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0 pointsthroaway465464y ago0 comments

>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.

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consp4y ago

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.

throaway46546OP4y ago

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.

dagw4y ago

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.

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multjoy4y ago

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.

noneeeed4y ago

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.

earthboundkid4y ago

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.

croutonwagon4y ago

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-...

mmarq4y ago

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.

djrogers4y ago

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

ajsnigrutin4y ago

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.

macrolime4y ago

Yeast also ran out in Northern Europe.

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