To Avoid the Trap of Panic Buying, Change the Way You Shop
What we can do to stop this in its tracks.
Stack up everything a family of three or four needs to be okay for a few weeks, and it might look like hoarding. It’s not. But how you acquire that much food makes a difference. You have to do it in stages, not all at once — for lots of reasons, which we’ll go into.
Panic buying is a terrible way of responding to an emergency. This is what happens when someone hoards:
- They don’t actually get the supplies they need, forcing them out in public again, risking lives regardless of the emergency.
- They deprive others of essential goods.
- They waste what they buy.
- They make other people suffer for nothing.
It’s not just about toilet paper anymore. That’s where it started, but now people are panic buying lots of different things.
There’s plenty of food in the world, but not if we rush out and panic buy whenever bad news hits. Every time someone does this, it takes time to replenish. It dumps extra worries on everyone.
This is going to be a long year. We need to get through it without ripping each other apart at supermarkets.
