Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Covid lockdowns have a a lot to do with that too.

People used to spent their money in restaurants, bars, cinemas, theaters, parties, festivals, massages, hairdressers, and a bunch of other services. If you add lockdowns, many things happen:

* people have leftover money, that they instead spend on "things"... and since they're used to using less services, this is also true for some time after the lockdowns

* If you're stuck at home, you'll buy stuff that makes that nice... a better tv, a game console,...

* Some lockdown policies directly affect your 'need for stuff' - school from home? Kids need their own PCs, you need to buy a scanner and a printer for them,...

* People working from home also have more free time, and decide to do the long delayed house work and projects - so people buy more construction materials (also people want houses outside of cities, because it's nicer to be there during lockdowns), so prices of that go up too

* and last but not least, manufacturers fuck up their orders, don't have stock buffers, and fail horribly

You can easily see the massive increase in savings in data from the Fed (for the U.S., at least):

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=ysLo

Typical growth in household checkable deposits/currency/savings deposits was around $500 billion/year during the mid-2010's. last year it was... $2.6 trillion

$2.6T... good lord. I wonder whether it will level off at $500B/y again?

>Some lockdown policies directly affect your 'need for stuff'

I think this was the root cause of the toilet paper shortage. People who normally spend a large portion of the day at the office were now spending that time at home. There was a popular viral video at the time of a man driving around on a forklift in a warehouse full of toilet paper laughing about the shortage, but it was all commercial toilet paper not what you would use at home. Anecdotally I noticed a correlation between the level of traffic on the freeway and the amount of toilet paper on store shelves. When the freeways were empty the shelves were bare and as traffic started picking back up the shelves started replenishing.

After the panic buy I've never seen a toilet paper shortage anymore. I therefore doubt your theory of correlation. Maybe it was so in the us but it definitely does not correlate for everyone.

It took forever for it to get back to normal here. There was limited TP available after the initial panic, but it took months to get anything decent on the shelves. I was ordering it online for a while.

48-72 hours after the initial panic my local large food store had literally more toilet paper on the shelves than I have ever seen in there before. However it was all super low quality and from brands I've never seen before or since.

John Wayne toilet paper... it’s rough, tough and doesn't take shit off anybody.

Nothing captured my imagination and horror more than an advertisement I once saw for "splinter-free" toilet paper.

Back when I used to use toilet paper, I would sometimes encounter a kind which would fall apart while I was still wiping, breaking up into a bunch of tiny "rollies" which would, as you may guess, would remain stuck to my butt. It was one of the "extra soft" brands, I think.

It's the cheap stuff that you normally find in the bathroom at an average office building, fast food place, etc.

With the world shutting down the companies that supply those kinds of places had a warehouse full of inventory and most of their usual customers either were entirely shut or going through a lot less product.

I'll wager your grocery store called one of them up and got a few pallets to resell, creative move on their part.

The root cause is that toilet paper is bulky and the stores simply didn’t carry as much of it as (say) tinned goods.

It didn’t take a big demand increase to start seeing gaps in shelves, and once that happened a degree of panic took hold and even though there was plenty in stock in warehouses, it wasn’t able to be distributed fast enough.

The difficulty is that the big supermarkets have got their supply chain down to a fine art and it only takes a small fraction of people to start buying an extra here and an extra there for it to start having an impact and they then have to struggle to keep up.

People really underestimate how small the slack is/was in parts of the supply chain.

I remember a couple of years ago when we had a lot of snow (for England) and it kiboshed the supply of things like milk and bread for about a week, even once all the roads were clear.

You only need a chunk of people to buy a few more toilet rolls than they usually would "just in case" and suddenly the shelves are empty.

Toilet paper is bulky for a store, but it's non-perishable, so under normal circumstances people buy a couple of month supply and return to the store when it runs low. The COVID shock meant that everyone replenished their TP supply at once, which screwed up the system by increasing demand x10.

Plus the commercial domestic imbalance.

That and I believe I read that most people used the stimulus to paid down/off debt [1][2]. I would suspect at least a portion of those used that opportunity to also take on more debt down the line as jobs came back

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/03/many-american...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/half-of-americans-used-1400-...

The causes of the lockdown shortages are cultural, toilet paper disappeared in Northern European and English speaking countries, while in Italy (and I think in some places in Spain) yeast could not be found.

Yeast and flour were gone in the US as well (at least where I live).

yeast was hone in slovenia too...

People were afraid they won't be able to buy bread, so they bought flour and yeast... then bought bread, and eventually threw away the yeast.

Yeast also ran out in Northern Europe.

I can confirm that lockdowns made our family save a lot more money then usual - despite us buying quite a lot of new stuff do to lifestyle changes.

My experience supports that - on public transit alone our family saved more than 5k USD last year, it would’ve more than made up for any equipment I would’ve had to buy (turned out though that I already had everything needed to work from home).

because of remote work, I have to heat the house 7 days per week, instead of about 0.25*5+2=3.25 => that's about twice as much. Given the rise in energy cost, this will have a huge impact.

At the same time that is largely a problem of the colder areas. In more sane (temperature wise) places, that energy cost is negligible.

Also, that assumes you are the only one (or the other person (s) in the house have very similar schedules) in the house. An assumption which if you have a house wife and a few kids, is largely invalid

Reply on news.ycombinator.com