> Fear is what brought us the inane toilet paper shortage a few months ago.
FWIW, evidence is that the toilet paper shortage wasn't caused by hoarding. Rather, it was a combination of two supply-chain quirks:
1.) Toilet paper is bulky and low-margin, which means that supermarkets largely stock it just-in-time and keep low inventories of it in storerooms. This exacerbates any problems in the supply chain because existing inventories run out quickly and there's no buffer.
2.) The supply chains for consumer toilet paper (used in homes) and commercial toilet paper (used in businesses & public places) are almost completely different. They use different raw materials (commercial has higher recycled paper content), different manufacturing processes (commercial is usually single-ply), and of course different warehouses, transportation infrastructure, and procurement processes. When everybody stays home for 8+ hours that were previously spent at work and in public places, that causes a dramatic shift in demand from commercial to consumer toilet paper. The commercial stuff can't really be sold in supermarkets; even if you could fix the procurement and distribution processes, it's packaged in ways that won't fit on (or sell from) a retail rack.
Taken together, that resulted in large shortages of consumer toilet paper and large oversupplies of commercial toilet paper, all of which get exacerbated by the small inventories kept by supermarkets. There may have been some hoarding too, but there's no good evidence for it, and a lot of reasons (eg. purchase maximums, inability to carry more than 1 48-pack) to believe it wasn't a major factor.
FWIW, evidence is that the toilet paper shortage wasn't caused by hoarding. Rather, it was a combination of two supply-chain quirks:
1.) Toilet paper is bulky and low-margin, which means that supermarkets largely stock it just-in-time and keep low inventories of it in storerooms. This exacerbates any problems in the supply chain because existing inventories run out quickly and there's no buffer.
2.) The supply chains for consumer toilet paper (used in homes) and commercial toilet paper (used in businesses & public places) are almost completely different. They use different raw materials (commercial has higher recycled paper content), different manufacturing processes (commercial is usually single-ply), and of course different warehouses, transportation infrastructure, and procurement processes. When everybody stays home for 8+ hours that were previously spent at work and in public places, that causes a dramatic shift in demand from commercial to consumer toilet paper. The commercial stuff can't really be sold in supermarkets; even if you could fix the procurement and distribution processes, it's packaged in ways that won't fit on (or sell from) a retail rack.
Taken together, that resulted in large shortages of consumer toilet paper and large oversupplies of commercial toilet paper, all of which get exacerbated by the small inventories kept by supermarkets. There may have been some hoarding too, but there's no good evidence for it, and a lot of reasons (eg. purchase maximums, inability to carry more than 1 48-pack) to believe it wasn't a major factor.