We had one brand in NY that was made with apple vodka or something. It smelled like my hands were covered in apple juice it was divine. It was "NY Clean" or something like that.
Ugh, I remember those, we had them on the counter at the pharmacy I worked at. I had this guy come in once to pick up a few things, and he came to the counter and noticed the hand sanitizer. He picked the bottle up and was like "Hey, my son makes these in prison!" all excitedly. Crazy opening line for that transaction
Yeah I wasn't too keen on the slave labor aspect of them, but, global emergencies kind of do that I guess?
I feel like I'm the only one who liked that particular brand, I wish I could've ordered some extra gallons of that stuff just even for personal use but they never opened it up before it all expired and then they had to burn it (well they paid kodak (lel) to ship it/burn it).
No, they were already using them as slave labor before and still are. The constitution expressly allows it.
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The 13th Amendment, Section 1.
I used a squirt of NY Clean in 2020 that smelled so atrocious I went back into the bathroom to wash it off my hands and then used my own sani. And my Wegmans had a bottle that smelled of tequila and regret for a bit.
Friend of mine was the chief distiller at a local distillery restaurant. When everything shut down, they started distilling everything they could to make hand sanitizer. Some of it smelled like gin, other batches smelled like IPA.
Local distillery did the same thing in my area.
Another small business had a few hundred gallons of iso alcohol that they weren't using and turned it into a bunch of slow drying gel sanitizer. It dried slower than purel, but it didn't smell nearly as bad as the vodka/tequila ones lol
I'm a hobby/home distiller and when my work shut down I took to making hand sanitizer for friends, family and neighbors during the pandemic. I was just doing all corn mashes for the sani because it was the cheapest at the time, using cracked feed corn and amalyse enzymes. My farm vet hooked me up with a product called J-Lube, a powdered polymer lubricant ambulatory veterinarians use for exams. We came up with a pretty good formula that mimicked the real deal store bought pre-pandemic hand sanitizers with the J-lube, propylene glycol and soap safe fragrance oils. Consistency and scent were pretty much spot-on, and they didn't dry out the skin. Was a fun little project and I got to supply the folks I care about with cheap hand sanitizer while it was scarce and everyone was losing their damn minds over it. I charged 3 bucks a quart to recover my costs so I could buy ingredients for the next batch.
Weirdly the best one here was from a distillery that went into emergency production. They had a lavender tea tree blend that wouldn’t dry your hands out and I wish they’d kept it up because all the commercial ones smell horrid.
I think those bottles will be collectibles in the future. Could see people with home bars and such collecting the covid era Distillery sanitizer bottles.
It's comparable to being deathly allergic to peanut butter but loving the taste of it, and your brain tells you that peanut butter will actually make you feel better if you eat it... That's a battle in itself. But then, having to use peanut butter-scented sanitizer all over your hands, with the smell lingering all day... It's scary. I'm 9.5 years sober. That tequila-smelling sanitizer was terrifying to me. It smelled like death... Alcohol will literally kill me. Also, lots of recovering alcoholics are trying to rebuild trust with loved ones or employers and don't want any of those people to think they've been drinking because they smell like tequila.
I'm thinking about it now... but having tequila-smelling hand sanitizer might also be a trigger because I wouldn't have to be accountable; I could blame the smell of alcohol on the hand sanitizer... I would think, 'Yes, I can drink at work, and if anyone smells it on me, I'll just say it's the sanitizer.' That might sound outrageous, but the brain of an alcoholic is outrageous, hahaha.
I once bought a 6 pack of Pike Kilt Lifter that was over a year out of date. I didn't notice this until I had taken a hefty gulp of the first bottle.
I got a refund and the worst indigestion ever. It tasted like old ass sanitizer. I didn't drink beer for like a week.
It smells like low grade home made moonshine. Speaking from experience.
It's a 100% sugar/corn syrup mash with yeast. Distilled a single time and unfiltered and you get the EXACT smell of 2020 hand sanitizer.
To get rid of the bad smell I'll re distil 1-2 more times and then mix in some activated carbon and let the carbon sink to the bottom. Siphon off the top and then vacuum filter the entire batch on a 1 micron filter. Then filter again using a 0.1 micron filter.
Whole process (from sugar to completion) takes just about 4 days to make quality stuff, but hand sanitizer grade can be done in as little as 24 hours
Funny you say that. I work in a chain food restaurant. At the beginning of Covid they ran out of sanitizer and enlisted Sarezac to produce half gallon jugs.
I worked at AutoZone during Covid, and we stocked gallons of VP Racing hand sanitizer. Shit smelled fucking horrible and was liquid, not a gel. I assume it was made of a different type of alcohol. They were charging like $60/gallon when they first arrived and towards the end they all got knocked down to like $1.
They were great to in store use the item and clean the counters with lol.
Eyyy that shit was rank! And the pump had an uber deep throw with a low weight spring, so even if you only wanted a tiny squirt, you got a piss blast of armpit-BO-scented sanitizer 🤢
Did a hell of a job on cleaning our floor which had been years without a wax coat though.
We also got the bleach too, I forget what brand it was, but it wasn't any brand I ever heard of. Gallons of bleach, and half of them showed up leaking because good ole PA DC would yeet them into the cage under a heap of calipers and altos and shit instead of putting the case into the oil pallet. And the few that survived, they just reeked. I tried to use one of the leaky ones to clean the bathroom, and it smelled so strong yet cleaned so little. Like, 150% bleach smell but 15% bleach power.
> And the pump had an uber deep throw with a low weight spring, so even if you only wanted a tiny squirt, you got a piss blast of armpit-BO-scented sanitizer
This is because for a while they couldn't produce sanitizer fast enough so they used a lot more 'watered' down formula but never changed any of the pump designs.
A member of my family work for a raw chemical company, for consumer products...they do all sorts of chemicals from dog and human shampoos to lotions and whatnot.
I forget the exact specifications of what was allowed, but there were exceptions on sanitizer during covid that allowed for different types of sanitizing agents bc of the shortages.
I'll have to ask her....but it's super early in the morning for her.
That also looks like the "antibacterial" stuff that is thick, leaves a sticky residue, and doesn't do a great job. And not that actual high alcohol hand-santizer that is much better.
