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Comment by JulianMorrison | Hacker News Reader

You don't need to stock up if you can get food delivered. They can leave the delivery on the doorstep.

That might be what the other 1.5 million people in my city are counting on. Which means, I’m not going to count on that.

If your city's supermarkets can feed people with in-person shopping, they can feed people with deliveries as easily, it's the same number of people buying food.

That's assuming that every supermarket has enough delivery staff. That's not a valid assumption in many places.

With an extra layer of logistics that will have failed because the delivery drivers or pickers are sick.

You’re not taking into account panic buying / ordering. If it gets bad where you are people are just going to order as much as they can and then there won’t be enough - this already happened with masks here in the UK and we only have a few cases. I had to send some to Hong Kong for a family member a few weeks back and paid £20 for packs of 20 for proper n95 respirators. They’re now sold out online and everywhere despite being £15 EACH.

Stock up now while no-one is panicking yet. Don’t waste money buying weird stuff - Just get stuff you’ll use anyway over the next few months.

> Stock up now while no-one is panicking yet

That's what triggers panic buying... It's a snowball effect.

Call it tragedy of the commons, call it whatever you like; your not buying stuff now isn't going to prevent a run later.

Socially, you're probably still better off buying sooner rather than later, because that means the system has more time to restock and ship things around for people later. If you're part of the end pile up, you're another stresser at the worst time.

As evidence of this... the ideal time to stock up with emergency supplies was months or even a couple of years ago, when it would bother nobody. I've buffed up some supplies a bit, but I wasn't starting from scratch because I've been keeping stuff on hand for a while now. Giving the system months or years of headstart is better than weeks, but weeks or even a single week is better than nothing.

Thanks for this comeback - exactly. Ordering a few extra tins of beans and spaghetti is hardly going to create a snowball effect if you do it now. Food isn’t in short supply in general, it just may become in relatively short supply in the shops near you. They’ll reorder more by tomorrow with no issues. It’s just about having it in your house VS in a storage centre some place.

Masks is slightly different I will agree. They are genuinely in short supply and medical workers need them more.

Do not count on this. Buy food stuffs that are non-perishable, which you can eat anyway if it turns out to not be needed.

I speak from experience preparing for hurricanes. If you wait until the last minute, you're going to be woefully unprepared.

You're not accounting for the fact that in these types of situations, there is often a run on things like food. You can only get food delivered if the stores still have food.

What about the people that made the food you got delivered.

They won't once the quarantine is in effect

A quarantine that tries to prevent people getting food is a quick way to get riots. No government would be stupid like that.

If it gets bad enough, it's quite likely that there'll be martial law, and possibly food rationing enforced.

Indeed. If a whole city is under quarantine then the supply of food has to be managed by the authorities.

Show me a person who values their minimum wage so much that they will risk making pizza deliveries (or even bake the pizza) in a quarantined city, please. Typically, the government does it in these cases, and often it's not enough or not what you need or prefer, so it's advisable to prepare.

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