Where is the panic in “panic buying”? Consumer purchases at the outset of the COVID pandemic

Abstract

The declaration of the COVID pandemic in March 2020 was immediately followed by news media accounts of “panic buying.” However, this term is problematic because it implicitly assumes that people engage in indiscriminate consumer product purchases that are motivated solely by extreme fear. Contrary to the implicit assumptions of “panic buying,” this study's examination of consumer product purchases by 435 households found that respondents drew clear distinctions among four activities (observed shortages, own consumption changes, own stockpiling, and others’ stockpiling) related to six consumer product categories (fresh produce, fresh meat, nonperishable food, cleaning supplies, sanitary supplies, and nonprescription medications). The results show that own stockpiling has moderately positive correlations with own consumption changes and is as strongly related to optimism and anger as to fear. Own stockpiling also has positive correlations with perceptions of others’ stockpiling, reliance on informal information sources, and observed shortages. Unexpectedly, own stockpiling has positive correlations with positive disaster stereotypes rather than negative disaster stereotypes, and is unrelated to expected pandemic duration, authoritative information sources, demographic characteristics, and routine stockpiling. The results suggest that the term “panic buying” should be replaced by “crisis stockpiling,” which avoids unnecessary erroneous inferences about the motivation for that behavior.