SOS, I CAN’T GET AN OCADO SLOT! THE CAPITAL’S CHRISTMAS PANIC

Tantrums over turkeys and a battle for festive Ocado slots — and it’s only October. WTF, asks Laura Craik

IT STARTED innocently enough. “Booked my Christmas slot !!!!! ” texted my friend B, accompanied by a row of Santa emojis. “Amazing !!!!! ” I replied, adding three Christmas trees and a champagne emoji. She is Christmas’s number one fan. B starts planning her Christmas dinner in August. As life events go, bagsying one of Waitrose’s prized Christmas Eve delivery slots is right up there with getting front row tickets to Hackney Empire’s Christmas panto.

Her sortedness made me feel as though I should get sorted myself, in that antsy way that people who run households will recognise. I logged onto waitrose.com. No Christmas slots available: I couldn’t book more than two weeks ahead. It didn’t make sense. Curious, I tweeted Waitrose. They confirmed that they released early Christmas slots to a small number of online customers. Happy with Waitrose’s explanation, I went back to getting a life, which lasted about 10 minutes before I logged onto Ocado to find that their Christmas slots had been released, but were fully booked.

Welcome to the great big Christmas clusterf*** of 2021, where people who don’t normally panic are now panicking alongside those who normally do, resulting in an almighty post-panpanic buying of Christmas food.

Thanks to Brexit, Covid, surging fuel prices and chronic labour shortages on farms, in haulage and at food processing facilities, everyone has decided — with good reason — that Christmas is likely to be cancelled, just as it was last year. Only instead of being locked down and unable to see your friends and family, you will be locked down and unable to eat, because all of the food is stuck somewhere in a shipping container in Calais. For similar reasons, the supermarket shelves will be bare.

Experts, which we’d already had enough of in 2019, are calling this rare and unfortunate confluence of events “a black swan”, an unpredictable situation that has potentially severe consequences. Perhaps the Government could redeploy these black swans as dinner, since they’re likely to be needed as an accompaniment for the roasties and sprouts. For lo, there is a turkey shortage. All over the country, people have started hoarding frozen turkeys, with Iceland reporting a 409 per cent surge in sales. Aldi is selling 1,500 frozen turkey crowns a day, with families being said to have hoarded as much as £2,000 worth of food in preparation for the festive season. Waitrose branches in the capital are warning shoppers to order theirs early. Meanwhile, like the Ghost of Christmas Future, Nestlé has warned that supply chain issues may also result in a shortage of Quality Street this December.

Christmas 2020 was a strange, parsimonious and lonely time for many people. You can hardly blame them for wanting Christmas 2021 to be better. It doesn’t have to be perfect (don’t mention Plans B or C). It doesn’t even have to feature turkey. But it does, ideally, have to involve reasonable access to reasonable amounts of food. Alas, this will involve humans acting responsibility and resisting the urge to stockpile. Whether they can do so in the face of so many panic-inducing headlines is another matter.

“We’re not saying there’s going to be desperate shortages, but we’re struggling to put the party food together,” says one industry insider. Define “desperate shortage”. Are we talking no pigs in blankets, no champagne, no luxury Christmas pudding or no truffled brie? Because a parsnip shortage, I could live with.

Some might say — in fact, someone already did — that if your Christmas joy depends on getting a particular type of turkey for lunch, you should take a long, hard look at what Christmas is all about. Londoners have taken a long, hard look at what Christmas is all about and can honestly tell you the answer is “getting a Christmas Eve delivery slot with no substitutions”.

Like the Ghost of Christmas Future, Nestlé warns of a Quality Street shortage