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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

The run on toilet paper started here (San Francisco Bay area) a week ago when the shelter-in-place order was announced. I figured I'd wait for stores to be restocked, since by then all the hoarders wouldn't need to go out an buy more. But I went out yesterday and the TP shelves were still empty. No pasta either. Canned tomatoes and coconut milk (which we cook with a lot in our house) are all gone too.

Happily, we were reasonably well stocked before this all hit the fan, but I'm a little surprised to still see empty shelves after a week. How long does it typically take to restock non-perishables?

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Here in Australia, one of the major supermarket chains (Coles) made a statement about this. They said their biggest week of the year is the Christmas week. They spend 6 months preparing for this. Each of the last 3 weeks has essentially been a Christmas shopping week. That's the scale of the problem.

We have enough food and supplies. We have the distribution to get it to stores. We have the capability to sell it in store. The only scarcity we have is because of the hoarders. That hoarding and resulting scarcity is creating more hoarders.

It's textbook illusion of scarcity.

Great point — also this season is the nadir of retailing. Everyone is broke from Christmas until March/April and companies shit their lines down to start making new product.

>shit their lines down

I'm not sure if that was meant to be a deliberate pun or just a fortuitous typo, but it fits here.

No it doesn't

Definitely a typo. My apologies.

The secondary hoarders-- those who hoard because others have hoarded-- are in some ways behaving rationally too: Try to buy your normal rate of toilet paper and find it gone; then you search and search; when you finally find some you don't know when you might do so again, so you need to buy extra.

It doesn't seem like a problem that will be solved until, gradually, everyone has plenty and most stores are stocked. That seems to be how things abated in 1973, over a few months.

The rational way to behave is to not live roll to roll, so to speak. A well stocked pantry won't have trouble in a scare because... well it will have stock.

Few things suck so much time away as having to go out for X because you've run out.

In other news I've got fourteen pounds of beans if anybody wants any.

> The rational way to behave is to not live roll to roll, so to speak. A well stocked pantry won't have trouble in a scare because... well it will have stock.

Just-in-time manufacturing succeeded because supply chains became reliable enough that factories didn't need their own stockpiles. If you're out in the country and you have a big pantry then sure, stock up, but those of us living in the city may not have space. And even if you do have space, if everyone realises they have no stock and decides to buy up a month's supply, that has pretty much the same practical impact as hoarding.

"Hoarding" is just a smear word on building an emergency buffer just-in-time. Or, JIT supply chains extend all the way to end-consumer, so let's not act surprised that a spike in demand due to perceived risk increase breaks everything up the chain. This should've been conpensated for in the chain.

no, "hoarding" in this sense isn't a smear word on a buffer, it's buying 4/5/6x your normal buffer, to the point that people who haven't hoarded are now starting to be left without. I have a 48sqm apartment with 2 adults and a dog. we only _just_ have enough space for 3 weeks worth of all supplies. we're now running low on the things that people started panic buying a month ago, because of hoarding, not because of buffering.

> I have a 48sqm apartment with 2 adults and a dog. we only _just_ have enough space for 3 weeks worth of all supplies

I have a 44sqm apartment with 2 adults, an infant and a cat, and we've managed to fit a month's worth of supplies in a single wardrobe. I don't think space is a problem (weight is, OTOH).

Suddenly stocking to up to 6 months of everything? That's hoarding. Building a month's worth? That's a minimum if you want to stay safe in case you and your family get quarantined, and your normal buffer should be around that anyway, regardless of the pandemic.

If everyone who didn't have a stash before is suddenly stocking up for a months supply of everything, you get shortages. The right way to build up your supplies is slowly over time.

Indeed FEMA is now asking that folks only buy a weeks worth of groceries: https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/23/coronavirus-new-guide...

Over here in Germany the recommendation has always been to have supplies for 10-14 days at home. Seems like a more reasonable number than a months worth - especially for city dwellers.

That's indeed the right solution. But it needs to be enforced by the stores - as many do now, with per-customer purchase limits.

> the recommendation has always been to have supplies for 10-14 days at home. Seems like a more reasonable number than a months worth - especially for city dwellers.

