The downvotes is for calling panic buying selfish. You can't simultaneously tell people to stay at home for long periods of time and tell them to not stock up for that.
Google the "Bullwhip Effect" to get an idea of how disruptive this bahiour can be, for everyone. And if individual behaviour has negative impacts on others, yes it's selfish.
Supply will be kept open, quarantine or not. Italy and China are the best examples, groccery stoes and pharmacies remained open. It is much harder to do that, so, if everybody goes panic shopping before. So please, don't do that.
>> You can't simultaneously tell people to stay at home for long periods of time and tell them to not stock up for that.
Nobody is telling people to stay at home for long periods of time. If you think you have the disease you need to quarantine for a couple of weeks. That doesn't require a lot of stocking up. In Italy, where they are in 'lockdown', grocery stores remain open along with other essential services. So panic buying is unnecessary, causing shortages that are unnecessary and causing problems for people who aren't panic buying.
Companies are _requiring_ people to work from home, childcare options are closing, schools are closing, businesses are cutting staff and hours, and there are public bans on large gatherings and urgings to stay home so that even if you are asymptomatic or healthy, you don’t risk accidentally contributing the spread to immunocompromised or elderly people.
If you think you only need to budget supplies for two weeks, you’re just wrong. You need to budget for _months_, and likely need to budget many supplies you otherwise wouldn’t have needed, like increased food for daily breakfasts and lunches for a whole family who otherwise would have been at school / work drawing those supplies from elsewhere.
While I agree the panic buying is harmful & we could ration and space it out with less shock to supply chains, I also think the behavior of everyday people facing the sudden prospect of a large family consuming toilet paper, 3 full meals, soap, medicine, etc., for an indefinite number of weeks ahead, it’s totally understandable and not even remotely “selfish.”
>> If you think you only need to budget supplies for two weeks, you’re just wrong. You need to budget for _months_
Can you back this up at all? As I explained in my comment, Italy, one of the worst hit countries globally (and on 'lockdown') has grocery stores still functioning. The idea that people will be required to not leave their homes for months is fear mongering , impossible to enforce, and even in the worst case scenario people simply won't do it - they'll go stir crazy and give up a lot quicker than they think.
Saying “can you back this up at all” in response to this is just glib rhetoric. There’s no published standard of evidence for this, by very definition of the type of event (panic).
When you buy a stockpile of supplies, it is for contingency, not immediate threat. You are not accounting for this.
If the probability of being home quarantined is, say, 1%-5%, that’s huge and requires stockpiling at least some supplies. The grocery stores functioning today has literally nothing to do with it. That’s not fear mongering.
In the absence of hard data on the probability of home quarantine, then what do you recommend people do? Prepare for a worst case scenario? Act like nothing will happen? Somewhere in between (but where exactly, and why?)
I’ll reiterate, your responses so far are just glib rhetoric. Unless you can provide a reason why people shouldn’t prepare for a worst case scenario (knowing it’s unlikely to get that bad, but better to have the supplies if it does), it’s extremely disingenuous of you to brandish such moralistic grandstanding judgment towards people trying to prepare for an emergency.
Ideally we would all have our own stocks of essentials that we build up gradually over time during normal circumstances. Unfortunately this is both difficult for some people, and antithetical to the modern trend of urban minimalism.