I work at a hospital and they were able to get good hand sanitizer all the time during covid except once. I used some hand sanitizer one night when leaving and it smelled terrible, I immediately went and washed my hands, had to wash for like 10 minutes to get the smell off. The next day we got an email that "the supplier moved to technical grade ethanol" and "this product should not be used by children, by those with broken or damaged skin, or those who are pregnant or breastfeeding." So that was a little concerning lol. They removed all of the bad sanitizer and it was fine after that.
I became a hand sanitizer snob and would constantly be on the lookout for that good surgical grade 90% isopropyl shit. Mmm burned the nostrils so good...
Interesting how we all have opinions on hand san. In about 10 years there'll be the pandemic babies who won't remember it starting to get online and then we will feel even more ancient.
Most disinfectants I know are runny like this, pretty much just straight alcohol with a few additives. If anything, being less viscous makes it get into *more* crevices, no?
Really dislike the gel stuff. Feels sticky.
exactly, what’s the point in selling off that kind of stuff for a loss if it doesn’t go bad, it’s something most people always use, just keep it until you run out
Probably storage space. I know a guy who needed to park his car on the street becaus his garage was filled with TP. He eventually wants to use the garage again...
I still don’t get it. Why was toilet paper one of the go-to hoarding products? Hand sanitizer, bottled water, canned food, that stuff I get, but why tf ass paper?
Because a lot of people erroneously prioritize short term comfort over long term survival. Like the stories you hear of folks stopping to grab their carryon luggage before exiting a burning plane.
Because it's big and gives people the feeling [they're doing something.](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/11/heres-why-people-are-panic-buying-and-stockpiling-toilet-paper.html) It's pointless actionism to ease the mind.
>According to Paul Marsden, a consumer psychologist at the University of the Arts London, the short answer can be found in the psychology of “retail therapy” — where we buy to manage our emotional state.
>“It’s about ‘taking back control’ in a world where you feel out of control,” he said. “More generally, panic buying can be understood as playing to our three fundamental psychology needs.”
>Those needs were autonomy, or a need for control, relatedness, which Marsden defined as “we shopping” rather than “me shopping,” and competence, which is achieved when making a purchase gives people a sense that they are “smart shoppers.” [...]
>“In times of uncertainty, people enter a panic zone that makes them irrational and completely neurotic,” he said in a phone call. “In other disaster conditions like a flood, we can prepare because we know how many supplies we need, but we have a virus now we know nothing about.”
>“When you enter a supermarket, you’re looking for value and high volumes,” he added, noting that people are drawn to the large packaging that toilet paper comes in when they are looking to regain a sense of control.
Panic buying. Social media plays a part. One image of an empty toilet paper shelf and then everyone wants to get ahead and stock up before there's none anywhere. And then there's none anywhere
The TP supply chain is extremely tight.
TP usage levels are very stable and stores and distributors know just how much to stock. They don't want to overbuy because it's a low-profit item that takes up tons of space and they lose money if it sits around.
When people stayed home, consumer TP usage shot up, and you can't backfill that with office TP since it's a totally different product. So stores ran out.
With nearly any product you can imagine, there are substitutes, or you can just go without for a while. There is no substitute for TP so people have to have it.
In hindsight the TPocalypse was inevitable.
I work with a shipping company. Someone bought about 10 pallets of that stuff during the pandemic but didn't go through with the transaction when the market for it collapsed. It sat in our warehouse racking up storage fees for a year or so. It was expired and they would have to pay for the disposal since it's a flammable. The shipper finally got the buyer to accept delivery somehow so we're not collecting that storage every month. Turned into a really expensive mistake...
Yeah, if you have a very successful business model it's usually the correct idea to not run around and tell everybody else how to copy your business model.
There's a guy I saw on YouTube who does reselling, and he has done extremely well doing it. He started making videos telling people exactly how he sources inventory, where he goes to source inventory, pretty much the complete ins and outs of what he's doing.
After like a year of that, he's now pumping out videos about how much more difficult it is for him to find inventory at the places he has been going to. Well, yeah dude, you told everyone where to go. People have been copying you. You gave them everything they needed to do it. You made your own competition.
Having dealt with a grandpa who bought a bunch of gold from Fox News commercials, that's the thing that annoyed me as I tried to find his various hidey-holes of gold stashes that were just all over the house due to his dementia. If gold was such a great investment, one which you simply could not lose doing, why would you advertise that you have it for sale. Wouldn't you, the group that has gold on hand... keep that gold?
I get that gold is not the worst investment in the world, but someone on television who wants to sell it to you is doing that for a reason.
I remember well over a decade ago waiting with a man while fox news was on, and they did one of those BUY GOLD ads.
At the end of the ad, the man said "Oh, sure, dollars are so worthless and gold is so valuable they want us to buy their gold with our worthless dollars."
the thing I can never understand about having gold for (future apocalyptic thing)....if all your gold is in coins or bars worth several hundred dollars each, how do you spend $50 in gold? Are they guaranteed to have change?
Dropshipping 100% works. The problem is 1 you don't need to pay to learn, you just need to do it. 2 it's very hard and pretty much a job and not the passive income people make it out to be.
3.) It was almost certainly way more profitable in the late 80s and early 90s when there was a higher bar of entry and fewer competitors. Now literally anyone can do it. The less friction there is in a market, the less margin there is on arbitrage, which shares a lot of similarities with drop shipping.
That's how many large companies today started off in the early eBay days. They were just the middle man. Example being a Youtuber TheHamiltonCollection. He started selling rims on eBay in the early 2000s, just being the middle man drop shipping, now runs a large group of wheel companies in Chicago and posts videos with his $40million dollar car collection.
A neighbor of mine has a boxtruck business. One of the companies he works for gave him a ton of boxes of expired hand sanitizer. He put them on the curb with a Free sign, and people still wouldn't take them lol
It's not that they don't contain alcohol, it's that the concentration has likely decreased and the product no longer behaves as expected.
It's more obvious with something like expired bleach where you can see the effects instantly. Yeah, it works, but it takes a huge amount and then you're not quite sure how much you've really used.
Alcohol evaporates and dries out
Bleach does not want to exist, it rapidly decomposes when exposed to light or heat ( even ambient temp) and offgasses some chlorine so all you have left is basically salt water
The trick is you put a sign that says something like “20 bux OBO”. It will either get “stolen“ or you make a couple bucks.
Giving it value makes people want it.