That's a nice recommendation for a calm time, but a bit short for the pandemic. If you get quarantined, you need to stay put for 14-21 days. Add a bit of padding to account for undersupplied stores (and to add a margin for error), and you arrive at 1 month's worth.

We've seen this coming since at least early February. That's exactly when I started stocking up, buying ~2x amounts of non-perishables (e.g. 2 packages of pasta) instead of waiting for the impending hoarder shitstorm at the very last minute. I forget where I read this recommendation (WHO?), but it has definitely paid off, I haven't been to the store in almost 2 weeks :)

That assumes you have absolutely zero access to groceries for those 14-21 days. But there are still delivery services and neighbors. In Germany, city governments have actually delivered food to those quarantined.

I'd say that's a safe assumption to make. On top of that, even contactless delivery by via service or neighbour has nonzero risk of communicating the disease (in either direction), so it's worth minimizing the need for it.

Interesting. Here in Norway the recommendation has been to keep supplies for 3 days, including water, power supplies (battery banks), a radio with full batteries, heating and cooking possibilities and so on.

I agree with you. People have been hating so much on hoarders, while not acknowledging that the real problem is that people are way too reliant on a just-in-time supply chain. It's really not that difficult, expensive, or space-consuming to have a buffer of at least one month for scenarios like this. Yet, most people don't build up this buffer over time, out of laziness, and then they go around blaming others for the shortages during a crisis (or they go panic-hoarding themselves).

I used to go to work every weekday, and eat 2 meals there. Now I'm at home 24/7, so I'm already eating 5x the amount (before this, I would barely eat at home). Also, my girlfriend is here with me. I used to have a many months' worth of stock in the pantry, but now it turns out that it's just enough for two weeks.

Having a buffer is fine, but only starting to build up your buffer when everybody else does so as well is not. Everyone could've kept a month's supply of toilet paper on hand already. We've had an emergency supply of food and water (should last about a week?) for a couple of months now. I mean a few years ago we had months of drought, the tap never stopped but in some areas pressure was reduced, so it can happen to anyone.

My complaint is that I see people screaming "hoardres" where what really happens is someone buying an extra day's or two worth of supplies, and/or are buying for themselves and the extended family. Maybe things have changed now, but around me, most ruckus about hoarding was made by people who thought COVID-19 is just a flu and were inconvenienced by queues. People who couldn't understand that you need a buffer.

perhaps correctly a smear word, since you should have built your buffer up ahead of time?

Well, if the Lean methodology is so great for the entire supply chain, why it suddenly shouldn't be applied to the last link - the consumer? Building up a buffer is against just-in-time principle :P.

(The truth is, JIT supply chains simply aren't designed to survive events like a global pandemic. They're control systems overtuned to extract the last bits of efficiency from trade, and fall into bad oscillations when disruptions happen. As we can see today.)

> In other news I've got fourteen pounds of beans if anybody wants any.

Let your neighbors know, and be sure to tell them that there is no condition to wanting to eat them. Many people are going to go more hungry in the coming weeks or months, and helping those around us is one of the best ways to apply surplus.

the rational way to live is to live in a big enough domicile that you can have reliably stocked up with 3 weeks of what you need of any item at all times.

but maybe our world is not structured for maximal rationality.

Personally I think 640 sheets is enough for anyone, however, rationality isn't rational at the moment.

Since The Thing is exponential there is a worst-case-scenario that everyone on the entire planet will have it by the middle of May, if not before.

So correctly assuming that you are the last person to get it, then you will need eight rolls of bathroom tissue. This will see you through to the calamity and through two weeks of self isolation to either recover or die.

If living in a house of two adults with two point two children, one dog and two cats, then you are going to need four of those nine roll packs to see The Thing through.

This has some contingency for problems of localised flooding in your bathroom, a stomach bug or children that are secretly selling your supplies.

Plus this allows for extra supplies in case vulnerable locked-down Baby Boomers run out in your neighbourhood and need the folding stuff.

Given that the hoarding mentality is growing at an exponential rate and that every tree on the planet could be cut down for bathroom tissue in a month's time, the people buying dozens of rolls are arguably behaving in a rational manner.

