Coronavirus: The psychology of panic buying - BBC Worklife - 0 views
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LLast Saturday afternoon, Kristina Moy decided to swing by her local supermarket in the US city of Seattle to pick up some weekly groceries and supplies for her son’s upcoming baseball tournament. What started as a quick errand turned into a three-hour ordeal, navigating checkout lanes packed with hundreds of shoppers stocking up amid the outbreak of coronavirus.
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Moy isn’t the only one to experience long queues and empty shelves. Mass demand for rice and instant noodles in Singapore prompted Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to assure the public there was enough to go around. In Auckland, New Zealand, supermarket spending shot up 40% last Saturday compared to the same day a year ago. And shoppers in Malaysia wanting to pad “pandemic pantries” – grocery hoards to fill people’s kitchens until the crisis dies down – have driven an 800% increase in weekly hand sanitiser sales. (All of those places have confirmed cases of Covid-19.)
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With events like looming natural disasters, such as a hurricane or flood, people frequently stock up with emergency supplies. “It is rational to prepare for something bad that looks like it is likely to occur,” says David Savage, associate professor of behavioural and microeconomics at the University of Newcastle in Australia, who’s written about the rationality behind stocking up in a crisis. However: “It is not rational to buy 500 cans of baked beans for what would likely be a two-week isolation period.”
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Irrational stockpiling can also lead to price gouging, says Steven Taylor, a professor and clinical psychologist at the University of British Columbia, and the author of The Psychology of Pandemics. “If the price of a roll of toilet paper is tripled, that’s seen as a scarcer commodity to acquire, which can lead to anxiety,” he says.
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Panic buying, Taylor says, is fuelled by anxiety, and a willingness to go to lengths to quell those fears: like queueing for hours or buying way more than you need. We’ve seen this before throughout history. Back in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis, when nuclear war seemed imminent, American families filled their basements with enough canned goods and bottled water to survive an atomic blast.
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“But for many people, hand-washing seems to be too ordinary. This is a dramatic event, therefore a dramatic response is required, so that leads to people throwing money at things in hopes of protecting themselves.”
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“Panic is a subjective, emotional state, and mostly what we can observe is the behaviour,” says Oppenheim. “Maybe someone reads articles or a couple of tweets about supply chain disruptions in China and mask shortages in Hong Kong, and then makes a very reasoned decision to stock up on masks just in case. All we can infer from the purchasing is the timing, so it could look panicky even if it's well thought through.”