briquettes, Kingsford, the different kinds of Wicked Good charcoals they have, Maple Leaf lump and briquettes as well as the Master Chef store branded counterparts. I checked a couple of other places on the way home before stores closed and every one was out of stock.
At home, I checked online all the box and hardware stores I could think of:
- Canadian Tire
- Lowe's
- Home Depot
- Home Hardware
- Rona
- Barbecue World
- Barbecues Galore
- Chadwicks and Hacks
The last three on the list don't have as wide a variety of charcoal listed as they have in previous years and seem to stick to the more expensive boutique charcoals, and I'm not sure if their websites list store inventory. The others all came up empty for stock and I used the 'search nearby stores' function to look basically from Fort Erie through to Toronto and up to Barrie and other than the odd place that either has ample stock or is showing an inventory glitch, all sold out.
Does anybody have any clue what's going on? Has charcoal suddenly become the new toilet paper?
Topic: Severe charcoal shortage in the golden horseshoe? (Read 2575 times)