There wasn't really much of a shortage though - at any given time there were warehouses full of residential toilet paper, what their wasn't was capacity to keep supermarket shelves stocked when regular customers all suddenly doubled their purchasing pattern.

A supermarket stocks maybe 150 packs but sees well over that in foot traffic per day: if a relatively small number of people simultaneously think "hmm, I might need more this week" then it's pretty easy to empty the shelves.

This of course gets compounded by the group of craven **holes who decided "this is my time to get rich!" and also realized it's not that expensive to buy out every pack in a store because toilet paper is not expensive.

The well managed supermarkets reacted to this by doing per customer day by day rationing, which smoothed shelf stock levels out a lot almost immediately: if there was a problem, it's that we don't have enough automated systems to detect and level this off: it's pretty reasonable in fact to have basic prohibitions against single purchasers buying "wholesale" level quantities out from supermarkets, and directing them to the regular supply chain system when they try.

Luckily, diarrhea is/was not a Covid symptom, else things could have been a lot worse.