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He Has 17,700 Bottles of Hand Sanitizer and Nowhere to Sell Them

On March 1, the day after the first coronavirus death was announced, Matt and Noah Colvin started a three-day, 1,300-mile journey from their homes in Chattanooga, Tenn., filling up a U-Haul truck with hand sanitizer and antibacterial wipes. Then Amazon cracked down on price gouging.

“It’s been a huge amount of whiplash,” [Matt Colvin] said. “From being in a situation where what I’ve got coming and going could potentially put my family in a really good place financially to ‘What the heck am I going to do with all of this?’”….

Mr. Colvin said he was simply fixing “inefficiencies in the marketplace.” Some areas of the country need these products more than others, and he’s helping send the supply toward the demand.

“There’s a crushing overwhelming demand in certain cities right now,” he said. “The Dollar General in the middle of nowhere outside of Lexington, Ky., doesn’t have that.”

He thought about it more. “I honestly feel like it’s a public service,” he added. “I’m being paid for my public service.”

www.nytimes.com/2020/03/1…

We’ve stocked up on about two weeks of emergency supplies, like you’re supposed to. It wasn’t a stretch – we buy in bulk anyway.

All but coffee. We only have a few days of coffee because it’s really best if you brew it soon after it’s roasted and grind it just before you make it, with a burr grinder rather than a blade grinder, and I guess I’m a hipster now where’s my moustache wax?

I have two important videoconferences scheduled for Monday, and I spent much of the day getting the office in shape to be seen – or, rather, the part of my office visible from the Mac camera,

I used the Photo Booth app to photograph the office from the perspective of the Mac camera, and I picked up clutter to make everything nicer. But only within the cone of space visible to the camera.

There are five steps from my office to the yard and I went up and down them a million times, carrying out junk. My Apple Watch Activities app is giving me high fives.

I’ve been working on an article assignment that has me thinking about how work has changed from the beginning of my career to now. This is one of the ways. In the first half of my career, if I had an important meeting, I put on a suit and tie, made sure my shoes were polished, showed up a few minutes early, etc. Now, this.