#Coronavirus stockpilling of household items: the time of toilet rolls, after sanitisers
When a family of two would go panic shopping the impact in their budget would be significant. Only on food 2 people in Ireland would spend almost 150 euros, half of which is panic shopping for cans, flour & sugar. It happened in several european countries and depending on the marked it can be panic buying – in UK – or hamster buying in Germany or Austria, according to Deutsche Welle.
We add then 5,75 x 2 on household good, because we know the demand for toilet rolls and disinfectant increased these days and most of the retails chains have an offer to toilet rolls online / offline – so the budget increases more.
In the meantime some supermarkets that sell online food also announce their customers that there can be a delay in sending the orders, in relation or not with the situation:
And products in high demand these days seem to out of stock like hand sanitiser:
No wonder as hand wash products, including sanitisers, grew by 15% in the 12 weeks to 23 February – representing strong, but not dramatic, growth according to Kantar latest data. Charlotte Scott explains: “We’d expect to see more of an impact towards the end of February and into March, as increased awareness of the virus will likely lead to an uplift in sales of healthcare products. This coupled with the impact of Storm Jorge in late February may well lead to growing sales of goods typically associated with stockpiling like pasta and tinned or frozen food.”
And in some retails chains -like Tesco – toothpaste is on sale:
But if cans are long shelf lives products, flour and sugar can be used to bake bread and pastries if needed, they why do toilet rolls fly out of shelves in Europe, America and Australia? Why is everybody buying this basic product in every household – but one which is improbable to run out of?
Although the risk of severe illness is very low according to doctors for people with no health issues because of Coronavirus, lots of usual shoppers have been stockpiling paper rolls. Explanations could be diverse – when a person stays in front of empty shelves, then that person could feel automatically that stocks will run out. In that situation she would buy far more than she needs. Secondly, toilet rolls are sold in big packages, as much as 24 rolls, and if some packages are missing from the shelves – even for a short time during the day- then the brain would panic and see the problem bigger than it really is.
In both situations people are basically reacting to a fear of something will happen but no state emergency was declared on the island. Moving on, consumers compensate for a loss of perceived control by buying utilitarian products (household cleaning agents or in our case toilet rolls) because of these products’ association with problem solving, a quality that promotes a sense of control. These are the words used by Charlene Y Chen, Leonard Lee and Andy J Yap in a study published in Journal of Consumer Research. This is by far the most self-explanatory and complex definition of what a person could fill while adding an extra roll to the daily/weekly purchases.
Stockpiling can be also associated in countries where authorities are believed to not communicate so openly about the real cases, but this is not the approach in Ireland. And this because here every day there is a brief from the authorities regarding the number of people infected with COVID-19.