> A well stocked pantry

Most ordinary people don’t have the luxury of a house with a pantry. And many people can only afford what they need each week so can’t stock up even if they had somewhere to store it.

There simply would’ve been no place to put bulk toilet paper in my 600/700 sq foot one bedroom in Seattle. Lots of people live in even smaller spaces.

I’ve lived this small and you get clever. I put things in storage under my bed, in my bookshelf, and in boxes in my closet. Worst case, I would just stack them in the open or on counters, behind the sink, and on window ledges

Whether or not you have a purpose built pantry is mostly just a reflection of the age of the building you live in.

A lot of bottom dollar apartments wind up having unintentional pantries because they wind up dividing a floor of an existing building in such a way that you wind up with a closet in the kitchen.

"Pantry" being a metaphor for whatever you have stored away, not a physical room. Regardless of your income unless it is extremely low or you are unemployed, whether or not you live paycheck to paycheck is a function of your decisions, not of your income. You will, in fact, have a considerably larger amount of money to spend, if you don't waste it on small volume frequent purchases.

In Australia here too.

Supermarkets have introduced limits on the number of toilet roll packets you can buy (which is sensible).

However, last weekend I was at the supermarket when it opened, and I observed something I haven't seen noted elsewhere.

Manufactures seem only to be shipping enormous packages of toilet paper (24 packs). This means people buy 1 packet of 24 rolls, because that is all that is available. These huge packets also take more shelf space, which results in more shortages.

Some smaller, independent supermarkets have taken to re-packaging the rolls into smaller packets, which is a win/win for both the shop and the consumer.

But the manufacturer behaviour is interesting and unfortunate.

There's another side to this. I've seen footage of this on the news. People will buy their per customer limits, throw it into their cars and queue up again. Rinse and repeat. The footage I saw of this was toilet paper. Some people.

Costco does similar limitz I wish they used member id as the limit, not the checkout Id...

I think most people are happy to buy a 24 pack at the moment (and would probably buy multiples of smaller packs otherwise), and it's probably easier to distribute only 24-packs than a mix of sizes. I'm all for manufacturers prioritising throughput over convenience for the duration of the crisis.

Except that means that less households get supply, which forces them into more extreme measures.

People are happy to buy anything at the moment. Making sure each household can get supply seems like it should be a priority.

You're assuming people don't split with friends downstream.

Not really.

I think that happens, but from observation it's a downstream event usually in reaction to shortages one of the friends is having.

Manufacturing output is already at 100%. They don't have much more capacity to add and TP is already cheap and fast to produce.

What they're doing is shifting production to focus on large bulk sizes and more TP instead of other paper items.

We were lucky to have bought a 6-pack of triple-length rolls of TP right before the drought hit, but it's been a few weeks not and every time I've been to the shop the TP shelves have been bare.

A checkout girl told me they restock overnight and every day it's gone within two hours of opening (although that was before they brought in the dedicated AM shopping hour for the seniors/disabled to get their supplies).

I also think there are now a couple of new factors affecting it. With people staying at home, the demand of toilet paper has shifted to the home more. People might be limiting their trips to the shop and are bulk buying more. But I agree the hoarding is still creating a shortage of toilet paper (and pasta, meat etc). It will be good when people have enough and we see things stocked on the shelves like normal. Although with potential businesses closing or enforced self isolation, I can't see the shelves looking normal for a while. Been a run on bottle shops, Bunnings etc as well.

It's been interesting to see what gets sold out, there is still plenty of canned tuna etc, but no lemon juice (but there is lime juice). Didn't realise people used lemon juice so much.

> With people staying at home, the demand of toilet paper has shifted to the home more.

This. TP consumption is unchanged per day. But the proportion of consumed TP that is consumed at retail must be up 30-50%. Nearly nobody is using their work/school/restaurant's TP that comes in giant rolls or in a cardboard box without a UPC code.

Same for tomato sauce: Most people don't want the 10# cans that food-service used to buy. Or the barrels that a pizza shop would buy. Grocery stores probably don't have a SKU for those. Could be a different packaging factory entirely.

