![]() ![]() The Bank of England suffered multiple such panics during the 1800s, as Kilian Rieder, lead economist for the Austrian National Bank, noted last year in a piece for Vo圎U. Living through the Covid-19 pandemic, and having witnessed shortages of various products during the first lockdown, has perhaps made people in the UK more anxious of running out of petrol than they otherwise might have been. Key to the toilet paper panic was the fact that people in the US had recently endured a lack of fuel and meat. Speaking to the New York Times in February 1974, Stewart Henderson Britt, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University, said that it once took a long time for a rumour to spread: “Now, all it takes is one TV personality to joke about it and instantly the rumour’s in all 50 states.” That joke has since been credited with inflaming the great “toilet paper panic”. Soon after, primetime comedian Johnny Carson made a very good joke about the notion of a toilet paper shortage on The Tonight Show. And so, he issued a press release highlighting this. Republican senator Harold Froehlich had heard from industry contacts that the nation faced a possible – possible – toilet paper shortage. In 1973, a rumour about toilet paper got out of hand in the US. Sometimes the merest suggestion of a shortage is enough to spark a dash to the shops. Images of the petrol station queues are easy to find on Facebook and Twitter. This has undoubtedly played a role during the recent run on petrol pumps. “Social media is a very, very powerful tool to make people go into that panic mode,” says Ismagilova. “If there’s a danger of depletion of resources in the future then it makes sense to go out and get some.” “It implies that there is something completely irrational about it – that isn’t true,” he says. ![]() The term panic buying is not very well defined, notes Richard Bentall, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Sheffield. It’s taken almost everyone by surprise, but even the term “panic buying” doesn’t precisely convey what’s happening when people instinctively head out to the forecourt to join a queue of cars waiting to fill up. A lack of lorry drivers meant that some petrol stations were beginning to run short at the end of last week, however, and it was arguably the fear that things were about to get much worse that triggered full-blown panic among drivers. The petrol crisis is as real as it gets.Īnd yet, the UK government and industry leaders both say that there is plenty of petrol in the UK. Occasionally, the mayhem has led to arguments and altercations. Reports abound of drivers waiting for hours just to fill up on petrol, forecourts running dry of fuel, and buses diverted to avoid the gridlock. The snaking queues of cars have stretched for hundreds of metres, even kilometres. ![]()
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