The psychology of panic-buying loo roll – again
So here we go again: as a second wave of coronavirus sweeps towards us, we find ourselves reliving some of the harrowing drama we witnessed in March. Though no national lockdown has (yet) been announced, we are braced. And while we face the next phase of the pandemic armed with a little more knowledge than last time, some of our reactions haven’t changed.
Remember when shoppers rushed out to panic-buy loo roll in early spring, clearing the supermarket shelves in near-apocalyptic scenes? That was just silly, wasn’t it? Except, fast forward to now, and history threatens to repeat itself. “Stockpiling in Scotland is back on the rise as a Home Bargains store was wiped clean of toilet roll,” read one news article today. “Mounting fears surrounding a second wave of Covid-19 cases have prompted some shoppers to stock up on food for the winter,” reported another publication.
Have we learnt any lessons from last time? Well, some of us have. Some of us scoffed at the stockpilers last time around; then we arrived at the shops to find them stripped bare of essentials. The joke, it seemed, was on us.
Much like a run on a bank, it becomes a vicious cycle, of course – a collapse in consumer confidence in supply chains precipitates more of us to hurry to join the queue. Panic breeds panic, and so on.
What’s going on with us?
In March I spoke to experts about the psychology of panic-buying and they offered various explanations for this type of human behaviour: irrationally collecting resources is a mechanism to deal with uncertainty; when we’re scared, we react emotionally, and without the cool, calm logic that might help us realise a 16-pack of Andrex won’t save us; seeing others behave like this prompts us to do the same, as it seems to provide external confirmation that there’s a good reason to act this way.
As the general sense of danger ramps up again, and we start to see a repeat of this kind of behaviour, it raises an interesting question: is the psychology behind raiding your local Tesco for essentials the same, or different, this time?
The answer appears to be a bit of both, with Christmas ramping things up now in a way only Christmas knows how.
“During summer we all very much relaxed and we knew what was happening,” says Dr Dimitrios Tsivrikos, a consumer and business psychologist at University College London. “Now we are returning to behaviours to protect ourselves. There’s a level of seasonality. You’re preparing for winter, you’re actually nesting in a way, preparing resources. That, in combination with planning for Christmas, is already setting us in a mode for spending a bit more, consuming a bit more and planning a bigger shop.”
Indeed, Sainsbury’s has reportedly seen the R number of customers searching for frozen turkeys increase to well above one. Last week there were apparently 400 searches for “whole frozen turkeys” on the supermarket’s website, while searches for “mince pies” and “Christmas puddings” were said to have tripled and quadrupled respectively on last year.
If the idea of stockpiling more festive goods than one needs seems comical (or tragic, perhaps, when you consider how likely Christmas is to be cancelled), it might be a natural response to what we are currently going through.
Survival instinct
“The impulse [to stockpile] really runs deep because ever since we lived in caves, whenever we saw an abundance but feared a deficit, in other words usually in autumn, we overstocked and overate, and only the people who did that survived,” says clinical psychologist Linda Blair. “So that reaction is totally understandable, though not logical.”
When modern consumer pressures come into play too, it seems you create a perfect storm.
“The Christmas period is incredibly intense for consumers,” says Dr Tsivrikos. “Imagine what will happen when people can’t distinguish flu from Covid, and there’s an added level of complexity because of Brexit. It’s almost like a pressure sandwich of Brexit, Covid and Christmas. Add all these layers together and it’s an incredibly tense period.”
These added pressures mean we could see even more aggressive stockpiling than last time, he suggests, adding: “Sadly I think marketeers, because they have to catch up with what they lost during lockdown, will most likely take this opportunity to promote offers and behaviours that will goad us into overspending, overbuying.
“We need to inform people that shopping in a rational way will allow people to have whatever they want, protecting the economy and also our own mental health.”
Steven Taylor, author of The Psychology of Pandemics, takes an opposing view, however. This time around, we’re likely to see less, rather than more, panic-buying, he believes.
“Panic-buying is driven by a small, frightened section of the community,” he explains. “If a handful of people start panic-buying in the grocery store, others will think they’d better do the same.
“But it probably won’t be as bad this time because we’ve been through this before and because stores are preemptively putting in place quotas on what you can buy.”
The degree to which each country’s population trusts their government could also be an influencing factor, however. Those who feel their politicians have handled the crisis well may be less likely to display a panicked response, Taylor suggests.
In countries where there has been more confusion and less of a coherent response, it’s easy to see how the opposite could happen. Which is arguably bad news for Britain.
Keen to prevent a repeat of the scenes from March, the British Retail Consortium has urged the public to continue shopping as we normally would. But nothing about this year feels normal at all. With uncertainty heaped on uncertainty, the comforting knowledge you have enough flour this time could yet prompt another mad dash, however much we’re told to stay calm.
