As snow falls, Seattle stocks up on de-icer, avocados and ... weed

Seattle has hunkered down.

At PCC, the natural grocery chain, sales reached holiday levels. The top item sold in the 24 hours leading up to snowfall? Avocados.

At Stoneway Hardware in Wallingford, word was that more shovels and de-icer were on a truck headed for the store.

This was welcome news to the preschool down the street, where teachers had been grinding pink Himalayan salt on the walkway.

Sales were also way up at Hashtag Cannabis, the marijuana dispensary with a store in Fremont. Sales on Thursday and Friday were double what the company expects for this time of year.

“All that points to people stocking up!” said Christine Bryant, director of marketing for Hashtag, by text message late on Friday.

Other pot shops, too, did brisk business: Ruckus on Capitol Hill had a line out the door … in the snow. And in Greenwood, the Have a Heart dispensary had a line to the door and customers filing in and out.

The mood across the city, at pot shops, in hardware stores, and in grocery stores, was festive pandemonium. The National Weather Service had said that worst-case scenario involved 14 inches of snow. Seattle rarely reaches its snow potential, and the prediction was amended to 4 to 6 inches. Still a respectable showing for this town.

This is also a city that is constantly harangued about preparing for the Big One, and there was a hint that Seattleites had taken this snow forecast as a challenge and then cleared out all the grocery stores as if to say, “Hold my avocado.”

(Speaking of avocados, and PCC, a shopper there lamented that no carrots remained at the Fremont store, although there was frisée in abundance. Disappointing, because who wants frisée when it’s freezing? No one.)

At noon, when snow was scheduled to begin its descent, Stoneway Hardware staff decamped to the parking lot, where they hoisted 20-pound bags of salt into shopping carts. And then the snow arrived. Small flakes at first, and then big, fat juicy ones.

The kind that take their job seriously.