People queued from 4am outside McDonald's in Rotorua and from 3am in Tauranga on the first day of level 3 freedom. There were similar scenes at fast food outlets elsewhere.
At one Auckland KFC outlet customers abused and swore at workers after they ran out of original chicken and had to offer alternatives.
This behaviour shows a level of fast food obsession I find staggering.
But it also raises immediate and important issues - safety, acceptable behaviour and spreading around our support for local businesses.
Firstly, it is essential people keep safe as they flock towards food and retail outlets.
A case where this did not happen was outside Burger Fuel in Glenfield on Tuesday night where 30 people packed together waiting to collect their orders.
This incident, which rightly drew stern fire from the prime minister, was in my view disgraceful. What part of physical distancing did the outlet and customers not understand? Surely they could have all stood further apart.
Burger Fuel has since introduced measures in an effort to prevent this happening again.
Every business now operating needs to take note of what happened here and ensure they too have stringent measures in place. They cannot rely just on their customers exercising safe distancing.
It would be a catastrophe for all our hard-earned success in smacking Covid-19 head-on was undone and we had to go back into level 4 lockdown because people couldn't follow common-sense rules when selling and buying fast food.
The KFC abuse example is disgusting and has no place in New Zealand.
But the other important issue here is to ensure we spread out our support for local businesses.
This paper, along with others in the NZME media stable, this week launched GO LOCAL! - a campaign aimed at encouraging local people to support local businesses.
It is vital we all show our support for local businesses as we try to kick-start the local economy.
Yes, people love food from the big chains. These outlets can be locally owned and employ local people, so we should support them.
But let's also spread around our support by buying from smaller operations too.
Buying a takeaway from your local Indian, Thai or fish and chip outlet, for example, is crucial.
We must ensure these smaller businesses - and other types of operations in our communities - survive.
We're all in this together. Let's support local businesses - safely and with respect for others.