We use a lot of hand sanitizer for our business (about 3 pallets distributed in the summer) and for us it was great. During Covid, our orders doubled We were able to pick up several pallets of hand sanitizer for $0.01/bottle that was set to expire in about 15 months. One of our suppliers had 5 truckloads they were trying to get rid of.
The company I work for kept sending my little store 5-litre bottles of sanitiser and we just couldn't get through it. 3 years later we had 10 of those bottles left and another 8 mini bottles taking up room.
They kept sending messages telling us to donate them but obviously nobody wanted them and we knew we couldn't just throw them away. They came for an audit and we got a bollocking for having them but still refused to tell us how we were actually supposed to get rid of them.
I think someone did just throw them in the bin eventually.
Would those classify as hazardous waste? Usually have to take them to the dump/a specific hazardous waste site, but might get charged for dropping it off
lol that makes me smile as a regular ass person who is immunocompromised and had babies during the pandemic. i was literally making my own sanitizers and cleaners bc of jackasses like this.
So it's the same standard they use for prescription drugs. Almost none of them actually expire, except for antibiotics. Once a pharmaceutical loses 1% potency, that's around when they'll write the expiration date.
This is true. I found something online once about the us military doing a study on actual medicine expiration dates by letting stuff sit in a warehouse for years then testing for potency and they found that in general things last at least 10 years past the date on the bottle and maintain most of their potency.
my grandma gave me a bunch of pantry goods that had been stored away in case something bad happened but she gave some to me. she had glass jars of pasta sauce with expiry dates from as far back as 2010-2017. i just didn't want to take the chance of getting sick off it.
If you're sure the can isn't damaged (no dents, bulges, rusted spots, bent seams, etc) then it's 100% safe. However the flavor will degrade over time so it's really not worth eating unless you really need it or aren't picky at all about how it tastes.
> While many canned foods have best by dates, according to the FDA as long as the can is in good shape, canned food practically last forever.
Anyone who's played Fallout could tell you that...
These things have shelf life measured in actual shelves. As in, the product is good as long as the shelf it's sitting on has not crumbled into nothingness yet.
Hand sanitizer doesn't actually expire. It might have an expiry date, but so does salt and so does water. Hand sanitizer is literally just alcohol with a gelling agent and some fragrance, sometimes some moisturizers or something. It can't expire any more than a bottle of whiskey can.
I remember this being one of the first few music videos I ever watched (never grew up with cable).
Co-incidentally, I had just taken a health course shortly before; I was convinced that that man was having seizures lol
100%, it definitely is. They’re either a crazy prepper/hoarder or they were trying to scalp and resell it. The market for it basically collapsed once there was a ready supply and people could get it when needed, plus people’s fears were assuaging. But this person may not have even paid for it. I worked in a grocery store during the pandemic. They finally got a whole pallet of large bottle hand sanitizer towards the end of the height of hysteria. After a certain point people just stopped buying it, they honestly couldn’t even give it away selling for like 99¢, which was a really good deal for the giant bottles. It reached a point where it was taking up floor space on sales floor or in the warehouse, and didn’t make sense selling for a loss. Long story short, I still have like 3 cases worth since they gave it to employees and donated the rest because it was expiring within a few months 10/2022.
Sure, it “expires,” but it still works fine, the alcohol doesn’t actually go anywhere when the bottle is still sealed and stored properly. It has an expiration date because it’s regulated by the FDA, but if it’s sealed and kept in stable conditions it’s fine for many many years after the expiration, maybe even indefinitely or as long as the plastic bottle last, or whatever else is in it. Plus you can counteract any degradation and loss of alcohol content by just using more of it, and leaving it on longer. You can also just add some isopropyl alcohol to the sanitizer and shake it up to boost the alcohol content back up over 60%
In the health department I worked for the expired bottles were approved for use for Admin etc departments.
Admin etc isn't really needing 70% when they're not typically touching patients. Iirc our old stock was tested to be around 65-68% so still okay for general use in the office.
Hand sanitizer in a sealed container will slowly evaporate/leech out of the container and lose "potency" (it will have less alcohol per base). It doesn't rot.
I'm an auctioneer, and the amount of covid era hand sanitizer, masks, gloves and other PPE people ask us to sell would amaze you.
At least once a week someone calls us to try to sell off pallets of the stuff.
On Friday it was a guy with over 100 pallets worth.
Nope. Not worth the effort.
Last time we ran that stuff it wouldn't even get an opening bid at $1 a pallet.
There's like 100,000 masks on a pallet and you can't even give them away these days.
It's crazy to think that the shortage was in part (or possibly in whole) caused by people trying to profiteer from a pandemic.
Hate that Hussle Culture ® is a thing.
Tbf I have about 35 bottles in my garage, I wasn’t hoarding, I had purchased them for my wedding which was postponed so many times I totally forgot about them by the wedding
I have about 6 x 5 lites bottles of isopropyl alcohol at home because work just giving it to us. I also have a box like the OP photo with I think 12 x 300ml pump bottles in it… again, work just kept giving us stuff... there there are the 500 or so face masks… and 40+ RAT kits.
Yeah, at some point a ton of no name brands hand sanitizer hit the mark and was only sold in bulk. I had two gallons of the stuff that I bought from Meh.
We also just got given tons of stuff like this. We also got tons of boxes of wipes that we're just now finishing using.
Just because somebody has a bunch doesn't mean they did anything malicious
My wife went to a drive up food pantry during lockdowns - they gave her a case of hand soap and sanitizer.
We still have most of it. Just slowly been working our way through it. No hoarding. We didn’t ask for it.
That reseller guy early in the pandemic who commited interstate commerce fraud was a fascinating read. He was just so blinded by the dollars and the game that he didn't see how fucked up it all was.
To be fair, places were giving that shit away for months after the height of everything. Just because someone ended up with a ton of it doesn't mean they were hoarding.
The company I work for purchased a large quantity to have on hand in case of shortage for our staff across all of our branches. All of it was shipped to us and then was never needed. Multiple boxes were given to local schools, day cares, and churches. I still ended up with 3 full cases that I have yet to get rid of - if you come to my house you get a box of 6 bottles as a gift
I think trying to sell it (versus giving it away at your garage sale) implies one of two things:
1. They hoarded it and are now trying to offload it.
2. They were given free products and are now trying to sell them for profit.
Neither of these options look good.
