The underlying assumption was that perceptions of actual or expected shortages led people to behave irrationally and overreact, and that overreaction took the form of selfish behaviours and aggressive competition, eventually accentuating problems of supply for the public. Such observations were often characterized as instances of “panic buying”. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors declare that there are no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.Īt the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, newspapers in several countries published photos of empty supermarket shelves to illustrate shortages of food and other products. įunding: The research presented here was supported by a QR seed grant by the School of Psychology and Life Sciences at Canterbury Christ Church University awarded to Evangelos Ntontis, and by a UKRI grant awarded to John Drury, Clifford Stott, Stephen Reicher, Fergus Neville and Evangelos Ntontis (ES/V005383/1). All relevant interview excerpts can be found in the following link. However, in line with the guidelines of PLOS for data availability, and particularly regarding qualitative data ( ), we have made publicly available all the anonymized related quotes and interview excerpts that we identified in the dataset during the coding phase of the analysis. Due to ethical concerns and the limitations imposed to us by the ethics committee, we do not have permission to publicly share the full interview transcripts with anyone other than the authors of this paper. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: In this paper we report findings from a set of qualitative, semi-structured interviews. Received: NovemAccepted: FebruPublished: February 25, 2022Ĭopyright: © 2022 Ntontis et al. PLoS ONE 17(2):Įditor: Mumtaz Alam, Fiji National University, FIJI (2022) Is it really “panic buying”? Public perceptions and experiences of extra buying at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. It can also facilitate such behaviours, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.Ĭitation: Ntontis E, Vestergren S, Saavedra P, Neville F, Jurstakova K, Cocking C, et al. Thus, “panic buying” is not a useful concept and should not be used as it constructs expected responses to threat as irrational or pathological. Overall, despite frequently using the term ‘panic’, the irrationalist connotations of “panic buying” were largely absent from participants’ accounts. The third theme addresses the meaningful motivations behind increased shopping, which participants described in terms of preparedness some participants reported increased shopping behaviours as a response to other people stockpiling, to reduce their trips to supermarkets, or to prepare for product shortages and longer stays at home. The second theme focuses on the influence of the media and other people’s behaviour in shaping subsequent shopping behaviours. When participants referred to “panic buying” they meant observed product shortages (rather than the underlying psychological processes that can lead to such behaviours), preparedness behaviours, or emotions such as fear and worry. The first theme addresses people’s understandings of “panic buying”. Through a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 23 participants, we developed three themes. We report a qualitative exploration of the experiences and understandings of shopping behaviour of members of the public at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, “panic buying” has been criticized for attributing shopping behaviour to people’s alleged psychological frailty while ignoring other psychological and structural factors that might be at play. Shopping behaviour in response to extreme events is often characterized as “panic buying” which connotes irrationality and loss of control.
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