Are people really panic buying?

We have, of course, been transformed into a nation of hoarders and panic buyers. We know this because everyone keeps telling us. There are the queues around the block, waiting for Asda to open; the tearful nurse on Twitter who couldn’t get any food after a 48-hour shift; anecdotes galore about people loading loo rolls into their trolleys by the tree trunk-load, fighting over each consignment as it arrives. How much more civilised we all were – it has been claimed – during wartime.

I’m sure there are people panic-buying and hoarding vast quantities of tinned foods, but is it all quite so bad as being made out? It is according to Mike Coupe, CEO of Sainsbury’s, who told the Sunday Times that ‘probably’ 50 per cent of customers are buying twice their normal shop’. It is not entirely clear whether he was reporting that as a statistic or making a rhetorical statement, but something doesn’t quite add up. 

The British Retail Consortium (BRC) has put out a figure that Brits have stockpiled over £1 billion worth of food in their homes over three weeks. That sounds like a lot when presented as a lump sum, yet to put into context it amounts to £15 for each man, woman and child in the country. Does that really deserve to be called hoarding? An extra pack of toilet rolls (£4), a couple of tins of soup (£2), a pack of pasta (£1) and you are halfway there already. If we have bought an extra £1 billion of food spread across three weeks it pales into insignificance when compared against Tesco’s total revenue last year of £64 billion, Sainsbury’s at £29 billion and Morrisons’s £17.5 billion.

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Alexander Larman

Beware the middle of Lidl

Moreover, this extra shopping has been done in reaction to pretty extreme circumstances. We have been warned that if we live alone and develop a cough, or any other symptom of Covid-19, we must remain at home for seven days. Should we be the first in the household to develop symptoms we should gate ourselves for seven days and all other household members must stay home and not leave the house for 14 days. For that very reason, I haven’t been to a shop for the past six days – my wife has had a cough. So I am pleased that we have over a week’s supply of food in the house and glad that we don’t operate our fridge and larder along ‘just in time’ principles.

That, surely, is the biggest change since world war two – not human behaviour, but the move to ‘just in time’ supply chains. The supermarkets are as much to blame for their empty shelves as the behaviour of their customers. With profit margins driven down to wafer-thin levels, they have taken to operating with wafer-thin stocks. Any irregularity in demand, or interruption in supply, and they can find themselves in trouble – as they did a couple of years ago when poor weather in Spain damaged the supply of fruit and vegetables, resulting in empty shelves.

As for our habit of stocking up, I suspect that a lot of the public have become used to living on the edge too. More people live in smaller homes than did their parents and grandparents, and have become used to the convenience of food shops with long opening hours – many never saw the need, until now, to keep much in stock at home. The wartime generation weren’t exactly averse to hoarding. When I was a teenager in the early 1980s, I had a weekend job cutting, with a pair of blunt shears, the 100-yard-long hedge of an elderly woman who lived up the road. One day I asked to use the bathroom – it was a bleak, unmodernised room in which I counted 52 bars of soap and 96 toilet rolls stacked in the corner.