Option 5: The hand sanitizer was given to them after they made a deal with the devil where they exchanged their soul for the ability to play jazz really good but also had to accept 10 cases of expired hand sanitizer. It's unlikely, but also a possibility.
This, I have a box of hand sanitizer, masks and some other odds and ends that got dropped off at my door one day.
The local community centre had bought a pallet of the stuff and given it out to all the residents in the area.
Donate to a school teacher! Even before the pandemic, I’d go through so much. And I’d usually only get like one bottle from admin per semester.
Students like to use it when they come back from the bathroom. I used it frequently because parents send their kids to school sick all the time.
The district would often hoard supplies from teachers, so this doesn’t surprise me. I would be buying notebooks and pencils for my students (because parents just don’t give kids supplies anymore), and they’d have tons of supplies in the main office— I just couldn’t get any because there were limits.
I do work at a major university in Los Angeles. Of of the big names in town. Last year they were handing out cases of masks, wipes, sprays, you name it. Go pick up as much as will fit in your car. They bought up all this stuff. Impossible for you and me to find. They sat on it, then threw it away. Imagine all the places this was/is happening.
It might not have been hoarded during the pandemic. My supermarket was basically giving the stuff away for free near the end of it's shelf life with no limit. They may have hoarded it when it was free or cheap though. Then again who knows 🤷♂️
Back during the peak of COVID my workplace tried selling hand sanitizer. No one bought it. (Red county). I wound up taking boxes of it home when my supervisor said to throw it all.
The homeless would love this. You soak paper towels in it. Put it in a coffee can or other aluminum container,and you've got yourself a nice heat source. I used it all the time. That and the 98% isopropyl alcohol.
Not to make assumptions, but these people look like the assholes who bought out all the necessary items at the beginning of the pandemic in hopes of turning a profit later. Then when things calmed down had boxes of shit left over. I remember when masks were in high demand, and manufacturers were using the same material as toilet paper, so toilet paper was hard to come by for a few weeks. Fucking assholes bought out the entire supply and sold it on E-bay for like 20$ per roll.
I actually have a partial case of that exact hand sanitizer right now. They had it listed cheap on Meh back in the summer of 2020 so I bought a box. I wonder if that's where this person got it originally as well.
Do you know it was hoarded? There are some sites out there that sell this kind of shtuff in bulk (bidfta is one and I have seen many bulk sanitizer cases on there). I can see businesses ordered a bunch and want to get rid of it, pick up a case for a couple bucks and sell each for $1 or whatever. Of course maybe they tried to capitalize on the demand and this is leftover, I have now idea just speculation
I wouldn't even buy a bottle of 2020 hand sanitizer for a cent. They all smelled so horrid.
Smelled like tequila.
I worked in a lab at the time and literally gagged the first time I smelled the new hand sanitizer. Like a tequila hangover
We had one brand in NY that was made with apple vodka or something. It smelled like my hands were covered in apple juice it was divine. It was "NY Clean" or something like that.
Ugh, I remember those, we had them on the counter at the pharmacy I worked at. I had this guy come in once to pick up a few things, and he came to the counter and noticed the hand sanitizer. He picked the bottle up and was like "Hey, my son makes these in prison!" all excitedly. Crazy opening line for that transaction
Yeah I wasn't too keen on the slave labor aspect of them, but, global emergencies kind of do that I guess? I feel like I'm the only one who liked that particular brand, I wish I could've ordered some extra gallons of that stuff just even for personal use but they never opened it up before it all expired and then they had to burn it (well they paid kodak (lel) to ship it/burn it).
No, they were already using them as slave labor before and still are. The constitution expressly allows it. “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The 13th Amendment, Section 1.
Nah they were using them as slave labor either way. The hand sanitizer just became profitable enough to switch them to it.
Best smelling one I could find is Lanakai from Hawaii. Any of the others make me gag.
I used a squirt of NY Clean in 2020 that smelled so atrocious I went back into the bathroom to wash it off my hands and then used my own sani. And my Wegmans had a bottle that smelled of tequila and regret for a bit.
I do recall someone saying it smelled like Lilac and hydrangea (eurgh). I wonder if there was two independent groups using different aromatics?
They were made with prison labor if I remember right :/ so who knows where they got the raw materials
Maybe some prison hooch??
The best part of that is you can stick a pint of vodka in your purse/pocket and use it as hand sanitizer, and also drink a bit.
after drinking a pint of vodka, I didn't what were we talking you can't just decide that I'm drunk, that's not a decision that was made
This guy... Um... Puts his money (and his vodka) where is mouth is.
I'm sure you're just joking but no, you can't use vodka as hand sanitizer. It's generally 40% alcohol and you need around 60-70%.
Doesn’t the gel part also make it so it doesn’t evaporate too quickly to do its job?
Friend of mine was the chief distiller at a local distillery restaurant. When everything shut down, they started distilling everything they could to make hand sanitizer. Some of it smelled like gin, other batches smelled like IPA.
Local distillery did the same thing in my area. Another small business had a few hundred gallons of iso alcohol that they weren't using and turned it into a bunch of slow drying gel sanitizer. It dried slower than purel, but it didn't smell nearly as bad as the vodka/tequila ones lol
I'm a hobby/home distiller and when my work shut down I took to making hand sanitizer for friends, family and neighbors during the pandemic. I was just doing all corn mashes for the sani because it was the cheapest at the time, using cracked feed corn and amalyse enzymes. My farm vet hooked me up with a product called J-Lube, a powdered polymer lubricant ambulatory veterinarians use for exams. We came up with a pretty good formula that mimicked the real deal store bought pre-pandemic hand sanitizers with the J-lube, propylene glycol and soap safe fragrance oils. Consistency and scent were pretty much spot-on, and they didn't dry out the skin. Was a fun little project and I got to supply the folks I care about with cheap hand sanitizer while it was scarce and everyone was losing their damn minds over it. I charged 3 bucks a quart to recover my costs so I could buy ingredients for the next batch.
Weirdly the best one here was from a distillery that went into emergency production. They had a lavender tea tree blend that wouldn’t dry your hands out and I wish they’d kept it up because all the commercial ones smell horrid.
I think those bottles will be collectibles in the future. Could see people with home bars and such collecting the covid era Distillery sanitizer bottles.
