Panic buying ahead of the winter storm isn’t preparedness. Here’s who it hurts.
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, …