Posted on by BlackMask Financial

Panic buying forces stores to limit purchases of toilet paper and masks

Retailers  are having to take drastic action to limit the number of toilet paper rolls, face masks and hand sanitizer bottles each person can buy as customers stockpile goods over fears of the novel coronavirus outbreak. The epidemic has infected more than 97,000 people and killed 3,300 globally, leading to growing alarm that has resulted in mass bulk buying around the world. Australian supermarket chains Woolworths and Coles both began limiting toilet paper purchases to four packs per person this week. Costco Australia is also restricting how much toilet tissue, disinfectant, milk, eggs and rice each customer can buy.
 In the United States, Kroger (KR) says it is capping individual purchases of “sanitization, cold and flu-related products,” while Home Depot (HD) is curbing the number of face masks in single orders placed online and in stores. In the United Kingdom, Boots is limiting the purchase of hand sanitizer to two bottles per customer, and UK online grocer Ocado has advised customers to place orders further in advance in the wake of “exceptionally high demand.” Emergency food service providers — which send freeze dried meals to people preparing for crises such as natural disasters — are also experiencing a huge surge in sales. “We’re doing approximately our average monthly orders in a day,” said James Blake, chief of Emergency Food Storage UK, the largest emergency food supplier in Europe. “Our tins have a 25-year shelf life so people are really thinking about stocking up.” At a Coles supermarket in Brisbane, Australia on Wednesday, toilet paper was completely sold out. One worker at the store told CNN Business that his shift had been hectic as customers mobbed the aisles. When a new delivery of toilet rolls arrived that afternoon, workers didn’t even have time to unpack the goods before shoppers swooped in, he said. Things were so frantic that workers simply handed packs straight to customers, the employee added. He said he didn’t want to be named because he wasn’t authorized to speak to media. “It’s crazy,” one customer muttered after spotting empty shelves at the store. “Insane,” another person said.
At another Coles store in Sydney on Wednesday, a security guard was dispatched to watch over the toilet paper aisle. One reporter at the Sydney Morning Herald said on Twitter that he was told the store was “going through a pallet every ten minutes or so.”
“The fear of facing increasing supply shortages and prospects of disruptions to daily life have likely prompted people to stock up,” Bernard Aw, a principal economist at IHS Markit, told CNN Business. But he added that “businesses generally prefer stable demand growth as opposed to any spikes because of the impact [that] such surges in demand will have on their capacity to ensure sufficient supplies.” Some retailers have also been thrown off by disruption on the back end.
Aw noted that the coronavirus outbreak has hit companies’ supply chains, with February manufacturing data showing that “global delivery times lengthened by the greatest extent in nearly nine years.” A notice posted on empty shelves of hand sanitizer in a supermarket in Sydney on Wednesday. To work around these hiccups, some businesses are adopting new practices.
Coles has introduced “some direct ‘supplier to store’ deliveries” to simplify the supply chain, a spokesperson said. Jonathan Cheng, a partner at Bain who leads the company’s retail practice in Greater China, said the crisis underscored a need for some traditional retailers to rethink how they source and provide goods in the long term.
“Retail management teams are currently facing two looming challenges. The first is a logistical bottleneck,” he noted. “The second challenge is imminent supply shortages, linked to uncertainty about when factories will resume production.”
 As the outbreak worsens, retailers are closely watching supply chains for signs of further disruption, according to Andrew Opie, director of food and sustainability at the British Retail Consortium, which includes grocers such as Marks & Spencer and Aldi. Nick Note: go to our pandemic informer web sight. we will show you how to make sanitizers more powerful then that dog shit they sell for $10 a pint. Why kill yourself with that freeze dried sodium and preservative filled shit. We do it better out way and for far less money. For many of you this may be something new. We have  been off the grid for decades and have ALWAYS MAINTAINED  5 NOW 10 YEAR FOOD SUPPLY333!