Good list. The problem, at least here in the UK, is that these cheap foods/ingredients are exactly what we're seeing empty on the shelves now. Unfortunately for those who live cheaply, expensive things go last.
Also, keep your eyes open for unobvious cheap food - people panic buy the food they know e.g. in NZ: wheat flour, pasta, tinned tomatoes. But while there was no flour, there were still dried beans and other products that have more food value on shelves that were still great value per $.
At least people are panic buying a range of items, usually it’s just milk, eggs, and bread. What is the grand plan there? French toast three meals a day for a month? Custard? Really runny scrambled eggs on toast? You might want some raisins if your going all-in on bread pudding. I bet a lot of it ends up getting thrown away.
Bread is limited supply
No offense but you sound incredibly sheltered. No one did any cooking in your house growing up? Most of the uses of raw flour are incredibly basic, straightforward recipes.
Literally add water, some kind of fat or oil, and maybe a leavener to flour and you're in business. Cakes, pastry, bread, roti, whatever. Use it as coating for fried chicken, or to thicken a stew. Make flour tortillas, or yorkshire puddings, or muffins, or all verities of noodles. Hard tack will last forever, if you hate yourself but want to store something for years.
The learning curve is trivial -- my mom made me roll out biscuits when I was 11 -- and flour will last forever as long as it stays dry and bug-free. Old flour isn't as tasty as the freshly ground, but you can still make a fine loaf of bread at home with 8+ month old flour; source: made a high hydration loaf last night.
Many of them will probably stick it 20 pounds of flour in their cabinet and never use it for anything.
I do use it, I make biscuits, and gravy every sunday... I have enough flour to last awhile and was not in the market for any but I did notice that section that normally had a pallet of each was empty in my store.
And then there are lots of people where a $100 hedge is a pretty simple choice.
(I bought 5 pounds of flour, about on the normal schedule)
My 'peacetime' rationale is to have fresh bread with no additives in it. There are spin off benefits such as the baking smell.
Over the last decade I have worked in different companies and never met another person with a home baking of bread routine. Sure some people have a bread making machine in the loft or have a mum that does it on occasion but making bread from flour is a rare thing in the UK.
So what is going on with the supply?
Truth is that bread flour is not a fast moving item. If I buy a 1kg bag on a Monday and another on a Friday then there won't have been a lot of restocking in between. I will be buying from the same batch.
Therefore it does not take a lot of panic buyers to take all the stock off the shelves for the few people who regularly buy to find themselves with 'flour anxiety'. If you do use a kilo or two of flour a week then you don't have more than two to three kilos on hand. This will be for variety, e.g. strong white and wholemeal, which can be combined with something else, e.g. spelt or granary, for variety.
In truth flour does not keep indefinitely, it will develop a horrible taste over time or even get weevils. Flour is also heavy, so if you have to carry your shopping by bicycle or on foot then you are not buying sacks of the stuff.
Car drivers with large boots/trunks can behave like a horde of locusts, snapping up vast quantities of items like flour that don't cost them a lot to pay for, store or carry. Meanwhile, people who are buying flour partly due to reasons of making their bread more affordable are less likely to have a car or even large cupboards.
Either all the bread machines were dug out of the closets or those bread recipes from Pinterest are getting put to work.
it is not uncommon to find 10 and 15 lb bags in most stores as well
Retail pricing logic suggests that brands would rather price relative to the baseline pricing anyway. It's more likely to be generally inflationary unless of course suppliers manage to meet the current demand and even if they do there's a big risk that demand will crash suddenly at some point which could cost the suppliers or retailers greatly as well as they overproduce items that never get bought and cost money to store. It's a big mess, really.
Either way there is a present glut of expensive things without enough demand, so existing oversupply is liquidated. So expensive things get less expensive.
This is the crucial part, there is no reason to believe this is happening. There is not a 'glut' of expensive things as many are forced to buy the expensive alternative when their preferred choice is gone, and regular consumers of the premium brands still buy them. They just sell out less fast.
Those are what produce the empty shelves.
If you don't allow referring to the vast empirical literature on price controls, you've already decided what you want to believe.
I am like a patient asking the doctor is they have evidence this fever is caused by flu, not for example COVID-19. I wouldn't want to be referred to medical textbooks telling flu causes fever as your only evidence.
Every economic textbook will have a demand and supply graph, it's not hard to see what happens when you fix a price arbitrarily and shift the demand curve in that graph to simulate a higher demand. Demand and supply no longer meet -> shortage.
Price fixing incentivizes hoarding and empty shelves.
Which is what the gp said.
> they'll be on the shelves so rich people can still have them
Complaining about word choice is a tradition around here, I know.
They didn't say that at all, they said something completely different, thereby proving that they don't understand the point.
Not raising prices at all evidently leads to empty shelves. Nobody can buy any eggs, except for the first lucky person that can get all the eggs at a bargain and then waste them without significant financial loss. In the case of toilet paper, there isn't even a loss - you were going to buy it anyway.
As prices rise, demand goes down. The hoarders buy less, or at least pay handsomely for the privilege, which is more fair. Nobody will raise prices until there is no demand whatsoever ($100 eggs), just for the sake of stocked shelves.
This system works strictly better, it's just that people don't understand it. That's why supermarkets don't raise prices. They can blame empty shelves on "a few idiots" (who aren't really idiots) and avoid complaints for price gouging, which could cause severe regulatory fallout.
However, let's just say eggs are five times as expensive: You're going to think twice about buying a whole shelf of them "just in case".
Rich people are going to get their eggs either way.
This bootlicking fatalism is the real problem, imho.