> Stocking up to prepare for a crisis isn't 'panic buying'. It's actually a pretty rational choice
That's because stocking up in preparation for a crisis happens when there is no crisis and you buying a thousand rolls doesn't trigger other people to do it; they just shake their heads and mutter 'prepper'.
Panic buying something when the crisis has already started just means that uncritical people will also panic buy that thing and everyone, including you, suffers because now there are queues just to get in to the supermarket even if you don't want to buy that thing.
So it's only rational if you discount the rest of the system.
It is anecdotal but this morning I have stoped by the local supermarket and everything is fully stocked including toilet paper. Not many customers. If I didn't read the news I wouldn't notice that there is something going on.
We had few days of intensive buying here in Poland last week but it is over now.
I live in the UK and panic-buying is not anecdotal. Just today, the government pleaded with shoppers to show responsibility and think of emergency personnel, such as NHS staff, who can't go shopping early in the day and are left with nothing in the evening:
Edit: and, btw, it's a thing that's hitting me hard because I refuse to go mad along with everyone else and hoard. Unfortunately for me, the government and supermarkets have plans in place to ensure vunlerable people have access to goods, but there's no such provisions for people who have just not gone mad yet. So I fear I might want for basic stuff as time goes by.
People are such shits when they're running scared.
It's bad in the U.S. as well. At least in Wisconsin, toilet paper, bleach, etc. Are nowhere to be found. Not in the supermarkets, not in the corner stores, not in the hardware stores... Milk, flour and eggs are also scarce. The limits are there but it's hard to say if it's helping.
Radio hosts are pleading with people to stop hoarding and just be reasonable.
Fortunately, my wife is a soapmaker, so we won't run out of at least that.
Pleading with people shouldn’t be part of the solution. Everyone responds to incentives. The government can and should fine people for hoarding, fine them for reselling, and fine companies for allowing it all by not having sensible limits. This would eliminate the profit incentive (for both suppliers and consumers) of bad behavior.
A radio host is just a person, not the government.
There are limits being placed to combat hoarding and strict penalties against reselling on major marketplaces. Attempts are being made. But I don't think it's as simple as you suggest, at least in the U.S. (Which government? How do you identify the hoarders? Where is the line which continues hoarding vs. having sufficient stock?)
There was a case of someone hoarding massive amount of sanitizer with intent to resell, who then couldn't resell any of it. I hear the government compelled them to donate it (don't have a source, that part is just hearsay). But that's an individual case. At scale I think the problem quickly changes.
The solution is neither fines nor radio hosts pleading. It is solidarity.
Unfortunately it is in shorter supply than toilet paper and takes generations to build up but only decades to destroy.
People need to set an example to their neighbours and friends, make it socially unacceptable to panic buy. It's not hoarding that is the problem it is is the unnecessary high rate of purchase. You could hoard all you wanted if you did it slowly in times when there is not a crisis.
Here in Norway we have a little more solidarity than most countries I believe but even here there was a one or two day period at the beginning when people went out to buy large quantities of toilet paper.
It's like you say. Noam Chomsky has published a book a while ago, called "Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power". Chapters are given titles implying "laws" for the concentration of wealth and power.
One chapter is titled "Attack Solidarity" and it describes how social solidarity in the US was eroded in the previous decades, resulting in a poor social state with almost no public health insurance, with no public higher education and so on.
But it's not just the US. This is happening in some other developed countries also (though hopefully not all, like you say). What is happening now in the UK, with the stockpiling situation, is absolutely the result of broken societal bonds that has led people to mistrust authorities and each other and adopt an attitude of "every man and every woman for themselves".
I should probably not blame people to be honest. They are acting like little shits, but they are right to believe that, if anything happens to them, nobody will take care of them and that they have to fend for themselves, in this selfish, greedy society that is governed by incompetent idiots.
1. Convince people that a certain action is morally wrong
2. Once 1 is accomplished, convince those same people not to do the action
We typically use law and consistent enforcement to solve these problems, because it's basically impossible otherwise.
What do you expect this would look like in reality, without laws and fines? Someone is seen buying 50 cases of toilet paper and loading into their truck. His friends or family, or a bunch of strangers at the supermarket, then shame him, telling him what he's doing is wrong. Then, he sees the error in his ways and decides to return the items? There's no way that this is a workable, scalable solution given the culture in the USA.
Generalization time: 1. People here are timid and avoid confrontation, and tend to not call others out on bad behavior, particularly family members. 2. Even if you do confront them, it is extremely difficult to convince people that what they feel justified in doing is actually wrong. 3. Even if you've convinced them that they're wrong, people don't respond to shame (either public shaming or private).
