Why the coronavirus outbreak has driven panic buying

COVID-19 HAS EMPTIED SUPERMARKET SHELVES

Around the world, people have flocked to supermarkets and stripped shelves of household essentials. Panic buying has reached fever pitch with shoppers piling trolleys high with toilet paper and other items. Supermarkets have imposed limits on customer purchases to quell unnecessary hoarding. In some cases, police intervention has been required to contain the behaviour of stampeding customers.

The coronavirus has caused us to fret and this has brought out the worst in humanity. Irrational stockpiling has turned people’s fear of a shortage into a self-fulfilling prophesy. Pleas by public authorities for calm have fallen on deaf ears. Worry about the scarcity of supplies has driven panic buying which has bred more panic buying – a classic case of herd mentality. Illogical behaviour has become contagious.

Blindly following the crowd has created public unrest which, in turn, has led to pandemonium due to confronting reporting. Television and social media have whipped people into a frenzy by triggering anxiety and uncertainty. The rolling news coverage with minute-by-minute online updates have stoked public hysteria and induced panic.

Professor Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, a journalism expert from Cardiff University, stated that the coronavirus reporting is a “bigger contagion” than the virus itself. She expressed concern at media coverage which used “sensationalist and frightening language” such as “killer virus” and “deadly disease” and said that she found this “particularly problematic”.

One online media outlet, Euronews, ran an article which asked the question: Which is the real pandemic – coronavirus or the hysteria that follows? It answered as follows:

The world is clearly in the grip of not one, but two pandemics, caused by a new coronavirus, the “novel Coronavirus 2019” or nCoV-2019 for short. The first pandemic is the actual infection caused by this virus. The second is the panic, hysteria, threat inflation, associated racism and xenophobia that are exploding in the shadow of the viral outbreak. The latter pandemic may claim more lives than the first.

One Australian newspaper, Darwin’s NT News, made light of the loo roll hysteria. It printed several blank pages for readers to use if they ran out of toilet paper. “We’ve printed an eight-page special lift-out inside, complete with handy cut lines, for you to use in an emergency,” the paper’s front page cheekily read.

Consumer psychology experts have opined that herd mentality coupled with over-exposure to coverage of the coronavirus is to blame for stores being ransacked of groceries and long-life pantry staples. One such expert, Steven Taylor, is a professor and clinical psychologist at the University of British Columbia and author of The Psychology of Pandemics.

Taylor argues that panic buying is fuelled by anxiety and a willingness to go to irrational lengths to quell those fears such as queueing for hours or buying way more than you need. He says: “If everyone else on the Titanic is running for the lifeboats, you’re going to run too, regardless if the ship’s sinking or not”.

Many shoppers insist that they are only in a frenzy because everyone else is, not because they are scared of the coronavirus. So, fear of missing out is allegedly driving them to join the hordes of other shoppers whose self-preservation instincts have also kicked in. People argued that it is “only normal” to want to look out for themselves and their families. No one, it seems, wants to take responsibility for their own overreactive behaviour.

Outraged customers have vented their fury on social media at the chaotic scenes created by the reaction to the virus. “Just ridiculous” and “insane” and “outrageous” are some of the comments recorded. During the height of the run on paper products, the top trending topic on Twitter in Australia was #toiletpapergate. Clearly, people did give a sh!t that stocks were wiped out!

History shows that a consumer buying frenzy ahead of a potential crisis is not an uncommon phenomenon. For example, it famously occurred in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis when nuclear war seemed imminent. Sensible American families stocked their basements with enough canned goods and bottled water to survive an atomic blast.

There’s nothing more fearsome than the great unknown and this describes the coronavirus. Many in the community see it as a dramatic event which requires a dramatic response – such as descending on supermarkets and stripping the shelves bare of toilet rolls, hand sanitisers and surgical masks. A much better response is something far more mundane – properly washing your hands.

Once a sense of normalcy and balance returns, we must examine our collective behaviour. It’s clear that we have to get better as a society in responding to the surprises and shocks of modern living. This requires us to take a more holistic approach by focussing on “we” rather than “me”. Our narrow self-interests must give way to the optimum outcome for all parties.

Trying to achieve the best for the collective rather than the individual led to the development of a branch of economics called game theory. This theory describes how the gain of one player is offset by the loss of another player, equalling the sum of zero (a.k.a. – a zero-sum game).

The best known example of game theory is the prisoner’s dilemma where two criminals are enticed by police to betray each other. The prisoner’s dilemma – to confess or not to confess – underscores how our choices affect others and how the choices others make affect us.

The Global Financial Crisis was a modern-day prisoner’s dilemma where the “every-man-for-himself” attitude saw markets crash as everyone tried to get to the exit door first. All the efficiencies of the free market flew out the window as institutions hid their bad loans causing credit markets to freeze as players did not trust each other.

The notion that someone has to lose for someone else to gain is narrow-minded. We humans must learn to modify our self-defeating behaviour, which is why game theory should be a compulsory element of the core curriculum of educational institutions. We all need to be taught the benefits of co-operation over conflict and this training should begin in the home.

After all, parents are the world’s first and foremost teachers. We can all play a part in making our planet a better place.

Let’s wipe out crap behaviour!

Regards

Paul J. Thomas
Chief Executive Officer
Ductus Consulting

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