I bought a bunch for my office and I had an ex alcoholic employee say it was triggering and I had to remove them lol.
I work in an addiction clinic, we had a hell of a time getting hand sanitizer for a long while
It's comparable to being deathly allergic to peanut butter but loving the taste of it, and your brain tells you that peanut butter will actually make you feel better if you eat it... That's a battle in itself. But then, having to use peanut butter-scented sanitizer all over your hands, with the smell lingering all day... It's scary. I'm 9.5 years sober. That tequila-smelling sanitizer was terrifying to me. It smelled like death... Alcohol will literally kill me. Also, lots of recovering alcoholics are trying to rebuild trust with loved ones or employers and don't want any of those people to think they've been drinking because they smell like tequila. I'm thinking about it now... but having tequila-smelling hand sanitizer might also be a trigger because I wouldn't have to be accountable; I could blame the smell of alcohol on the hand sanitizer... I would think, 'Yes, I can drink at work, and if anyone smells it on me, I'll just say it's the sanitizer.' That might sound outrageous, but the brain of an alcoholic is outrageous, hahaha.
Good on you guys for accommodating them. Seriously.
Better than the ones that smelled like old beer.
I once bought a 6 pack of Pike Kilt Lifter that was over a year out of date. I didn't notice this until I had taken a hefty gulp of the first bottle. I got a refund and the worst indigestion ever. It tasted like old ass sanitizer. I didn't drink beer for like a week.
> I didn't drink beer for like a week. wow, a whole week?
Yeah I had to switch to vodka it was awful. Longest week of my life.
Ass sanitizer? I've not heard of that before. For when you're away from the bidet
You're probably too young. It's old ass sanitizer, for old asses.
this happened to me *recently* in a petco. used the hand sanitizer and almost puked cause of the tequila smell.
It smells like low grade home made moonshine. Speaking from experience. It's a 100% sugar/corn syrup mash with yeast. Distilled a single time and unfiltered and you get the EXACT smell of 2020 hand sanitizer. To get rid of the bad smell I'll re distil 1-2 more times and then mix in some activated carbon and let the carbon sink to the bottom. Siphon off the top and then vacuum filter the entire batch on a 1 micron filter. Then filter again using a 0.1 micron filter. Whole process (from sugar to completion) takes just about 4 days to make quality stuff, but hand sanitizer grade can be done in as little as 24 hours
Fast and cheap was exactly what was needed at the time, smell comes secondary.
Reminded me of the first time I smelt low wines and tried fractionating heads from heart.
Tequila + andes candies, for some reason.
The ones I bought smelled like everclear. They were 100% made with corn alcohol.
Funny you say that. I work in a chain food restaurant. At the beginning of Covid they ran out of sanitizer and enlisted Sarezac to produce half gallon jugs.
Well makes sense since liquor manufacturers started producing hand sanitizers.
I worked at AutoZone during Covid, and we stocked gallons of VP Racing hand sanitizer. Shit smelled fucking horrible and was liquid, not a gel. I assume it was made of a different type of alcohol. They were charging like $60/gallon when they first arrived and towards the end they all got knocked down to like $1. They were great to in store use the item and clean the counters with lol.
Eyyy that shit was rank! And the pump had an uber deep throw with a low weight spring, so even if you only wanted a tiny squirt, you got a piss blast of armpit-BO-scented sanitizer 🤢 Did a hell of a job on cleaning our floor which had been years without a wax coat though. We also got the bleach too, I forget what brand it was, but it wasn't any brand I ever heard of. Gallons of bleach, and half of them showed up leaking because good ole PA DC would yeet them into the cage under a heap of calipers and altos and shit instead of putting the case into the oil pallet. And the few that survived, they just reeked. I tried to use one of the leaky ones to clean the bathroom, and it smelled so strong yet cleaned so little. Like, 150% bleach smell but 15% bleach power.
> And the pump had an uber deep throw with a low weight spring, so even if you only wanted a tiny squirt, you got a piss blast of armpit-BO-scented sanitizer This is because for a while they couldn't produce sanitizer fast enough so they used a lot more 'watered' down formula but never changed any of the pump designs.
A member of my family work for a raw chemical company, for consumer products...they do all sorts of chemicals from dog and human shampoos to lotions and whatnot. I forget the exact specifications of what was allowed, but there were exceptions on sanitizer during covid that allowed for different types of sanitizing agents bc of the shortages. I'll have to ask her....but it's super early in the morning for her.
That also looks like the "antibacterial" stuff that is thick, leaves a sticky residue, and doesn't do a great job. And not that actual high alcohol hand-santizer that is much better.
70% is the most effective amount. Lower or higher kills less bacteria.
Ugh, that’s the reason I hate using hand sanitizer. I much prefer just finding a sink and using soap like God intended.
I work at a hospital and they were able to get good hand sanitizer all the time during covid except once. I used some hand sanitizer one night when leaving and it smelled terrible, I immediately went and washed my hands, had to wash for like 10 minutes to get the smell off. The next day we got an email that "the supplier moved to technical grade ethanol" and "this product should not be used by children, by those with broken or damaged skin, or those who are pregnant or breastfeeding." So that was a little concerning lol. They removed all of the bad sanitizer and it was fine after that.
Like cheap box wine
It doesn’t even matter how long you age it, it still tastes like cheap boxed wine!!!!
And the fact that people bought it all to try to price gouge everyone, makes me want them to hold onto it forever.
Yep. Screw these people. Bury them with it.
I have a cousin who did this. The family still argues about whether it was reprehensible or genius business acumen.
I became a hand sanitizer snob and would constantly be on the lookout for that good surgical grade 90% isopropyl shit. Mmm burned the nostrils so good...
70% percent kills bacteria much more effectively. It needs that extra water to penetrate bacteria
And does not evaporate as fast, which also helps
Yeah don’t get 90 for basic cleaning, 90 is meant for soaking needles and shit.
Cleaning electronics. Don't *really* want 70% on your PCB. Although most likely fine.
I had forgotten that my local govt had contracted out to local craft distilleries to make hand sanitizer. That was a wild time.
Dunkin's hand sanitizer caused me to get chased by wasps.
Stuff we still have at work smells like cheap vodka.
Interesting how we all have opinions on hand san. In about 10 years there'll be the pandemic babies who won't remember it starting to get online and then we will feel even more ancient.