A local restaurant has been offering a roll of TP per take out order. I thought it was a nice gesture but hadn’t considered that it reflects this shift in demand from businesses to homes.

Yeah, I'm guessing that while it's for marketing value, they're not buying that TP - the source is their own stock which they can't use now that the venue itself is closed.

What I found interesting was as the run on toilet paper began, people in my office started to spread the good word about bidets, and then a couple of days later, sure enough, those were selling out on Amazon.

Which is amazing because bidets are very far from being a thing in the US.

Panic buying seems to transfer easily to many products-- now that a quinine-related drug had some good press as a potential treatment, I can't find tonic water anywhere (except some really weird brands at like $12 for 4 small cans or bottles... Apparantly a gin boom has given rise to some niche high end tonic water too)

Does tonic water even have a theraputic dose of quinine anymore?

It's a therapeutic dose of gin that people really need right now.

Depending on your state, liquor stores may or may not be classified as essential businesses exempt from the mandatory lockdown.

I think limited to 20mg per 12 oz now, so way too little for malaria treatment I think. Maybe it has some preventative effect at that dose?

> Does tonic water even have a theraputic dose of quinine anymore?

It never did. It's poorly soluble in water, that's what the gin was for. If it's not pre-mixed, your tonic water has a negligible amount of quinine.

So if I was going to make an authentic, “Englishman wearing a pith helmet and trying not to get malaria”-style gin and tonic, how would I go about that?

Also, I thought the gin was for making the tonic water palatable. The tonic water I’ve had is pretty awful by itself and the gin definitely brings something to the table in terms of moderating the flavor. I have to imagine that any tonic that actually worked would taste even worse.

I noticed that ginger and turmeric became totally unavailable in Ireland two weeks ago (which was when the government started telling people to work from home if possible and introducing restrictions). I suspect because people have been claiming (incorrectly) that they help with coronavirus. They're back now, but it really doesn't take much change in consumer behaviour to cause shortages.

Sucks for people whose favorite cocktail (much needed in these times) is a gin and tonic. Especially because the niche high end tonic waters are usually rubbish for a G&T. Luckily I've got a bag of cinchona bark i've been meaning to make tonic out of for a year or so now...

There's probably not much of a stockpile for those in the first place. They would sell out quickly on any increased demand.

The Google Trends chart for "bidet" seems to reflect this as well: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=bidet&geo=US

In a bind, you can cobble an emergency bidet / ass wash together from a bottle of water with a hole in the cap.

Or jump in the shower.

*walk-in bidet

This is just speculation, but I think people are continuing to overbuy toilet paper in fear of a further shortage. So it's a kind of vicious circle. Consumers are afraid toilet paper will be unavailable, because consumers keep buying up all the available toilet paper as soon as it hits the shelves.

If everyone bought the normal amount we'd be fine... Except the high risk and elderly, who should restrict their movement even more carefully and not go shopping as much, and so actually need a deeper stock of TP (and other normal grocery items)

Why is it that only those at highest risk of dying should be the only not taking risks shopping? It as not as if shopping is any safer than any other activity, it is just necessary. Would it not be better for everyone if shopping was done once a month now (or some other longer period than normal), even for those with lower mortality rates? The word hoarding is thrown around a lot now without any specific numbers. Angela Merkel was seen buying 4 bottles of wine and one roll of toilet paper (which seems a low example to set). How many rolls is too much? Or more generally how much time is too much time to be prepared for without exposure to outside your household? I am not planning for the Apocalypse, but certainly want at least a month's supplies on hand to enable physical distancing to be more effective.

How many people are in your house? My family of 3 goes though about 1 roll per person in a week, and we aren’t super conservative about it, so a 12-18 pack should last us a month. Personally, I think it’s the people buying 4 24 roll packs (or an equivalent number) at a time for the same size family that need to calm down.

