Emptying supermarket shelves. Driving from store to store, hunting for milk, bread, and water. Ignoring the signs instructing shoppers to “Take one.”
It’s a song and dance consumers across the country typically engage in when confronted with an incoming extreme weather event, and a pattern we’re seeing repeated as images have circulated of grocery shelves from North Carolina to New York City stripped bare leading into Winter Storm Fern. Now, with a second major winter storm brewing, shoppers and retailers across the East Coast are bracing for another rush.
Experts warn that these stockpiling frenzies have lasting consequences — both personal and planetary. In times of turmoil, the irrational desire to overbuy things a household doesn’t really want or need can be difficult to distinguish from just regular emergency preparedness.
To some extent, according to Parke Wilde, a food economist at Tufts University, the pre-storm frenzy can be “a real nuisance, because people show up at the store and the shelves ar... Read more
