The strange phenomenon of stockpiling ‘toilet paper’

I will be camping later this year for 3 months into places where shopping will be impossible. I'm not planning on taking anywhere near what people have been hoarding. Whatever the reason I hope they plan on eating food as well.

A few reasons why some people use a lot of toilet paper: poor diet, food contamination, lack of fiber, lack of exercise and just being overweight. The overall process requires hydration to flow, physical movement and general ability to digest. Even regular walking helps with later bowel movement.

Perhaps these people are revealing more about themselves than they realise?

When the SHTF (pun intended) things to be shipped will be ranked in priority according to the cost-effectiveness of its transport.

Obviously, scarce transport will be used to ship high-value, low-physical-volume things rather than low-value, high-physical-volume things.

Gold is the definitive high-value, low-physical-volume item.

Toilet paper is the definitive low-value, high-physical-volume thing. As such it sits very low in the scale of transport priority. Consequently, it becomes one of the first items to run-out when a crisis hits.

However, most families would normally keep several weeks' worth of toilet-paper on hand. So the current run on toilet-paper is, in my humble opinion, a waste of time, angst and money.

People fear being stuck at home for weeks, in which case toilet paper may come in handy...

As in the case for all panics, there is a snowball/contagion effect. People see others panic-buying and empty shelves so they also start to buy for fear of lacking.

I think people are reading into it deeper than they need to. When the news says things like "people are stockpiling X" then a lot of other people who otherwise don't wear tinfoil hats might be more inclined to stockpile some X for themselves to avoid needing it when the stores have already run out. It's not that they are worried that coronavirus will suddenly make them need so much toilet paper, but that the apparent toilet paper hoarding forces people to stock up before they run out.

In that regard, I see it as a cyclical sheeple problem.

I was literally out of toilet paper, paper towels, and hand soap but couldn’t bother buying them since I was exhausted from working 50-60hour weeks. The Coronavirus caused our management to be concerned for our health and this gave us a break to go shopping. So naturally I buy whatever I need or have run out of.

This makes me wonder how many other people in the world are also tired and exhausted.

Thank god for time off.

As we say in backpacking, "you pack your fears".

Fear of missing out, and by getting items such as toilet roll, pasta and cleaning products people feel like they have some control over the situation.

People are just worried it’s going to sell out and they’ll be left without any. After shelter, water, food, and critical prescriptions, TP is the item that most people anticipate being most miserable without.

Also, the young single men who populate this site often forget that women (who are half the population, remember) need toilet paper every time they go to the bathroom, not just for “number 2”.

It's a quality of life thing. People think you only need to stockpile food. Obviously, it's better to have food than to starve. But there are also important psychological aspects: if the Internet goes out, what are you going to do all day?

Thus, it's important to stockpile "luxuries": board games, toilet paper, candy, etc.

It's something that will get used eventually even if they don't need it, so they can justify hoarding it.