What people do respond to is consistent incentives and consequences. If there's a good chance you'll lose money or go to jail for doing something, then people will think twice before trying it.
I fear people are starting to raid cornershops, also. The one two streets from me had a note last night that it was selling toilet paper, hand wash, kitchen towels etc, but it was all gone and they were promising to restock soon.
My local cornershop stood strong against toilet paper hoarders for a long time but it finally fell today morning. They are on their last few packs of rolls.
We didn’t have any (they sold as much as people bought) for a few days and now we do.
There’s no shortage of toilet paper, but there’s plenty of idiots.
Yesterday I say a person who bought like a cubic meter of TP. What for? If we are indeed short of groceries for that long, you are going to die from starvation rather than inability to poo because you don’t have any toilet paper.
More anecdotes: My SO is a Walmart manager. Walmart last week Friday implemented limits to toilet paper and other items. Am told there's currently a line for the paper goods section.
Same in my area of Poland, but arguably it's a smaller town. My hypothesis is that everyone who wanted to stock up already did, and we're now in the "social isolation / waiting for the knee of the exponential to hit us" phase.
I'm wondering how long it will take everyone to be at capacity for toilet paper. I mean I can fill entire rooms with it but then it physically gets in the way. There has to be a point of diminishing returns soon.
Here's my and my partner's back-of-the-napkin calculation of maximum toilet paper hoarding capacity for what should be an average-ish person living in a two-bedroom house and buying six-packs of toilet rolls.
Suppose a two-bedroom house has 200m² surface with the ceiling at 4m. And let's assume that it's possible to squeeze 25 six-packs of toilet paper in 1m³. That's a capacity of 20,000 six-packs (800 m³ house volume times 25 rolls per m³). Assuming of course the person is willing to stuff every last cm³ of their house with toilet paper maximising storage efficiency, which means throwing out all the furniture and living in their car, not to mention not being able to go to the toilet in the house, in the first place.
It's definitely doable. 20,000 six-packs per person, no problem.
I'm afraid it's going to take a while before people are at capacity.
Edit: of course, when I say "back-of-the-napkin", it's just a turn of phrase. We ain't got no napkins.
Perhaps. Alternatively, toilet paper will replace money so people will receive it in place of wages, payments etc. In that case, stuffing one's house full of toilet paper will be similar to stashing one's banknotes under one's bed etc.
In that scenario, money would acquire the same value that toilet paper used to have before the virus. So toilet paper would be the new money and money the new toilet paper.
Home toilet paper usage has probably legitimately gone way up since people were previously using the company bathroom for half their waking hours and are now instead using their home facilities.
I saw a photo on twitter where a 7Eleven was selling commercial sized roles of TP that they probably normally used for their public bathroom for a few bucks.
It also seems crazy for it to be toilet paper in the first place.
Its (1) easy to make, (2) mostly produced in-country with no long, integrated supply chain and (3) relatively new (talk to someone over 80 who grew up rural, they probably switched from the sears catalog to toilet paper in their life).
It's one of the bulkiest consumable products people buy. Which means a whole shelf is only equivalent a few families worth of demand. So it only takes a few buyers stocking up for a few weeks of use to empty the shelves. And once the shelves are empty the panic sets in.
The way I see it, toilet paper occupies the same slot in its users' minds as soap - basic hygiene article. You want to stock up on it to compensate for risk of shortages; consequence of running out is having to reinvent an area of life you usually handle on autopilot.
My wife suspects it started in Hong Kong. People started buying all the toilet paper so they could make masks from them. Then people in other countries saw on the news that toilet paper was running out in Hong Kong so they started panic buying as well.
The folks in Green Bay say they're busy making more. That's the difference between toilet paper and money. If you run out of toilet paper, you can print more.
... oh, wait. ;-)
But seriously, I think there is probably no fundamental shortage of the ability to make more TP. When you drive through northern Wisconsin, you will see huge stacks of wood all over the place.
In my area, that's closer to 6 months supply. I went to Costco right after the coronavirus data hit the mainstream news and before Costco put limits on basic items like TP, and a lot of people were buying 2 packages of TP. In fact, one of the Costco stores had to close because of a fight over TP. Each package at Costco has 36 rolls, so if you use 1 roll/week, that's well over a year's supply. For my family of 4, a 36-pack lasts >6 months (probably closer to a year, I haven't bothered to calculate it), and we picked some up about 2-3 months ago, so we didn't bother buying more.
