This is why everyone is hoarding toilet paper

Enlarge / You know it's crazy when they even take the letter "E" from the sign. (credit: RabbitEMT)

The world was a strange place even before the COVID-19 pandemic, but it has gotten stranger still. One of the oddest things about this socially distanced new world is that a respiratory disease has made toilet paper worth its weight in gold. Why is everyone scrambling for toilet paper all of a sudden? Consumer behavior researcher Kit Yarrow suggests it's a case of our social primate brains reacting to newsfeeds full of striking but sometimes disorienting visual cues.

Retail therapy on overdrive

Panic-buying during a crisis is nothing new. Midwesterners joke about everyone making Apocalypse French Toast before a blizzard, because store shelves mysteriously empty of bread, eggs, and milk. On the coast, peanut butter is the must-have item every hurricane season. In part, it's reasonable to want to be prepared, says Yarrow. But panic-buying is partly an attempt to gain a sense of control when the world feels uncertain and dangerous.

"When we feel anxious, which I think all of us do right now-it would be sort of abnormal to not feel a little anxious-the antidote to anxiety is always control," said Yarrow. "And since we can't really control the track of this disease, we turn to what we can control, and that's why people are shopping. It's like, 'well, I feel like I'm doing something, I feel like I'm preparing. I feel like I'm taking control of the thing I can control, which is stocking up.'

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