Online and in-store, hand sanitizers were in high demand Friday as concern over the coronavirus continues to rise.
NBC 6 Responds found Whole Foods offering 2-hour delivery for a bottle of hand sanitizer online, so we went to the nearest Whole Foods and found the same product on the shelves. The other three retailers NBC 6 visited Friday morning were sold out of hand sanitizer, as were most websites carrying these products. It was a similar story with cleaning wipes.
But inside the Surgical World Medical Supplies store in Hollywood, gloves, hand sanitizer, hospital-grade disinfectant wipes, even N-95 masks were available for purchase. The owner of the store said she had never seen so many people looking for these types of supplies.
“I’m actually running very low,” Alicia Hubbard said Friday afternoon about hand sanitizer.
Alicia was selling smaller bottles of hand sanitizer for $4.99 but was out of stock of larger bottles that had a price tag of $24.95.
“It’s a 16-ounce bottle,” she said, adding it’s what she would normally sell that product for even though she says she is paying more for the product. “I would say maybe 20% more than we pay, so we’re trying to keep our price as low as we can.”
Alicia said she was doing what she could to stay stocked, but added that getting products from vendors is getting increasingly difficult.
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“They’re selling to the nursing homes and they’re focusing on the hospitals,” she said. “We’re at the bottom of the totem pole.”
One thing the NBC 6 Responds team found plenty of - soap. Hand-washing is better than using hand sanitizer anyway, so your best bet is to try to wash your hands as often as possible.