That's why it's so weird to me that people are buying so much. How long do people expect this to last? I'm guessing it'll be resolved within a couple months in most places, so what's the point in buying >6 months worth of TP?
Honestly, I think everyone with means should have 1-2 months of basic necessities on hand in case of emergencies (job loss, natural disaster, etc), especially for shelf-stable stuff like TP and soap. However, the time to stock up isn't when an emergency happens, but after an emergency happens (presumably your stock is a bit low).
My friends back in Cupertino and Sunnyvale (I split my year between Tel Aviv and Sunnyvale and now am "stuck" in Tel Aviv) thought everything would calm down, but as soon as deliveries arrive of disinfectant cleaning products and paper products, they are complete bought up. The store managers claim the same number of almost everything is arriving, with a few exceptions like rubbing alcohol (and of course masks!). I have no idea what all these people are doing with them, but there must be houses in Cupertino that are 100% full of lysol and toilet paper.
If you look at the shelves they don't exhibit classic shortage issues, as they have big gaps for specific products vs. empty shelves of everything. This (to me) indicates supply coordination vs. actual shortages.
It sounds like the author's concluding that the fixes aren't the same. Daley says that the fix for the bank run is for the government to step in as a guarantor and provide the cash to depositors withdrawing, then says that that's not possible for toilet paper, and thus it should do a quantity limit ... with no further economic analysis except that it worked somewhere.
Those are, like, the opposite solutions. Government (or the central bank, in this case[2]) can easily loan money out of thin air, but it can't do the same for toilet paper. At most, it could commandeer suppliers or initiate its own manufacturing, which breaks the economic similarity.
Similarly, the solution for toilet paper (quantity limit) doesn't apply to the bank run case, as bank insurers don't do a quantity limit. Arguably, the deposit insurance maximum is a kind of quantity limit, but Daley doesn't offer it as such, and it's known in advance, and unrelated to customers' legal right to how much they can access, so is non-analogous in several respects.
Since no defense of quantity limits is given beyond (as above) that it worked once, the title is bad and the argument isn't well supported.
[1] For the record, here's what I see as the last paragraph so you know if I'm missing something:
>The second solution is to ration the commodity – putting limits on the amount a customer can buy. Imperfect though these buying limits are, they are feasible, as shown by the restrictions put in place by Australia’s supermarkets. https://www.afr.com/companies/retail/coles-joins-woolworths-...
[2] Let's not break into the debate about whether the Federal reserve is private or not; it really doesn't matter for purposes of this topic.
>> Those are, like, the opposite solutions. Government (or the central bank, in this case[2]) can easily loan money out of thin air, but it can't do the same for toilet paper.
If I may offer a brief moment of levity to relieve the tension of the moment, I must point out that if the government can print money then it can create toilet paper.
Our national TV station has been asked by the government to show on the evening news how we have huge warehouses full of toilet paper. So the government is doing guarantor work: Proving enough TP is out there, and the delays are getting it from the warehouses to the shops
I dunno, imagine being locked in your house for a month. Pretty much the only absolutely necessary behavior is to eat, drink, sleep, pee and poop. If you stock up on food for eating, you are going to need TP for pooping. You can survive without TP, but it would be unpleasant.
It's a fun and silly article, but it would take a vasty greater disruption to actually cause a toilet paper shortage. The "problem" right now is that deliveries don't happen every 3 hours, so if people buy out all the TP at a store they have to wait for that TP to get restocked. It's not as if the trucks have stopped coming or the toilet paper factories have shut down. People just need to wait a few days, which is unusual but not really a problem.
I got desperate this morning and woke up early to wait in line outside of a store before it opened (which on its own was insane), only to find that they didn't have any stock come in overnight. Rushed over to the next store -- queue of people around the block waiting to get in. Drove to another town at 7:30am and tried their store, and they had TP but only small packages, limit of one, and I got one of the last ones. Not looking forward to doing this again in a week or so, but at least we got some.
Where I am it's the same. I went to do my normal weekly shop today; there was no toilet roll (luckily I bought a 9pk a few weeks ago so have enough left to last me a couple of months), no eggs, no chicken, almost no peanut butter (only a really expensive brand was left). Crazy. It's been impossible to find toilet roll and hand sanitiser for about two weeks now.
> The second solution is to ration the commodity – putting limits on the amount a customer can buy. Imperfect though these buying limits are, they are feasible, as shown by the restrictions put in place by Australia’s supermarkets.
