Panic Buying – Consumer Behavior

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, pictures of empty shelves of what once were aisles of toilet paper, instant noodles and bread spread throughout social media. People were standing in line at cashiers with their trolleys of toilet paper and dried food. It seems almost ridiculous to think that people will go to such trouble to wait in long queues at crowded places during a pandemic. Of course, those people were wearing face masks and probably gloves but at what cost? And why toilet paper?

As a Malaysian, I swear on my habit of using the bidet or any shower or water pipe to clean my behind. I believe it is part of social influence and the “herd mentality”. People these days have a FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) attitude. What we see on social media, or read on WhatsApp groups motivates us to do the same. However, that is not the only reason behind panic buying. 

 In this post, we will look at the psychology behind panic buying and the results of that action. Why do we do it? And what are the consequences?

Let us start by taking apart the concept of panic buying and looking into the basic and most innate human response of ‘panic’.

"It was without thought. It was physiological response." - Ephimia Morphew in Malcolm Gladwell's What the Dog Saw

Panic

Panic is a physiological human response in a body when faced with a life-threatening situation. It is part of our ‘fight-or-flight’ response. As mammals, this response is engrained in our DNA. The response is triggered by the release of hormones and neural activity by the hypothalamus (a small part in our brain) that prepare our body to either confront a threat or run away from it.

A sudden surge in certain hormones causes changes in our body that include an increase heart rate, tensed muscles and dilation of pupils. This response helps in preparing the body to perform under pressure and survive a perceived danger. However, this response is not always accurate. Sometimes the body activates the ‘fight-or-flight’ response when there is actually no real threat. This leads to panic.

Panic causes perceptual narrowing and reversion to instinct. Panic erases short-term memory which causes an inexperienced or sometimes experienced person to “lose their minds” or to depend on basic survival instinct. This is an abstract from Malcolm Gladwell’s book “What the Dog Saw”, narrating a recount to him of a NASA human factors specialist, Ephimia Morphew during her scuba-diving accident:

It was an open-water certification dive, Monterey Bay, California, about ten years ago, I was nineteen. I’d been diving for two weeks. This was my first time in the open ocean without the instructor. Just my buddy and I. We had to go about forty feet down, to the bottom of the ocean, and do an exercise where we took our regulators out of our mouth, picked up a spare one that we had on our vest, and practiced breathing out of the spare. My buddy did hers. Then it was my turn. I removed my regulator. I lifted up my secondary regulator. I put it in my mouth, exhaled, to clear the lines, and then I inhaled, and, to my surprise, it was water. I inhaled water. Then the hose that connected that mouthpiece to my tank, my air source, came unlatched and air from the hose came exploding in to my face. Right away, my hand reached out for my partner’s air supply, as if I was going to rip it out. It was without thought. It was physiological response. My eyes are seeing my hand do something irresponsible. I’m fighting with myself. Don’t do it. Then I searched my mind for what I could do. And nothing came to mind. All I could remember was one thing: if you can’t take care of yourself, let your buddy take care of you. I let my hand fall back to my side, and I just stood there.

A highly educated NASA specialist was not an experienced diver and she reverted to her basic human instinct to survive (get oxygen!) in the face of a life-threatening situation without taking logical actions. This is a really good example of panic. We may be part of a highly literate society, but when it comes to facing a perceived life-threatening situation, panic kicks in and we might end up doing really stupid things. Next, let’s take a look at another important human activity – buying.

Buying

Buying is the general act of acquisition of a product or service. Purchasing is slightly more complex which involves choosing a specific retailer and in-store choices. So, why do people buy and consume? Consumer motivation is the human drive to satisfy physiological and psychological needs through product purchase and consumption. In terms of panic buying during a pandemic, there are two main explanations behind it:

The first is the ‘need to possess’. The logical or sometimes illogical need to possess something plays an important role in what marketing experts call, impulse buying. That is when consumers unexpectedly experience a sudden and very strong urge to buy something immediately. A great example would be during “flash sales” where consumers are psychologically forced to purchase something limited in quantity during a limited time even if they didn’t plan to purchase it initially. Oh we love our 11:11 sales or Black Friday sales! In the case of toilet paper or instant noodles, consumers think that these products will be limited in quantity (run out) for a limited time because everyone else is buying it. So they run out of their houses to buy more? That is an actual question. Think about it.

The second is the ‘need for safety and maintaining health’. I feel this is slightly more justified and logical than impulse buying. Threats to our safety and health motivate us to purchase for personal security and protection. This explanation is part of the ‘fight-or-flight’ response where our body chooses to fight. One explanation why people panic buy toilet paper or any other sanitation product (hand sanitizers, wet wipes) is maybe because they want to feel clean during this pandemic. Steven Taylor, author of “The Psychology of Pandemics” has this theory that panic buying of toilet paper is ‘rooted in our evolutionary aversion to things which disgust us, heightened when people feel threatened with infection’.

The combination of physiological response and psychological motivation could be a catalyst for panic buying. But let’s look at another external force which was mentioned in the beginning, ‘social influence’.