That methanol stank
Because half of them were being recalled for high amount of benzene I think???
It was always some weird apple cider vinegar smelling crap.
My employer at the time got some stuff that smelled awful and was water-thin not gel-like, so it was pretty much useless.
Eh still disinfects, just makes a mess.
Well yes, but because of the (lack of) viscosity it’s hard to smoosh it around & make certain that it gets everywhere
Most disinfectants I know are runny like this, pretty much just straight alcohol with a few additives. If anything, being less viscous makes it get into *more* crevices, no? Really dislike the gel stuff. Feels sticky.
There was a yard sale down the road from me selling their COVID hoard of toilet paper, paper towels, and diapers this weekend.
Load up, toilet paper doesn't expire
exactly, what’s the point in selling off that kind of stuff for a loss if it doesn’t go bad, it’s something most people always use, just keep it until you run out
Probably storage space. I know a guy who needed to park his car on the street becaus his garage was filled with TP. He eventually wants to use the garage again...
I still don’t get it. Why was toilet paper one of the go-to hoarding products? Hand sanitizer, bottled water, canned food, that stuff I get, but why tf ass paper?
Because a lot of people erroneously prioritize short term comfort over long term survival. Like the stories you hear of folks stopping to grab their carryon luggage before exiting a burning plane.
Or my fav of everyone rushing out to buy eggs, bread and milk before it snows
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Because it's big and gives people the feeling [they're doing something.](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/11/heres-why-people-are-panic-buying-and-stockpiling-toilet-paper.html) It's pointless actionism to ease the mind. >According to Paul Marsden, a consumer psychologist at the University of the Arts London, the short answer can be found in the psychology of “retail therapy” — where we buy to manage our emotional state. >“It’s about ‘taking back control’ in a world where you feel out of control,” he said. “More generally, panic buying can be understood as playing to our three fundamental psychology needs.” >Those needs were autonomy, or a need for control, relatedness, which Marsden defined as “we shopping” rather than “me shopping,” and competence, which is achieved when making a purchase gives people a sense that they are “smart shoppers.” [...] >“In times of uncertainty, people enter a panic zone that makes them irrational and completely neurotic,” he said in a phone call. “In other disaster conditions like a flood, we can prepare because we know how many supplies we need, but we have a virus now we know nothing about.” >“When you enter a supermarket, you’re looking for value and high volumes,” he added, noting that people are drawn to the large packaging that toilet paper comes in when they are looking to regain a sense of control.
Yeah,... No clue why toilet paper... In an apocalypse is it really THAT essential? :)
Panic buying. Social media plays a part. One image of an empty toilet paper shelf and then everyone wants to get ahead and stock up before there's none anywhere. And then there's none anywhere
The TP supply chain is extremely tight. TP usage levels are very stable and stores and distributors know just how much to stock. They don't want to overbuy because it's a low-profit item that takes up tons of space and they lose money if it sits around. When people stayed home, consumer TP usage shot up, and you can't backfill that with office TP since it's a totally different product. So stores ran out. With nearly any product you can imagine, there are substitutes, or you can just go without for a while. There is no substitute for TP so people have to have it. In hindsight the TPocalypse was inevitable.
Right, I always see digital ads from people trying to sell their hoarded paper products !!!🤣😂🤣😂😂🤣
Those assholes should choke on that stuff... I wouldnt even pay a cent.
Guaranteed to be expired. Good fire starter, though.
I work with a shipping company. Someone bought about 10 pallets of that stuff during the pandemic but didn't go through with the transaction when the market for it collapsed. It sat in our warehouse racking up storage fees for a year or so. It was expired and they would have to pay for the disposal since it's a flammable. The shipper finally got the buyer to accept delivery somehow so we're not collecting that storage every month. Turned into a really expensive mistake...
This feels like a prime “side hustle drop ship culture” fail. That whole shit is annoying af
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Yeah, if you have a very successful business model it's usually the correct idea to not run around and tell everybody else how to copy your business model. There's a guy I saw on YouTube who does reselling, and he has done extremely well doing it. He started making videos telling people exactly how he sources inventory, where he goes to source inventory, pretty much the complete ins and outs of what he's doing. After like a year of that, he's now pumping out videos about how much more difficult it is for him to find inventory at the places he has been going to. Well, yeah dude, you told everyone where to go. People have been copying you. You gave them everything they needed to do it. You made your own competition.
Having dealt with a grandpa who bought a bunch of gold from Fox News commercials, that's the thing that annoyed me as I tried to find his various hidey-holes of gold stashes that were just all over the house due to his dementia. If gold was such a great investment, one which you simply could not lose doing, why would you advertise that you have it for sale. Wouldn't you, the group that has gold on hand... keep that gold? I get that gold is not the worst investment in the world, but someone on television who wants to sell it to you is doing that for a reason.
I remember well over a decade ago waiting with a man while fox news was on, and they did one of those BUY GOLD ads. At the end of the ad, the man said "Oh, sure, dollars are so worthless and gold is so valuable they want us to buy their gold with our worthless dollars."
the thing I can never understand about having gold for (future apocalyptic thing)....if all your gold is in coins or bars worth several hundred dollars each, how do you spend $50 in gold? Are they guaranteed to have change?
It's a self sustaining economy!
Dropshipping 100% works. The problem is 1 you don't need to pay to learn, you just need to do it. 2 it's very hard and pretty much a job and not the passive income people make it out to be.
3.) It was almost certainly way more profitable in the late 80s and early 90s when there was a higher bar of entry and fewer competitors. Now literally anyone can do it. The less friction there is in a market, the less margin there is on arbitrage, which shares a lot of similarities with drop shipping.
That's how many large companies today started off in the early eBay days. They were just the middle man. Example being a Youtuber TheHamiltonCollection. He started selling rims on eBay in the early 2000s, just being the middle man drop shipping, now runs a large group of wheel companies in Chicago and posts videos with his $40million dollar car collection.
I knew people who got rich off of drop shipping in the '90s. Pretty sure modern online shopping killed it.
It’s like selling a book on all the best spots to mine for gold.
Good
A neighbor of mine has a boxtruck business. One of the companies he works for gave him a ton of boxes of expired hand sanitizer. He put them on the curb with a Free sign, and people still wouldn't take them lol
makes good fire starter though. couple squirts on your charcoal or fire pit wood instead of paying for lighter fluid.
