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Comment by emsign | Hacker News Reader

I hate it when people call it panic buying. It's not a panic. People are preparing themselves to have food for 2 weeks. That's what you should do as well.

In fact what everyone should have done is stockpiling gradually over the last couple of weeks. I went grocery shopping today and I only had to buy a few things because I was already prepared when there was still enough in the stores.

Be smart, think about what you need to get by without being able to go to the store for 2 weeks. I see lots of people buying stuff like bread, but you don't wanna eat bread all the time, do you? Also it goes bad pretty quickly. I think most of the bread that has been bought will end up in the dumpster.

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There are different degrees. Some people are buying months and months' worth of things. Some people are buying an entire store's supply of toilet paper and the like in hopes of profiteering. It's insane and selfish. It prevents reasonable people from getting their 2 weeks' worth of stuff.

While it's true the over-preppers hurt everybody, I think you're overestimating how many of them there are and how directly they caused the dearth. Grocery stores simply aren't prepared for everybody buying even just two weeks of food at once.

I don't think I'm overestimating. It's all anecdotal, but I'm hearing things from friends, seeing lots of instances on social media. The NYT just covered one of them: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/technology/coronavirus-pu...

That guy isn’t an overprepper. He tried to buy a monopoly on the product so he could price gouge.

The distinction isn't relevant to the discussion at hand

Well it works of is, as people like him are committing illegal acts so it’s already heavily discouraged and supplies may be seized.

Over prepping though isn’t illegal, so many more people could do it.

I must be out of the loop, but why exactly are people so focused on toilet paper? The virus doesn’t cause you to go to the bathroom any more than you’d normally do in a three week time period. It seems odd to focus on this one thing.

Last trip to the grocery store I saw people carrying out 3 year supplies of TP but the stock of fever reducing medication was all untouched.

Facebook rumor that TP comes from China, and that the shipments were being blocked. In reality, the stuff come from Wisconsin and we have plenty of pulp.

Are you serious about this? Surely nobody assumes all toilet paper is imported from China?

I thought the same thing and it must be that when you have a family, you can go through tp pretty quickly. Roughly four times as fast for two adults and two kids, and twice as fast if you live with your partner, compared to just living alone.

All the stuff people buy, most of it isn't for them alone.

I think in those cases the store owners should be responsible to not let that happen. They are basically doing 99% of their customers a disservice.

They should, but they have no real incentive to beyond civic duty.

They have the incentive of keeping customers happy

If 1 customer is allowed to buy all the TP then that means the rest of the customers will not be happy

> I hate it when people call it panic buying. It's not a panic. People are preparing themselves to have food for 2 weeks. That's what you should do as well.

People have been loading up shopping trolleys with literally hundreds of rolls of toilet paper. Easily enough to last a year. If that's not panic buying, I don't know what is!

Yes, some people are "prepping" or "panic buying". There's various degrees. The complaint is that some people do it over the top which affects us all. Though how exactly over the top is defined isn't clear.

> I hate it when people call it panic buying. It's not a panic.

Yes, it is, for some non-trivial percentage of the people doing the buying. There are also people who are stocking up in a more rational way, but those are irrelevant except in the sense that their rational strategy is being thwarted by the panic buyers. It's not necessary for everyone to be in a panic before the phenomenon can be considered real.

Buying a year worth of toilet paper instead of food is panic buying in my book.

And it is the kind of thing happening right now, at least here in Europe. Hell, my house mates witnessed it just today while stocking up on the regular weekly groceries. Cart after cart filled with toilet paper.

They call it panic buying because it is irrational and driven by fear of the unknown. Don't know where you live but in every country/region with a covid-19 epidemic had any shortage in the production/supply chain of food or other first need goods (and 2nd/3rd need either but some of those shops did close) and it doesn't look it's going to happen. It's not a post-nuclear scenario nor a "get touched and you are gonna 99.9% die" disease either. So yeah, people is panicking.

It's not irrational any more, enough people were/are acting irrationally to cause real shortages, so much so that at this point the rational thing to do is to make sure you're prepared and stocked up with basic essentials.

we have developed a very efficient supply chain, where stores generally keep on shelf what they expect to sell, and everything else stays in some warehouse somewhere.

stores restock every day; every week. there will not be supply shortages, just things out of stock until they get restocked the next day. For all we know, stores may start having things that are selling out quickly shipped to them in larger quantities.

This isn’t like the potato famine or similar where the actual production was disrupted, or a war or natural disaster where supply chains are disrupted, leading to real shortages. Just people buying in larger quantities than stores have stocked for.

If you can’t get what you need today, it’ll be there tomorrow, etc. While the stock market has crashed, retail stores are seeing their biggest profits in years. They have every incentive to keep restocking and even to respond by stocking in larger quantities during this time.

They'll restock tomorrow and a large proportion of people who saw the empty shelves today will buy more than they would normally to make sure that they don't go without, leading to empty shelves, goto 10.

