Panic buying is an effect caused by the fear of COVID-19; it’s when consumers buy unusually large amounts of a commodity in anticipation of a shortage or sudden price increase.
People have been warned that a nation-wide quarantine might be gracing our neighborhoods in the coming weeks and has unfortunately sent some people into a panic.
Fear is inevitable with a pandemic like this, with over 858,000 cases of COVID-19 confirmed worldwide and 163,539 of those cases in the U.S.
Despite the staggering number of cases the virus has produced, just a couple of months ago the virus was barely making headlines in the media. People were beginning to get reports of cases through the media, but were not reacting as much to it.
“I’m in the healthcare industry, so I was a little more aware of it, thinking it was along the lines of the flu,” Katherine Davis, a 33 year-old registered nurse packing her car with items, outside of a Costco in Azusa said. “I never thought it would get to the point where it’s at now.”
People are now rushing to grocery stores in an effort to gather supplies for themselves like toilet paper, chicken, eggs, milk, cheese, bread and more. The sudden influx of customers has grocery stores fighting to keep the shelves stocked.
Customers stand in lines outside of grocery stores as the stores enforce social distancing, but are still coming up short with adequate products to go around.
Stores like Walmart, Target, Sprouts, and many more are mostly barren in the dairy, bread and meat sections. Grocery stores’ shelves remain empty as people in a frenzy forage for commodities they would normally not be worried about.
Rick Brown, a psychology professor at Citrus College, said panic buying starts with the fear of just a few people.
“It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy at the very beginning,” Brown said in an email. “An initial trigger (irrational panic) occurs, but also starts the cycle by recruiting more people who have an increasingly more rational reason to stock-up.”
All it takes for the panic buying cycle to commence is a few nervous people who start to gather supplies in an effort to prepare for the worst.