The restrictions do not work, if not heavily supervised. And even then it’s still a gamble. People would queue again at another cashier to buy another pack of TP. I don’t think there is a solution, if actors are invested in gaming it.
The inconvenience of having to queue several times might already lead to a sufficient decrease in hoarding to keep shelves stocked, especially when combined with increased supply. If not you can escalate, e.g. by limiting TP checkout to a single register.
Reading the article title gave me an idea - raise the price to $20 per pack. Give each customer 2 coupons per week that takes $15 off one pack. Tied to a name / loyalty card or whatever.
The heavily supervise-ing can be a night mare. Local one data point, 16 yo self checkout 'watcher' yesterday was brought to tears with some customers demanding something be done about the person buying 12 packs of ground beef when the sign says limit 2.
I noticed yesterday some local cashiers are breaking - psychically and mentally/likely emotionally - yet they keep moving to keep pushing stuff down the conveyor belt and bag.
Most cashiers were not hired to be or trained to be security guards and prepared for the emotional battles that can come with that.
Or implement surge pricing like uber so only the rich have toilet paper and it’s cvs receipts and three sea shells for everyone else.
Issuing ration cards like WWII would be an option also and that solves a number of the problems you mentioned, you could use the existing electronic benefits infrastructure for that.
You’ll never have a completely unbeatable system but you can go a long way to keep honest people honest. Even forbidding the resale of TP so people realize they are stuck with whatever they buy can do a lot of good - people wont buy eight thousand rolls of toilet paper if they know they’ll be stuck with it.
Along that thought I imagine that if TP resale was forbidden then people would have to pay the moffia to take the stuff and insert it into the supply chain someplace so then it would be double penalty - you lock up significant resources in TP or you take a loss to have someone sell it for you.
I am particularly disturbed by emergent behaviors and life decisions that are now laid bare in this crisis.
As a Bay Area resident, it is incumbent upon me to maintain, in perpetuity, several weeks of food and drinking water as well as various other life essentials. I owe this to my family and everyone in my community as we all live in a place where a tremendous natural disaster and accompanying social dis-integration could occur at any time.
Of course I have had my suspicious ...
Now we see that most residents of the Bay Area are barely prepared to make dinner tomorrow and have supplies on-hand for a day or two. They don't have contingency plans for the absence of water, electricity or gas and I suspect very few are certified and practiced in even basic CPR.
Shame on you.
There is going to be a day when even the grocery stores aren't open and the water isn't going to flow. Possibly for weeks. I plead with you to spend your quarantine time getting your shit together the way you've always been expected to.
>> As a Bay Area resident, it is incumbent upon me to maintain, in perpetuity, several weeks of food and drinking water as well as various other life essentials. I owe this to my family and everyone in my community as we all live in a place where a tremendous natural disaster and accompanying social dis-integration could occur at any time.
Sorry, but I'm missing the context to understand your comment. Can you explain? What is the tremendous natural disaster that compels you to maintain sevearl weeks of food and drinking water?
One of the single most terrifying facts about our modern space-age-a-go-go society is that there is only about three days of food in the pipeline. If the food stops flowing for more than a week the only thing to eat is our pets and then each other.
That's some thin ice.
- - - -
But I'm speaking in generalities.
This particular virus is unlikely to take down civilization. Remember how few people it takes to farm these days, eh? Something like 3 people out of 100 are enough to make bread. It's going to hurt but we will survive.
However, this won't be the last virus.
The underlying causes are the teeming numbers of humans going out into wild areas and getting exposed to new contagions, combined with our casual global travel and transport networks (this virus went international almost before we (globally) knew it existed.)
We are going to have to reconfigure our civilization.
- - - -
"It may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency." ~Camus
all this toilet paper nonsense got me thinking about how much TP people actually use. I looked up the statistics and it said the average US person uses 1 to 2 rolls per week!! I was floored. What are these people eating?
I'm mostly vegan and i do fast a lot, due to a slow metabolsim. But, I barely use 1 roll per 2 months. We shop for costco TP, maybe once per year, if that much.
That's because stocking up in preparation for a crisis happens when there is no crisis and you buying a thousand rolls doesn't trigger other people to do it; they just shake their heads and mutter 'prepper'.
Panic buying something when the crisis has already started just means that uncritical people will also panic buy that thing and everyone, including you, suffers because now there are queues just to get in to the supermarket even if you don't want to buy that thing.
So it's only rational if you discount the rest of the system.