I wish my household had normal TP usage. My fiancée and I both have Crohn’s disease, we probably average a bit more than a roll per day for just the two of us. On top of this we both take immunosuppressants, so we are at very high risk right now. We bought an industrial size pack from Sams Club when things started to get bad, but now we are on “don’t think about leaving the house any more than taking the dog out” levels on advice from our doctors, and that pack is depleting more quickly than I see this dissipating. We have a friend that works at Walmart back home and he is going to see if he can purchase some for us then ship ~1000mi as no one else obviously has any for shipping

Have you considered a bidet?

Others with the disease strongly recommend them.

I don’t mind it, but my SO could never get used to it. We may be revisiting them soon though, thanks

Don't go out of house for toilet paper! Just use shower. It sucks. But struggling to breath sucks more.

>people buying 4 24 roll packs

While these are very visible events, do they actually have a significant contribution on the shortage compared to all the other shoppers having a slight increase in desire to buy toilet paper. It is possible even the visibility of the panic buyers loading up as much as possible has more of an impact than their actual purchase. Take someone who buys 8 of those mega packs. Plenty right. But the picture going around might convince hundreds that they should pick up a single pack when otherwise they would have waited until their existing stock was lower before restocking.

I'm guessing only someone with access to the actual store records would be able to pull a report to clarify one way or the other.

For example here, a large rice "manufacturer" (distributor?) at normal times has pre-orders from asia for deliveries 3 months in advance for typical amounts that are sold. If people start buying at 5-10x the normal rate, it will deplete the current stock quickly and it will take time to ramp up the deliveries and packaging. Also intermediate storage facilities and silos/packaging lines are not inflatable. So it's not all that easy to ramp up distribution 3x.

> a large rice "manufacturer" (distributor?)

Both concepts would seem to apply, and to be different people, but a rice manufacturer would usually be called a farmer.

Most rice farmers don't order their rice delivered from a different continent.

Well, they might, but they wouldn't be reselling rice they'd ordered. That would tend to defeat the idea of making your own rice.

More relevantly, it's not at all implausible for a farming operation to be selling rice on another continent, and to schedule shipments several months in advance.

Eh, nearly all rice that people buy is post-processed to various degrees (brown rice has the outer husk removed, white rice also has an inner layer removed), so manufacturing capacity is also a real concern.

In most if the world there had been a reduction in grain storage capacity, and may stores were knocked down and repurposed. We optimised into 'Just-in-time' supply chain so hard, there is no slack in the system to handle a crysis, it's too fragile.

After a couple of weeks, toilet paper seems to be back with a vengeance in Irish supermarkets; there's heaps of the stuff. And canned tomatoes are back. The panic buyers seem to have given up on it, and have moved onto weirder targets. Based on my visit to Tesco last night, the new hoarding targets seem to be lightbulbs and chewing gum, for some reason.

Your supermarkets are probably restocking this stuff every day, and possibly multiple times a day, but it doesn't take much change in buying patterns to cause temporary shortages.

I am thinking some of it has to do with the fact that more people are buying groceries now (rather than eating out) and groceries that are staples rather than buying a wider variety of food (stuff that lasts, is easy to make and is packaged so it can be cleaned easily).

It started long before then, I'm sure.

Statewide Shelter In Place was, what, Thursday AM the.. 19th? Bay area was Monday the 16th? I've been working from home since the 6th. At least a week before the 6th, my wife made a Costco run to make sure we were topped up on non-perishable stuff, and bought another "case" of TP even though we had almost an entire full one on hand. (usually we buy it once we get below 50, because we don't go to Costco very often). That was the extent of our "stocking up", but I think it happened in late Feb, and we were almost immediately hearing of others doing the same in the region.

Costco lines have been a thing for weeks. Which I didn't get; I popped into my local grocery store a few times (granted, in the morning) the week of the 9th, and it was always quite well-stocked, even as I was hearing of lines and chaos at Costco.

Granted, I went back on the afternoon of the 14th or 15th and it looked like it had been ransacked :) but until then, I thought the strategy was JUST DON'T GO TO COSTCO.

People are price-optimizing, not distance-optimizing, so the most hit are the large markets, which are usually the cheapest.

