You may have seen empty shelves on your recent trip to the grocery stores. Toilet paper and hand sanitizer. Milk or eggs.

“Milk, eggs, bread, meat products — those are the big ones I’m hearing,” said Ellie Taylor, president of the Alabama Grocers Association. “I even had someone write to me about what was wrong with the ramen noodles.”

At the Food Outlet in Millbrook, the store can’t keep paper products and sanitary items on the shelves amid the coronavirus outbreak, said Gregg Chandler, the store manager.

“People are concerned,” he said. “It’s something they’ve never seen before.”

Grocers say the empty shelves aren’t the result of problems with their existing supply chains. They say it’s the result of the outbreak causing unprecedented demand that has customers cleaning valued products off shelves within hours. Some stores have begun limiting purchases of certain products.

“We have it in the morning, and we lose it in the afternoon,” said Robert Renfroe, the owner of a chain of family grocery stores.

The uptick in business doesn’t necessarily mean extra money for grocers; the industry “is still a net profit margin business of around 1%,” said Taylor. And the demand is causing prices for items like eggs and meat to rise. She said suppliers “have been working with grocery stores and ramping up production to get as much product as we can” out there.

“The food supply is strong,” she said. “There are products coming. Please do not stockpile. Take what you need, but leave some for your neighbor.”

The COVID-19 outbreak has left the owners of grocery stores — virtually the last businesses open amid the pandemic — trying to cope with that increased demand while ensuring safety within their establishments.

Many are also trying to bring on new employees to keep up with the demand. Chandler said they’re “in the process of looking for extra people,” and Renfroe spent much of his Tuesday morning going over job applications in a back office of a Renfroe’s Market location in east Montgomery.

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He can’t give "an exact number,” Renfroe says, but he’s looking for more employees at the chain’s stores.

Several establishments are also devoting extra time for cleaning and sanitizing their stores. Chandler said his store is devoting added time in the morning and evening to the project.

“We sanitize the registers and register stands,” he said. “Spraying shopping carts. Spraying around Coke machines. And we’re encouraging everybody to do everything in their area to make sure it’s clean.”

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Stores have also instituted early morning senior hours to ensure that senior citizens have time to shop. Renfroe’s has one from 7 to 8 a.m.; Chandler said his store had its first on Wednesday morning from 6:30 to 8 a.m. and said it was a “big success.”

Chandler said he had seen high demand for bottled water early in the outbreak, but said that had cooled to some extent.

“We have seen business increase,” he said. “The main thing right now is people are just trying to figure out how long it’s going to be.”

Contact Montgomery Advertiser reporter Brian Lyman at 334-240-0185 or blyman@gannett.com.