At a big box retailer recently, I saw a display that held hundreds of boxes of earloop face masks. The price had been marked way down, so I assume they have a lot of this product and not many people are buying them.

This is an interesting example of our society’s ability to forget a crisis or to believe without cause that such a crisis can’t happen again.

Of course, I am talking about the coronavirus pandemic crisis that spread across the globe five years ago, devastating lives and economies everywhere.

One thing that we didn’t have at the start of the pandemic was face masks of any kind. Early on, we wore bandanas or homemade masks, since mask companies were unable to quickly switch from normal-scale production to pandemic-scale production.

People were getting desperately sick and dying, and one important way to get that under control was for everyone to wear masks.

Now, almost five years later, mask companies are almost giving away masks, since many have forgotten how hard it was to find them in 2020.

I’m not telling you a new pandemic is on our doorstep, but the reality is that with more than eight billion people on the planet, another pandemic is on its way.

So I bought two boxes of masks. If you see them for a marked-down price, it certainly wouldn’t hurt for you to do the same.