>Like the great toilet paper shortage.

I'm drawn to die on this hill every time. The toilet paper shortage made sense.

At the start of the first lockdown in the UK, we were told to minimise contact with others. This meant that it made sense for a daily shopper to become a weekly shopper & a weekly shopper to become a biweekly shopper. And if you're shopping less frequently but consuming at the same rate, you'll be buying more volume each time. Shops don't have the means to react to an overnight doubling of demand, so the shelves became empty.

To be efficient is to stop being resilient. The world runs on JIT. And if you buck that trend and make things resilient, you can't compete on price. So it's a race to the bottom where all it takes is one off-white swan event for things to fall apart. Does your country have food security? Does your country have energy security? If it does, what would it take for that to stop being true?

Additionally, everyone moved home and offices emptied out, so the daily/weekly/monthly demand for toilet paper went from 50/50 consumer/industrial to 100% consumer overnight. Those are two very different supply chains, with distinct, roughly (if you'll pardon the pun) incimpatible products, packaging and distribution networks.

We were also told to prepare to self isolate a family for 2 weeks. That's a bunch of toilet roll for a normal sized family needed to stock up on. When internet deliveries were restricted to just the vulnerable too.

Almost all "panic buying" is calm and rational.

> When internet deliveries were restricted to just the vulnerable too.

That never happened? Perhaps new sign-ups (at the company's discretion)?

I had groceries delivered before the pandemic and continued throughout, only affect was that for a few months slots would be booked up weeks in advance of normal, so had to plan ahead more.

Exactly, booked up for weeks, so to plan you had to buy in the shops in bulk before a slot became available to your family of 4

The annoying thing was, my position on first lockdown was:

1. Covid doesn't generally disable young and healthy people, so there will be no supply shortage.

2. It will be nice to have a reason to go out if I'm cooped up inside all day, and buying groceries is a good one.

Then of course, I ended up using napkins as toilet paper for a week, because everybody else thought different.

People on the whole do not know what "panic buying" actually is.

I've had multiple conversations which run along the line of "I'm not panic buying, I am rational. I'm only buying this because others are panicking and there wont be any left for me. "

Sounds like they do understand panic buying. The issue is that it's completely rational on an individual level. "Panic" buying isn't really a good term for it.

The issue is that everyone thinks they are rational, there's not a bunch of people panicking and another bunch of people reacting to them. There's just one bunch!

So yes the term is wrong but also people don't know what it is, and how they negatively contribute to the cycle.

People don't panic when they "panic buy". People don't see themselves as panic buying and they are not reflective

They don't just think they are rational, they are rational. When there is a run on the bank, the rational thing to do is join the run, because if you do, you have a chance of getting your money, but if you don't, you have no chance. That is why this behavior is so hard to stop.

I'm sure game theorists have studied this problem extensively so I could be very wrong and just showing off my ignorance, but I would think that the rational/utilitarian thing in a situation where a large number of actors are acting selfishly is to also act selfishly, assuming you have no effective method of influencing those other actors.

In the northeast it was typically bread and milk (and also toilet paper) people would stock up on before a big storm often causing shortages. I've seen "French Toast Alert" used but it's a bit too cute to quite capture it. [1]https://www.universalhub.com/french-toast

My wife was the same during lockdown, I said there's no need to panic buy stuff we don't need. She told me she was just buying stuff so we could eat if the shelves went empty

> She told me she was just buying stuff so we could eat if the shelves went empty

In my opinion the best solution to this in uncertain times is to have a decent supply of shelf-stable foods and good recipes with them before things get crazy. I try and keep at least a couple weeks of food on hand with a decent supply of shelf-stable stuff that'll last a while in emergencies. Its not a bad idea to be familiar with recipes that use mostly dry and canned foods that may only require water and a hot pot to cook. Most of the time it means we slowly cycle though meh-level canned meals once a month to keep the canned foods fresh(er), but when grocery stores go empty or you don't feel safe to go outside its pretty nice. That said, there's plenty of nice recipes where you can substitute canned chicken, canned veggies, or evaporated milk without taking too much of a hit on overall quality of the meal. On the plus side a lot of those dry food recipes often work pretty well on camping trips.

