To the pp who said what’s the difference between panic buying and stockpiling, it’s this.
I’ve been stockpiling for the last 2 years. We had snow a while back. We live rurally. Very rurally. We were stuck in our village for 3 days (our biggest facility is a postbox - no local shop). When we could finally get out, it took near enough a week for shops to get back to normal, as we seem to be at the end of the line for ensuring the supply chain goes back to normal. I was lucky. We’d done our big weekly shop two days earlier. We just managed without fresh bread for a few days. Since then, I have stockpiled, making especially sure I am ready for winter.
I started out by just adding two extra things to my trolley each big shop. An extra tin of tomatoes, maybe, and an extra packet of rice. Not even as much as you’d get if you were hosting a dinner party, so not exactly going to affect the shops. I then put those aside. Next week, it might be a packet of biscuits and an extra washing up liquid bottle. That goes aside. So at the end of the month, I have maybe six or eight extra items. They go into the cupboard, along with everything else, and get used, so I’m not worried about sell by dates. I just keep on top of the replacements so once I have created a ‘spare’ I always have it.
Which means that this week, when I did my big shop and there was no pasta to be had, I don’t mind, despite it being a staple in our diet. I have spare bags of it. I have spare toilet rolls, bought months ago. If anything, my stockpiling has lessened the need to panic buy, because I have all the stuff already. At some point I will need to replace it but I will do that when the initial panic dies down.
There’s your difference. I have bought my usual weekly shop this week. Without pasta and toilet rolls which weren’t in Tesco. But the fact that they weren’t there doesn’t affect me, despite the fact that my dd only really eats pasta and consumes her own body weight in it each week, because I have already planned for that to happen. I’ve got it covered. I’ll replace it when stocks go up again. Snow, possible disruption to supply chains due to Brexit, global pandemics, I can cope for a few weeks with my family without buying a single extra thing. Our meals might get monotonous but we could eat.
It’s taken me a couple of years, and there are things in my freezer I don’t normally use (frozen diced onion, for example, in case I can’t get fresh) but I’m about as far from panic buying as I can be.
Prepping is exactly that. Planning for it way in advance so you can do it in fragments over a long period of time. Panic buying is because you didn’t prep and now have nothing and still need to eat and wipe your backside, so have to rush out and grab what you can get. Preppers haven’t caused this, because we have what we need and some to spare. It’s the people who haven’t given it any thought who are the problem, which then causes real issues for those who can’t stockpile because they don’t have the spare money each week, or the space.