Why is there a run on toilet paper? The supply chain isn’t disrupted. Even if it is and there is a shortage, what’s the big deal if you run out and have to poop before you shower? How about instead of buying 40 pounds of toilet paper now, taking some of that money and time at home and installing a bidet? I have a Toto and it’s the best, I will never not have a bidet in my home. Do you wipe peanut butter off a plate with a napkin or do you rinse it with water? It’s a world of difference and uses 95% less toilet paper.

You're 100% right. My toilet paper usage is 1-2 squares per trip.

I'm something of a bidet evangelist, even in non-invisible-war times. A coworker mentioned the other day that bidets had long shipping delays.

I just looked on Amazon. There are no prime options, some are out of stock + the model I have is priced at least 2-2.5x higher than when I bought it a year or so ago.

The run on bidets must have started around the same time as the run on TP.

Crazy lol, never in a million years would I have thought my Toto would appreciate in value far more than my stock account.

Because the shelves are empty, I'm guessing far more reasonable people are thinking to just pick up a single pack when they do see a store stocked. Just in case they miscounted the amount they have at home. But when you count the number of items of TP on the shelves and compare it to the number of families, there is a large mismatch. Far more families than TP. So even a minority of those families making the quite reasonable 'buy one just in case, not like it will go bad' decision will quickly leave a store bare, meaning the rest of the day is filled with shoppers seeing bare shelves and thinking 'next time I see some, I should grab one just in case'.

While there are some panic buyers who are buying far more than just 1, I wonder if they are making as much an impact as all the non-panic buyers who are just picking up one just in case.

Maybe not, I could be off on the impact, but it does seem reasonable at first glance and explains why even purchase limits can have a hard time combating TP shortages in the short term.

Wish I'd taken a picture, but I saw multiple people standing in ridiculous lines to buy 2+ huge packs (lasts my family of 8 a month) of toilet paper, 2+ packs of paper towels (lasts my family of 8 at least 2 months) and 4+ cases of water (we go through about 1 a week).

These people must not be regulars because they weren't using the scan and go app and were waiting in the huge lines for at least 30-40 minutes minimum. Many of them had nothing else in the carts.

I suspect I go through about 4 rolls of paper towels per day with a family of 14. Clearly you have a low per-person rate of usage.

Are you talking about normal paper towel rolls that are about an inch and a half from core to edge, or "super" rolls that are closer to double that size (and feel much denser). These are about the size of the bounty double rolls. I could go through several of the smaller cheaper rolls also.

It's a really rough estimate, but I mean something like the largest bounty rolls with normal density.

yes, we're frugal with paper towels.

My local shop seems to have had the presence of mind to order extra beforehand, they had a pallet of TP out and they had it on sale as well - but it was the smaller packet, so not the most economic anyway. Anyway that shop hasn't had a shortage as far as I know.

But yeah same, I would've expected things to have calmed down by now - how much toilet paper can people hoard? That's not even the main issue, we're still having problems finding fresh produce and meat and the like. I mean sure, some (like bread) can be explained by more people working from home (we like our lunch sandwiches), but people should still be eating dinner as normal.

The statistics are that grocery shops are seeing 35% more revenue, bigger even than around christmas.

But again, I hope things settle down a bit once people realize they can't physically cram more supplies into their house. After this I think we'll see a big decline in e.g. toilet paper because people have stocked up on so much.

In terms of grocery stores seeing more revenue, This is likely largely explained by a shift in spending of food dollars from restaurants to grocery stores. You go to work, you generally buy lunch somewhere, and people can't go out to eat anymore. Delivery still exists, but I wonder how they are doing- there is a general sense of fear around having people come to your house.

I would only actually cook maybe 1.5 meals a week at home before this- lunch was served at my job, Friday/Saturday we would go out to eat, I would cook on Sunday and snack on whatever during the week.

Interestingly enough, even at the height of this craze, the Asian markets were well-stocked.

Not sure about other countries in Asia, but here in Thailand every toilet has a sprayer next to it. You get a lot cleaner and use a lot less toilet paper. So no TP panic here. If I ever move back to the US I will definitely install one.

The way I understand it, they're talking about asian (super-)markets, not the marktes of Asia.

At least that's the way here in Germany. While flour, toilet paper, some sorts of canned food and random other stuff is sold out in most super markets, the small turkish shop down the street has everything in stock.