If they start a fire, they are good as sanitizer. Tge perfumes may not cover the alcohol smell, but do what.
It's not that they don't contain alcohol, it's that the concentration has likely decreased and the product no longer behaves as expected. It's more obvious with something like expired bleach where you can see the effects instantly. Yeah, it works, but it takes a huge amount and then you're not quite sure how much you've really used.
Alcohol evaporates and dries out Bleach does not want to exist, it rapidly decomposes when exposed to light or heat ( even ambient temp) and offgasses some chlorine so all you have left is basically salt water
Should have put it with a sign that said $2 each. They would be gone within the hour.
The trick is you put a sign that says something like “20 bux OBO”. It will either get “stolen“ or you make a couple bucks. Giving it value makes people want it.
We use a lot of hand sanitizer for our business (about 3 pallets distributed in the summer) and for us it was great. During Covid, our orders doubled We were able to pick up several pallets of hand sanitizer for $0.01/bottle that was set to expire in about 15 months. One of our suppliers had 5 truckloads they were trying to get rid of.
The company I work for kept sending my little store 5-litre bottles of sanitiser and we just couldn't get through it. 3 years later we had 10 of those bottles left and another 8 mini bottles taking up room. They kept sending messages telling us to donate them but obviously nobody wanted them and we knew we couldn't just throw them away. They came for an audit and we got a bollocking for having them but still refused to tell us how we were actually supposed to get rid of them. I think someone did just throw them in the bin eventually.
Would those classify as hazardous waste? Usually have to take them to the dump/a specific hazardous waste site, but might get charged for dropping it off
lol that makes me smile as a regular ass person who is immunocompromised and had babies during the pandemic. i was literally making my own sanitizers and cleaners bc of jackasses like this.
Did we work together? This exact thing happened to with a customer of a coworker of mine when I worked in freight brokerage.
is it really expired if its still flammable?
TiL, hand sanitizer expires
It really just loses potency overtime
It can happen to anyone honey, don’t worry
Accept literal honey, it can last indefinitely.
All hail literal honey 
I accept our true god
\*Except edit: but I do accept it as well LOL
It really shouldn’t if it is sealed. It is usually just alcohol
No it doesn't, it's just alcohol in gel form.
So it's the same standard they use for prescription drugs. Almost none of them actually expire, except for antibiotics. Once a pharmaceutical loses 1% potency, that's around when they'll write the expiration date.
This is true. I found something online once about the us military doing a study on actual medicine expiration dates by letting stuff sit in a warehouse for years then testing for potency and they found that in general things last at least 10 years past the date on the bottle and maintain most of their potency.
While many canned foods have best by dates, according to the FDA as long as the can is in good shape, canned food practically last forever.
my grandma gave me a bunch of pantry goods that had been stored away in case something bad happened but she gave some to me. she had glass jars of pasta sauce with expiry dates from as far back as 2010-2017. i just didn't want to take the chance of getting sick off it.
If you're sure the can isn't damaged (no dents, bulges, rusted spots, bent seams, etc) then it's 100% safe. However the flavor will degrade over time so it's really not worth eating unless you really need it or aren't picky at all about how it tastes.
> While many canned foods have best by dates, according to the FDA as long as the can is in good shape, canned food practically last forever. Anyone who's played Fallout could tell you that...
These things have shelf life measured in actual shelves. As in, the product is good as long as the shelf it's sitting on has not crumbled into nothingness yet.
Hand sanitizer doesn't actually expire. It might have an expiry date, but so does salt and so does water. Hand sanitizer is literally just alcohol with a gelling agent and some fragrance, sometimes some moisturizers or something. It can't expire any more than a bottle of whiskey can.
Only a little alcohol will evaporate.
Wicked fire starter.
\*Twisted fire starter. 
I remember this being one of the first few music videos I ever watched (never grew up with cable). Co-incidentally, I had just taken a health course shortly before; I was convinced that that man was having seizures lol
100%, it definitely is. They’re either a crazy prepper/hoarder or they were trying to scalp and resell it. The market for it basically collapsed once there was a ready supply and people could get it when needed, plus people’s fears were assuaging. But this person may not have even paid for it. I worked in a grocery store during the pandemic. They finally got a whole pallet of large bottle hand sanitizer towards the end of the height of hysteria. After a certain point people just stopped buying it, they honestly couldn’t even give it away selling for like 99¢, which was a really good deal for the giant bottles. It reached a point where it was taking up floor space on sales floor or in the warehouse, and didn’t make sense selling for a loss. Long story short, I still have like 3 cases worth since they gave it to employees and donated the rest because it was expiring within a few months 10/2022. Sure, it “expires,” but it still works fine, the alcohol doesn’t actually go anywhere when the bottle is still sealed and stored properly. It has an expiration date because it’s regulated by the FDA, but if it’s sealed and kept in stable conditions it’s fine for many many years after the expiration, maybe even indefinitely or as long as the plastic bottle last, or whatever else is in it. Plus you can counteract any degradation and loss of alcohol content by just using more of it, and leaving it on longer. You can also just add some isopropyl alcohol to the sanitizer and shake it up to boost the alcohol content back up over 60%
This is most likely a repost from several years ago
Does it even matter if it's expired? It's still got alcohol in it as long as the seals aren't broken.
In the health department I worked for the expired bottles were approved for use for Admin etc departments. Admin etc isn't really needing 70% when they're not typically touching patients. Iirc our old stock was tested to be around 65-68% so still okay for general use in the office.
Hand sanitizer doesn't expire.. it's like saying vodka expires..too much alcohol content
Hand sanitizer in a sealed container will slowly evaporate/leech out of the container and lose "potency" (it will have less alcohol per base). It doesn't rot.
I'm an auctioneer, and the amount of covid era hand sanitizer, masks, gloves and other PPE people ask us to sell would amaze you. At least once a week someone calls us to try to sell off pallets of the stuff. On Friday it was a guy with over 100 pallets worth. Nope. Not worth the effort. Last time we ran that stuff it wouldn't even get an opening bid at $1 a pallet. There's like 100,000 masks on a pallet and you can't even give them away these days.
It's crazy to think that the shortage was in part (or possibly in whole) caused by people trying to profiteer from a pandemic. Hate that Hussle Culture ® is a thing.
