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Comment by nogabebop23 | Hacker News Reader

It also seems crazy for it to be toilet paper in the first place.

Its (1) easy to make, (2) mostly produced in-country with no long, integrated supply chain and (3) relatively new (talk to someone over 80 who grew up rural, they probably switched from the sears catalog to toilet paper in their life).

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It's one of the bulkiest consumable products people buy. Which means a whole shelf is only equivalent a few families worth of demand. So it only takes a few buyers stocking up for a few weeks of use to empty the shelves. And once the shelves are empty the panic sets in.

Also due to its bulkiness, there is a limit on how many units can be delivered per truck.

In short, toilet paper is a low margin, least-stocked product with difficulty in transportation. Logistics matters.

It happens in every crisis, across every culture, and has been happening for decades.

One hypothesis is it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. The other is it's the defence of an intimate space.

Either way, it’s older than this crisis.

The way I see it, toilet paper occupies the same slot in its users' minds as soap - basic hygiene article. You want to stock up on it to compensate for risk of shortages; consequence of running out is having to reinvent an area of life you usually handle on autopilot.

My wife suspects it started in Hong Kong. People started buying all the toilet paper so they could make masks from them. Then people in other countries saw on the news that toilet paper was running out in Hong Kong so they started panic buying as well.

Unfortunately we have no Amazon catalog to switch back to.

You don't get tons of junk mail?

Many people have an ad blocker installed on the mail box.

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