On just toilet paper, or everything? It looks like S.Korea has remained calm pretty much the whole way through.

I think GP means Asian supermarkets in the US, places like H-Mart.

Non-Asian people haven't been raiding them because a) they either never knew or simply forgot these stores even exist or b) because racists think they're more likely to catch covid from anything Asian.

Well let's hope sanity prevails in a few small pockets like that at least. This whole thing is bad enough without further avoidable problems.

I've heard some truckers on radio shows saying that it's typically a three day window between restocking a particular product type at any given grocery store. I've also heard the toilet paper manufacturers saying that there's no shortage in supply. However, from what I'm seeing in my area and hearing of in other areas, either the truckers or the manufacturers (or both) are incorrect.

Buy and install one of those hand faucets. It's cleaner anyways and you'd need way less toilet paper (pretty much only used to make sure everything is clean and to dry a bit): https://www.amazon.in/b?ie=UTF8&node=10079354031

If you stop eating junk food, you only need a make sure everything is clean and wipe a bit.

It took about a week for retailers in the midwestern US to restock and put buying limits in place on TP and staple foods. The buying limits (i.e. limit 2 packages of 12 rolls of TP) were pretty sensible, and for the most part, solved the problem here. It was surreal seeing 1/2 empty shelves at grocery stores, though.

The limits on staple foods are hitting me hard. There is no adjustment for family size. I have 12 kids.

I grabbed all the sliced mild cheddar cheese, which was only about ten half-pound packages. We could go through that in 3 to 10 days, depending on what people feel like eating. The cashier took away all but two packages. I don't even have enough to make toasted cheese sandwiches for my family.

I was planning to buy 6 gallons of milk, which is pretty normal for me. It might last 2 days at my house, so it really isn't much. The limit was just 2 gallons! This means I have to keep going back to the store, sometimes more than once per day, risking virus exposure each time. I managed a small violation by putting two gallons on the checkout conveyor belt and then, a full cart and hundreds of dollars latter, two more gallons. The argument over cheese probably helped the cashier to forget the 2 gallons already bagged.

Fortunately, there didn't seem to be any limits aside from dairy and bread. I got a couple large whole turkeys (each good for one meal plus a bit for soup), a whole chicken (lunch), and a large pork roast. I got a 19-pound jackfruit.

They are restocking quite frequently but most stores sell out almost immediately after opening in the morning.

My guess is that TP is low margin for the volume it takes on the truck. Better to ship over canned goods or cleaning wipes.

Now all of the Diet Coke is being hoarded too. Hoarding has finally gone too far.

I know, right? The first time I went out they were sold out of Nutella! We are truly witnessing the fall of western civilization.

I'm starting to see the point of a whole food plant based diet.

That shit has negative value

Here in Canada, lots of out-of-stock items are returning to shelves. Not all of them, but my grocery store has had toilet paper all week and they got flour/pasta recently too

I live in a heavily impacted area for the virus, and am myself high risk, so we're doing all shopping online. All local supermarkets are still booked for deliveries a week in advance, and no store with local delivery has had any tp in the last two weeks, so we may still have a while more to wait as confirmed cases increase ~45% each day, further panicking people, along with those that hadn't panicked yet.

In Chicago, the stores still have Kleenex, so it can't be too bad out there.

Depends on the place. My Jewel (in Chicago) was good on tissues and out of toilet paper up until yesterday when it was out of both.

Maybe get a physical newspaper subscription? I hear that's what people used for TP in the old days...

I know this is a joke, but please don't do this. Sure, people used to use newspapers & the Sear's catalog, but they were also using outhouses.

Newspaper will clog plumbing, and it is not fun to deal with.

Not sure if maybe this is a generational thing or what but...

I used paper towels, newspapers, and magazines all the time as a kid when we ran out at home and never once clogged anything as far as I can remember.

There is also the option of throwing the used paper in the trash. This is standard practice in Mexico and I assume many other places with poor water pressure.

Also in SF Bay Area (in The City). We have TP in the grocery stores.

My exact situation in the midwest as well.

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