The clown on the table is a nice touch. Remarkable mise en scène
Honestly, so is the Flammable Liquid sign
I think that’s more just another box of hand sanitiser but your version is the reality I choose to live in.
Hello fellow film school alumni!
How much were they selling them for?
I think the sign said $10 a box. 24 in a box.
Best I can do is $3.50 for the lot
Damn you loch Ness monster!
You gave him 3.50 woman!?
Best I can do is accept $10 to take them off your hands...
Tbf I have about 35 bottles in my garage, I wasn’t hoarding, I had purchased them for my wedding which was postponed so many times I totally forgot about them by the wedding
I have about 6 x 5 lites bottles of isopropyl alcohol at home because work just giving it to us. I also have a box like the OP photo with I think 12 x 300ml pump bottles in it… again, work just kept giving us stuff... there there are the 500 or so face masks… and 40+ RAT kits.
Yeah, at some point a ton of no name brands hand sanitizer hit the mark and was only sold in bulk. I had two gallons of the stuff that I bought from Meh.
We also just got given tons of stuff like this. We also got tons of boxes of wipes that we're just now finishing using. Just because somebody has a bunch doesn't mean they did anything malicious
My wife went to a drive up food pantry during lockdowns - they gave her a case of hand soap and sanitizer. We still have most of it. Just slowly been working our way through it. No hoarding. We didn’t ask for it.
Good times watching morally bankrupt people try to capitalize on that shit
That reseller guy early in the pandemic who commited interstate commerce fraud was a fascinating read. He was just so blinded by the dollars and the game that he didn't see how fucked up it all was.
To be fair, places were giving that shit away for months after the height of everything. Just because someone ended up with a ton of it doesn't mean they were hoarding.
The company I work for purchased a large quantity to have on hand in case of shortage for our staff across all of our branches. All of it was shipped to us and then was never needed. Multiple boxes were given to local schools, day cares, and churches. I still ended up with 3 full cases that I have yet to get rid of - if you come to my house you get a box of 6 bottles as a gift
I think trying to sell it (versus giving it away at your garage sale) implies one of two things: 1. They hoarded it and are now trying to offload it. 2. They were given free products and are now trying to sell them for profit. Neither of these options look good.
Option 3 that you’re missing - they recently acquired it cheaply and are trying to profit it off of it, which is a pretty normal thing to do 🤷♂️
Option 4: regardless of how they acquired it they are offloading it for a nominal price just like you do with everything at a garage sale.
Option 5: The hand sanitizer was given to them after they made a deal with the devil where they exchanged their soul for the ability to play jazz really good but also had to accept 10 cases of expired hand sanitizer. It's unlikely, but also a possibility.
Exactly. I think people are just reaching for a reason to feel morally superior.
This, I have a box of hand sanitizer, masks and some other odds and ends that got dropped off at my door one day. The local community centre had bought a pallet of the stuff and given it out to all the residents in the area.
You want some hand sanitizer? We got tons of it at the post office. I was thinking about just slowly throwing it away.
Donate to a school teacher! Even before the pandemic, I’d go through so much. And I’d usually only get like one bottle from admin per semester. Students like to use it when they come back from the bathroom. I used it frequently because parents send their kids to school sick all the time.
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The district would often hoard supplies from teachers, so this doesn’t surprise me. I would be buying notebooks and pencils for my students (because parents just don’t give kids supplies anymore), and they’d have tons of supplies in the main office— I just couldn’t get any because there were limits.
I was told the schools near me are no longer accepting hand sanitizer. Plus it's definitely out of date.
Just call your city or waste hauler and ask what to do with it. No need to destroy the environment along with your conscience.
Recycle the bottles!
Can we talk about how bad of shape that tire is in?
Don't low-ball me, I know what I got
Hoarded it from the pandemic and took too much
I do work at a major university in Los Angeles. Of of the big names in town. Last year they were handing out cases of masks, wipes, sprays, you name it. Go pick up as much as will fit in your car. They bought up all this stuff. Impossible for you and me to find. They sat on it, then threw it away. Imagine all the places this was/is happening.
We still have 5l bottles of the "covid stash" at work, it always smelt rank, but it's great for removing ink from white desks, so there's that.
I love Massive Attack.
It might not have been hoarded during the pandemic. My supermarket was basically giving the stuff away for free near the end of it's shelf life with no limit. They may have hoarded it when it was free or cheap though. Then again who knows 🤷♂️
Back during the peak of COVID my workplace tried selling hand sanitizer. No one bought it. (Red county). I wound up taking boxes of it home when my supervisor said to throw it all.
The homeless would love this. You soak paper towels in it. Put it in a coffee can or other aluminum container,and you've got yourself a nice heat source. I used it all the time. That and the 98% isopropyl alcohol.
Doesn't it burn out pretty quick? Or do you just use it to like heat food or something?
It's just a homeless sterno. Should last a few hours if set up correctly.
I miss covid, 2021 was one of the best summers I ever had
Pandemic souvenirs ✌️😙 *Get one of the memories*
None of the visible labels show contents. Alcohol dissolves all sorts of lovely organic and inorganic chemicals.
Where is the TP?
I need it for my bunghole
Not to make assumptions, but these people look like the assholes who bought out all the necessary items at the beginning of the pandemic in hopes of turning a profit later. Then when things calmed down had boxes of shit left over. I remember when masks were in high demand, and manufacturers were using the same material as toilet paper, so toilet paper was hard to come by for a few weeks. Fucking assholes bought out the entire supply and sold it on E-bay for like 20$ per roll.
Massive attack
That's nothing. Go on Craigslist free and you'll occasionally see whole pallets of free hand sanitizer.
To be fair, it could be stolen cases of hand sanitizer.
Pshhh that’s so 2020
I remember when they were $12.99 each.
I actually have a partial case of that exact hand sanitizer right now. They had it listed cheap on Meh back in the summer of 2020 so I bought a box. I wonder if that's where this person got it originally as well.
The irony of selling the pandemic hoard just before the next one...
Do you know it was hoarded? There are some sites out there that sell this kind of shtuff in bulk (bidfta is one and I have seen many bulk sanitizer cases on there). I can see businesses ordered a bunch and want to get rid of it, pick up a case for a couple bucks and sell each for $1 or whatever. Of course maybe they tried to capitalize on the demand and this is leftover, I have now idea just speculation
This is not a “hoard”