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Comment by mordechai9000 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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