Horse 2667 - What Caused The Great Sydney Toilet Paper Crisis Of 2020?

Humans are strange creatures.
One of the basic assumptions in economics, especially when looking at the interaction of forces in markets, is that humans are rational actors who make rational choices. The plurality of those choices determines broad tendencies which translates into data and price decisions. Humans are not rational however, and will make really stupid decisions at times. Broadly speaking, everything bad that has happened in the history of the world has come down to accident, selfishness, or stupidity; or some combination of those things. The Sydney Toilet Paper Crisis of 2020 has the accident of COVID-19 as the base problem; with loads of selfishness and stupidity driving toilet paper sales.

The root cause of the Sydney Toilet Paper Crisis Of 2020 is a very real fear of the effects of COVID-19 (accident). The general public has responded by not bothering to do very much research into what the effects will be (stupidity). As a result, the general public has decided to raid supermarkets for all of their toilet paper, tissues, tins of beans and now tinned spaghetti (selfishness). None of this is out of character for these strange creatures. Yet again, there is nothing new under the sun.

Charles Mackay in his 1841 book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds" made a catalogue of a bunch of historical hysterical manifestations of human stupidity; including Tulipomania, The South Sea Bubble, Alchemy, Witch Mania, and The Crusades among other things. The Sydney Toilet Paper Crisis of 2020 certainly looks like a lot of these historical hysterical manifestations of human stupidity in my opinion.

I wanted to interrogate the trigger for all of this. We've known about COVID-19 for a while but it has really only been this week when we've collectively gone stark raving mad. Most of the media has done a fantastic job of reporting on what has happened but I hadn't found anyone asking why it did. That meant that I had to go and do it myself.

I sent the following email to twenty Woolworths, twenty Coles, and ten Aldi stores across Sydney and was hoping that in an age of real time stocktaking that they might be able to provide me with some useful information. They wouldn't be able to tell me the why it happened but they will be able to give me a precise time to pinpoint the when.

Dear ,
As you are probably more than aware, people in Sydney have been caught up in a wave of panic buying of toilet paper and tissue, in relation to a perceived threat of outbreak of the Coroniavirus.

I have sent emails to multiple supermarkets across Sydney because I want to enquire into what triggered this. I suspect that there must have been a single trigger which has caused this and I am curious to find out what it is.

If it is not too much trouble, could you please reply with an approximate time, or possibly the exact time, when your particular store started seeing toilet paper fly off of the shelves? 

I completely understand if this is something that you do not want to reply to but I appeal to your sense of curiosity and hope that you are just as curious as I a. I will not publish your name or email address because I also completely understand and respect your right to privacy and anonymity. 

Thanking you in advance,
Andrew Rollason.

Publishing people's names is a sensitive subject and so I will not do that. I do not want store managers to get into trouble. The beauty of the internet and email is that once you have compiled a list, you can send out a bunch of emails using a mail merge. In the olden days this might have cost quite a lot in postage. I didn't know what kind of response to expect but to everyone who has responded, I thank you for your cooperation.
These then, are the responses that I got back; with the email addresses and names removed.

Firstly, from Woolworths:

Dear Andrew, 
Thank you for your email. This isn't the usual sort of email that we get but I am happy to answer it because I am interested to find out what the hell is going on.
Our store had it's first run (don't mind the pun ha ha) at 08:57am on Tuesday the 3rd. 

Please let me know how you get on.

Cheers, Woolworths 1 Manager.

and this:

Hi Andrew.

On Tuesday for store open at 8am on Tuesday we had 100 lots of toilet paper (5 brands) on the shelf. We sold two by 08:45. By 9am we had sold out of all 98 remaining lots of toilet paper and the shelf was empty. 

Woolworths 2 Manager.

this:

Andrew. 
Thank you for your enquiry. Sales of individual items is not something that we get asked a lot but it is heaps easy to get data for because we have stocktaking in real time.
We had no toilet paper by 9:15am on Tuesday morning, no toilet paper by 8:30am on Wednesday morning and we got no toilet paper delivery last night.

Woolworths 3 Manager.

The story was not markedly different at Coles either but only two stores were prepared to email me back:

Andrew,
Thank you for your enquiry. At Coles 1 Store we pride ourselves on customer service and we are happy to answer questions from customers, no matter how odd they are. The only stupid question is a question that is never asked.

I have also been shocked at the panic buying of toilet paper in Sydney and I have never seen anything like that before. I hope that you get to the bottom of this (har har).

Our store experienced nothing out of the ordinary until 08:50 on Tuesday when I had to call a section manager to restock the shelves with toilet paper. By 10am it was all gone. On Wednesday, we had whole queues of people with nothing but toilet paper in their trolleys. 
Let me know what you find out. This is not normal and people are weird.

Coles 1 Manager.

I got this rather abrupt reply from a second Coles store:

Andrew.
08:00 - 08:30 - nothing
08:30 - 09:00 - nothing
09:00 - 09:30 - IS EVERYONE EATING TOILET PAPER? WHAT THE **** IS WRONG WITH YOU

From an Aldi, I got this:

Hi Andrew,
Our store in X opens at 8am and by 9am we were out of toilet paper. I don't know if that helps. 
Aldi 1 Manager.

I think that 5 responses from 50 emails is a good result. I imagine that most store managers probably either wouldn't give me the information or wouldn't even deign to respond in principle. I do not know if sales of individual items counts as a trade secret or not.

The general trend here is that something happened on Tuesday morning and before 9am. There is nothing out of the ordinary in either the Daily Telegraph or the Sydney Morning Herald for that morning but the Alan Jones Breakfast Show had him ranting about the subject at 08:43am that morning¹. The problem with this line of inquiry is that Alan Jones tends to get all of his grist for his breathless rants from the daily newspapers. It wouldn't surprise me if he was Coroniavirusvirus Patient Zero but I can't honestly prove the case.

Or it could be that the media was already in a frenzy that just happened to get recharged again. Adjunct Associate Professor Ian Mackay of the University of Queensland's Adjunct Associate Professor and an actual virologist was on Neil Mitchell's breakfast show on Wednesday the 26th and said that the arrival of COVID-19 was an inevitability².

“Think about your pets, think about your grandparents and parents, how they’re going to go. Talk to your doctor about getting a few extra prescriptions stocked in the cupboard, just in case. There’s no point hoarding things or panic buying so that we empty the shelves. We don’t need to do that. It’s not panic preparing, it’s just thinking ahead to what happens if there are interruptions in our day to day life.”
- Ian Mackay, to Neil Mitchell, 3AW. 26th Feb 2020

Quite frankly I think that media has a lot to answer for when it comes to matters of public health. Ian Mackay's discussion with Neil Mitchell is sensible but Alan Jones who basically subscribes to the old newspaper adage of "if it bleeds, it leads" does nothing but flame hysterical manifestations of human stupidity. I could be drawing a long bow here but I suspect I am close to hitting the target.
I guess people have a need to feel in control of their life and buying loads and loads of toilet paper satisfies this need? We need to do a thing - this is a thing - therefore we need to do this? Yet again, there is nothing new under the sun.

¹https://www.2gb.com/podcast/alan-jones-full-show-podcast-3rd-march-2020/
²https://www.3aw.com.au/coronavirus-what-you-need-to-know-and-how-to-prepare/