I honestly think Brexit was only a very small part of this. It's probably also a combination of IR35 making the entire endeavour not worthwhile for UK AND European workers and the government not having enough HGV tests available to bring newly qualified drivers into the workforce. It's a combination of a lot of different things.

I'm not sure drivers could fall afoul of IR35 anyway.

What Brexit did impact it was that it removed EU cabotage and availability of drivers. For example, cargo would arrive on a RoRo ship in Dover, without changing to a british driver. The same driver could take other cargo while in UK (for example having delivered to point A, then taking a load from point A to another british location at point B, and finally taking a load from point B to a continental destination at point C). With Brexit, you suddenly have extra demand (as even with dimnished cargo traffic you need more drivers to service ports as cargo no longer comes with its own drivers) and inability to hire (whether complete firms through cabotage laws or simply due to smaller pool of candidates.)

I find that a strange take. There is a HGV driver shortage solely because a lot of drivers have left, due to Brexit. The UK wouldn't need so many extra HGV licences without Brexit, because drivers from the EU would be qualified. The IR35 issues are because people in the UK are used to cheaper labour from mainland Europe, which is no longer available, due to Brexit.

That's not to say that the UK government isn't characteristically unprepared, despite months or even years of warnings about these very issues, or that they couldn't have done better to mitigate problems.

What a coincidence that something that was claimed for years to be a likely outcome of Brexit happened right in the aftermath of Brexit.... but it turns out that it was mostly unrelated to Brexit.

What. A. Coincidence.

From a purely selfish perspective, the worst outcome of the pandemic so far is that it has served as a distraction and shield for Tories who bungled Brexit and have yet to face any political consequences.

Only on a programmers' forum could this all be IR35's fault!

(could well be true - but i did laugh out loud)

IR35 doesn't just apply to programmers, it applies to everyone performing individual contract work through a Limited Company, (as originally recommended/insisted upon by the Inland Revenue).

And poor working conditions. Why live in a truck when you can get paid the same to stack shelves in a supermarket and wake up in your own bed.

You can have one ass and buy a thousand rolls of toilet paper. You can't have one car and buy a thousand liters of fuel.

This is pure supply shock

A sister comment on this article mentions that Halfords have seen jerrycan sales multiply 17-fold compared to last week. Perhaps a thousand liters is a bit much, but you can definitely get more than a carfull.

This reminds me of the video from the forklift driver in one of the warehouse where they store the toilet paper here. He was laughing as he drove by hundreds of meters high stacks of toilet paper.

If that was any indication at least, it will last for a few days and then return to normal if supply can resume for normal demand (assuming it can for normal demand)

"Appears to be _mostly_ a mediagenic phenomenon: the driver shortage caused a few stations to run out".

I believe it's more serious than just a mediagenic phenomenon, with only a few stations affected. From The Guardian: "Ministers are considering a range of options after BP said a third of its petrol stations had run out of the main two grades of fuel, while the Petrol Retailers Association (PRA), which represents almost 5,500 independent outlets, said 50% to 90% of its members had reported running out. It predicted the rest would soon follow." (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/27/eu-lorry-dr...)

It's still a mediagenic phenomenon. The driver shortage itself only caused a handful of petrol stations to run out - it was panic buying due to frenzied news headlines about petrol shortages that caused all the rest to run out of fuel.

A larger contribution to the driver shortage was the change in self employment status caused by IR35 off payroll legislation.

https://driverrequire.co.uk/ir35 https://www.contractoruk.com/news/0015112ir35_reform_fuellin...

Lorry driver shortage is a fairly common phenom in Europe atm.

For non UK-english aware, a lorry is a truck.

Minister needs to tell everyone not to panic vaccinate.