What’s IN Store? – A GIS Solution for the “Panic-Buying” Problem

Wash your hands, keep your distance, and limit trips. We’ve all heard it, over and over again. But when you leave the house after 10 days of staying at home only to find your grocery store is STILL out of toilet paper, the shelves are bare, and you can’t find that specific item that your child or spouse has requested, it can become overwhelming and sometimes devastating.

Now, you must make a decision. Do you buy from what’s available, and disappoint your family? Can you survive another 10 days without toilet paper or diapers? Without milk, or bread? Do you go to another store in hopes of finding what you are searching for, increasing your chances of exposure to COVID-19? What if the other store is miles and miles away? What if their shelves are bare too?

Although we have been told that the coronavirus currently poses little threat to the integrity of our food supply, panic-buyers are still at large emptying shelves at our neighborhood grocery store (and they show no signs of slowing down). So how do we go about finding everything we need to sustain our households for a few more weeks? We can’t very well call every store and ask if they have the 20 plus items we have on our list? …Can we?

Tarin has created a tool that will make shopping a far less stressful experience and we NEED YOUR HELP.

Helping is simple. After you visit a store take a minute to share your experience on our web-app. This information will be shared with the rest of your community in hopes of helping the next person make an informed decision on where they should go to purchase their necessities. Working together by sharing updated, accurate information, we can limit exposure to COVID-19 for everyone.

You can find the Tarin web-app created with Web AppBuilder for ArcGIS here: “What’s IN Store”

Thank you for helping your community!

#inthistogether

Please forward any comments or questions about the app to digital@tarin.ca