MANCHESTER — Greg Ricker, head cashier at the Home Depot on March Avenue, stood in front of what had been the store’s “Get Ready for Sandy” display Monday. He held up a package of 6-inch LED flashlights and said, “These are basically all that’s left.”

Even though the small LED units cast as much light as their incandescent counterparts, consumers seem to prefer the larger model. Large flashlights, D batteries and generators were sold out Sunday.

“We went through 225 generators out of this store in the past two days,” Ricker said.

Anyone who waited until Monday to stock up for Hurricane Sandy in the Manchester area had waited too long. The big rush was over the weekend, Ricker said. By Monday morning, people were hunkered down and supplies were exhausted.

The experience of “Snowtober” last year left many determined to be prepared this time, and the frantic warnings about Sandy had the desired effect. “There have been a lot of people who were thinking ahead on this, and they got a lot of things taken care of,” Ricker said. “After October of last year ... everyone learned their lessons on that one.”

Ricker said his staff had been checking availability of generators at other hardware stores, and had referred customers to Lowe’s in Bedford and Leblanc’s True Value on Hayward Street while they still had some. “There’s no competition in this,” Ricker said. “We have to put the public first.”

Linda Farruggio, a 21-year employee at Leblanc’s, was waiting at around noon for an employee to return with six generators from the True Value distribution center — five of which had already been promised and paid for. That one remaining generator was not expected to last long.

“Home Depot is sending people here,” she said.

At Lowe’s, the story was much the same — no generators, no D batteries, no five-gallon gas cans. “Everybody came in early over the weekend,” said store manager Scott Tarry.

Shelves in grocery stores weren’t stripped bare of essentials, as was the case in many Mid-Atlantic states, but there were huge gaps in the egg, bread and milk shelves at Hannaford on Hanover Street.

The cashier lines were unusually long for a Monday at the Market Basket on Elm Street, according to Assistant Store Manager Mike Devoe, who said the store has done a good job of keeping up with demand, and did not run out of anything that it usually stocks, except for D batteries and large flashlights.

Devoe said the store adapted its inventory to the expected rush. “We were able to get our bread order early. Trucks that would have come Tuesday came today,” he said. “And we were able to get some extra water through corporate.”

Which turned out to be a good thing. “The bottled water has been flying out of here,” he said.

dsolomon@unionleader.com