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> So the naive retailer will say "OMG it now takes 3 months and 2x price to get widgets, I had better order 4 months supply ... and so it goes - an infinite bug methodology.

Sounds like how around here our naive consumers bought a few hundred rolls of toilet paper.

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The stupidest thing about that whole phenomenon was that after the first person panic-bought a heaped trolley full, what everyone else was worried about wasn't a genuine shortage but was just other peoples' panic buying.

But was that stupid, though? In the end there was a very real shortage, so if you were reasonable enough to avoid panic buying, you were risking not having enough toilet paper for yourself.

There was a shortage because enough people were buying enough to last them years that it impacted the supply.

Strange, that's not what I've read. Obviously some people were doing that, but all the articles I saw suggested that there just wasn't a lot of excess capacity in the toilet paper industry, so even just a lot of people buying 1.5x the normal amount was enough to DOS the toilet paper supply. Have you seen evidence to suggest that people buying years' worth of supply was the dominant factor?

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