The Threat of Panic Buying

As Japan works to recover from Friday’s earthquake, something serious is going on in the Kanto region. Hundreds of miles from the earthquake-damaged northern region, people are engaging in ridiculous amounts of panic buying. Although there may be strong aftershocks, it is highly doubtful that any would be strong enough to endanger the lives of people out here. Still, a lot of them are shopping like the apocalypse is upon us:

• The shelves of supermarkets and convenience stores are becoming empty. On Saturday, basic essentials such as bread, rice, water, and noodles were sold out. The panic buying continues, spreading to different kinds of food. My supermarket’s shelves have not been stripped of meat, cookies, curry, spaghetti sauce, potato chips, soda, juice, frozen food, and noodles.

• Batteries and cell phone chargers are sold out everywhere.
• Following the earthquake, many people rushed to gas stations to fill up their cars. The gas stations in my area had been out of gas since Saturday morning. They were re-supplied some time last night. As of 9:00AM, there was a line of about 30 cars waiting to fill their tanks. High octane fuel had already run out, and the supply of regular gasoline will probably be gone by the time this blog post goes live.

It is hard to understand why so much panic buying is taking place. If people are expecting another disaster, why are they buying items that would require electricity or gas to cook, such as frozen food and meat?

The panic buying of gasoline is especially worrisome. How can we expect new deliveries of food to supermarkets if consumers are hoarding all the gas? I really hope that most food suppliers have their own independent fuel delivery and storage facilities, because any business that relies on normal gas stations is going to have serious problems.

The people who are hoarding gasoline might rest easy knowing that their parked cars have full tanks of gas, but their actions are probably only prolonging shortages of food.

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