Supply chains are intact but they can't deal with this level of demand immediately and so there's going to be a period in which there are shortages. How long those shortages last depend not only demand but on other factors, e.g. how many people in the supply chain are directly or indirectly affected by the virus.

This assumes that people have infinite money, infinite demand, infinite space, and infinite time.

But there are diminishing marginal returns.

Check your local retailers today and see if they’re still sold out of toilet paper.

Less trips to the supermarket, less chances to get infected.

Ha, I'm seeing the same thing over here in NL. All the bread and milk gone, while there's plenty of canned food. No toilet paper, pre-packaged meals and other processed foods, but plenty of fruits and veggies. People are weird.

Buying 6 months of toilet paper is not preparing themselves to have food for 2 weeks. Your argument would be good if they were buying food, but they are not.

You can freeze bread for weeks, maybe even months and even preserve freshness.

While that is certainly true, if things were to get dire enough that bread is no longer available, I do not think you could count on having electricity, either.

This is a global pandemic with a death rate of <1% to 6% depending on the place. The world isn't ending. Electricity isn't going away. Neither is bread. The whole idea is to not have to go to the store and expose oneself to the virus. It's not the zombie apocalypse or whatever dumb thing the people hoarding toilet paper think it is.

You are talking as though the world is going to end for 2 weeks. It’s not

One of my colleagues has been infected, it's another department, so we aren't doing home office yet, but if just one of the people I came in direct contact with was also infected, I have to stay at home for two weeks. I get grounded for 2 weeks, I can't even go outside to buy food. That's a real possibility for me.

No, the world isn't going to end for 2 weeks, but I might run out of food during that time. And I don't want that.

People think it cannot affect them until it does.

You can easily freeze bread.

Better still, you can easily bake bread. White flour lasts for years if stored well, dry yeast lasts as long. Add some rye, oats, muesli, nuts and/or other random kitchen finds to create something akin to whole-grain bread. Add boiled grits or ground boiled pasta to create a more moist loaf. I've been baking my own bread since high school (i.e. for about 40 years) and see no reason to stop doing so. It also gives you something to do while waiting out the quarantine...

Yes. Great bread recipe linked below. You may never go back to store bought. It has non-laborious kneading, you just leave it overnight.

http://chefmichaelsmith.com/recipe/country-bread-city-bread/

You can also easily make bread if you have an oven. This recipe requires flour, salt, yeast, and water, almost no work, and time.

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/11376-no-knead-bread

I've been baking more in the past week than in the past five years. Being cooped up at home goes better with fresh bread every day.

We buy bread in bulk when it's on sale, and freeze it. When we pull out a loaf, it goes in the fridge, where we keep it.

Even if you skip the freezer, keep it in the fridge. Cold temperatures extend its shelf life.

Bread goes stale faster in the fridge.

Not been my experience in the 20 years I've been doing it. Perhaps it depends on the type of bread?

This. Take your slices out of the freezer in the evening and you get your good bread for breakfast or later the next day.

For bread that isn't sliced thick, I've found that it thaws remarkably fast. 10-15 minutes on a paper towel on the counter is enough.

Or just right into the toaster directly from the freezer, works great

Ok, true. Many people have a big freezer.

Although not in Europe were the virus is about to peak in the coming two weeks. The average freezer and refrigerator is much smaller here.

This is why we (as Europeans, Dutch) bought an American fridge. So we can store large amounts of food. We buy certain things when they're on sale, in large amounts. There's much less choice available of American fridges (especially if you have other requirements such as amount of dB). It saves us money on the longer term.

The average european is smaller than the average american, so there is that :)

... wider than ...

Yes it is a panic. If you've seen some of the photos of supermarkets where people are rushing to grab everything before anyone else and there's stuff scattered all over the floor.

It's poor behavior, illogical, and doesn't help the situation. This isn't armaggedon, it's a slightly worse flu and if you're not old (70+) or immunocompromised you're going to be fine. Anyway, if you're 70+ getting a flu is bad news in any other year (60k people in the US die every year of flu!), nothing really changed except every flu death is now front page news. This isn't a zombie apocalypse, people are blowing this massively out of proportion.

> it's a slightly worse flu

There are two key differences here:

1. The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus currently appears to have a death rate 7 to 20 times higher than typical seasonal flus, and the death rate gets worse without medical care (and later in the illness).

2. Nobody has any existing antibodies against the coronavirus, so it can infect more people than a seasonal flu.

We have seen in China and Italy that this virus can push health care systems to the point of collapse. And Italy can expect to see 3x the current patient load even if their shutdown has mostly stopped the virus.

Estimates from the CDC say that the US risks up to 1.7 million dead if we don't slow the spread of the disease. Other estimates suggest closer to 480,000 dead unless we take measures. That's out of 325 million, so yes, most people would survive.

The good news is that this isn't the zombie apocalypse or (for Steven King fans) Captain Trips. But unless everyone is missing something important in the numbers, this could be closr to 1918.

Exponential growth (or even sigmoid curves) can be nasty.

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