Social Influence

As social beings, humans want to conform to a larger group or certain ‘exclusive’ group in fear of missing out or negative consequences. The basic idea is that if we follow the majority, we would be rewarded with benefits (social status) and avoid negative outcomes (being left behind or forgotten). This is the main reason behind ‘peer pressure’ and why so many people are motivated to follow the actions of others even if they know that it could be wrong. Here is another abstract from one of Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller “The Tipping Point” about a Micronesian suicide epidemic among adolescents documented by anthropologist Donald Rubinstein:

Suicide ideation among adolescents appears widespread in certain Micronesian communities and is popularly expressed in recent songs composed locally and aired on Micronesian radio stations, and in graffiti adorning T-shirts and high school walls. A number of young boys who attempted suicide reported that they first saw or heard about it when they were 8 or 10 years old. Their suicide attempts appear in the spirit of imitative or experimental play. One 11-year-old boy, for example, hanged himself inside his house and when found he was already unconscious and his tongue protruding. He later explained that he wanted to “try” out hanging. He said that he did not want to die, although he knew he was risking death. Such cases of imitative suicide attempts by boys as young as five and six have been reported recently from Truk [one of the four states of the Federated States of Micronesia, aka Chuuk State]. Several cases of young adolescent suicide deaths recently in Micronesia were evidently the outcome of such experiments. Thus as suicide grows more frequent in these communities the idea itself acquires a certain familiarity if not fascination to young men, and the lethality of the acts seems to be trivialized. Especially among some younger boys, the suicide acts appear to be acquired an experimental almost recreational element.

This ‘mindless action’, as described by Gladwell, has become a form of self-expression among these adolescents even if the act itself is dangerous. That is the power of social influence as illustrated morbidly as possible for greater effect. Obviously we do not want to correlate panic buying toilet paper to suicide but the basic theories are there. Social media is a major platform for social influence. There is no need for the traditional word-of-mouth (WOM). Images and words are spread like wildfires through social media. Panic buying could be as contagious as the real virus.

"Highly efficient systems have no slack, no redundancy, and therefore no resilience and no spare capacity." - Helen Lewis in her article on The Atlantic, How Panic-Buying Revealed the Problem With the Modern World. 

The Cost

As we sit in our warm houses stocked with mountains of toilet paper, dry food or hand sanitizers to last probably few months, we might reflect on our decision whether it was the right thing to do – or maybe not. Those who truly need that packet of toilet paper or dry food are forced to accept the fact before their eyes – an empty shelf. Stores can’t restock fast enough once one person decides to wipe out an entire shelf.

Helen Lewis, on ‘The Atlantic’ elaborated on this fragile economic system of ‘efficiency’ and the reality of businesses trying to achieve greater efficiency through ‘just-in-time ordering’ from supply chains so that products do not go to waste by sitting in warehouses for too long. Under normal situations, where there is no pandemic, efficiency is profitable and sustainable. However, under situations during a pandemic that same efficiency makes it a fragile system. According to Lewis, ‘highly efficient systems have no slack, no redundancy, and therefore no resilience and no spare capacity’.

Efficiency has also driven health professionals to the edge. Under-staffing in public hospitals and pressure to increase profit are a bad combination carried out in the name of efficiency with little to no regard for exhausted doctors, nurses and other hospital staff. This highly tuned system will face a risk of over-heating, as explained by Lewis.

These are the costs of our actions. We might be prepared and safe in our homes, but we often fail to acknowledge that our behaviors have consequences. Although we pride ourselves with our efficiency, the ability to conform and our quick-thinking skills, it is during difficult times that we must understand the reason behind our actions, make a conscious effort to not succumb to our basic instincts and rise above it.

Thanks for reading, stay safe always and see you on the next post. 💛

MY.

References

AFP. (17 March 2020). On a Roll: The Psychology Behind Toilet Paper Panic. Retrieved 3 May, 2020 from https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2020/03/17/on-a-roll-the-psychology-behind-toilet-paper-panic

Blackwell, R., Miniard, P., Engel, J. and Rahman, Z. (2017). Consumer Behavior. Cengage.

Barber, N. (13 April 2016). Panic as Fight-or-Flight. Psychology Today. Retrieved 3 May, 2020 from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-human-beast/201604/panic-fight-or-flight

Gladwell, M. (2000). The Tipping Point. Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company.

Gladwell, M. (2009). What the Dog Saw. Back Bay Books.

Layton, J. (13 September 2005). How Fear Works. HowStuffWorks.com. Retrieved 3 May, 2020 from https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/emotions/fear2.htm

Lewis, H. (26 March 2020). How Panic-Buying Revealed the Problem With the Modern World. The Atlantic. Retrieved 3 May 2020 from https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-panic-buying-britain-us-shopping/608731/

Strahle, W. M. and Bonfield, E. H. (1989). Understanding Consumer Panic: a Sociological Perspective in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 16, eds. Thomas K. Srull, Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 567-573.