It is being predicted that the slide affect (sorry, side affect) of corona-virus – the wholesale going-down-the-pan of world sanity – will come to an end next Tuesday.
It’s all just been a splash in the pan as far as some marketing gurus are concerned – particularly that lavatorial madness of stockpiling toilet rolls!
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls and anybody else who is reading, a consumer psychologist has predicted that toilet-paper hoarding will end within days.
Well, I bet that’s wiped the smile off the faces of some of the idiots who can no longer move in their toilet-sized homes because it’s packed to the ginnels and ceilings with puppy-dog soft pink Andrex, double quilted whiter than white Bliss or the workman like skiddy but medicated Izal.
Adam Ferrier, from Oz, one of the characters behind renowned advertising agency Thinkerbell, who has to keep a close eye on buying trends, says the stocking up on toilet paper was declining. ‘Most trends are over at about the same rate they start. The quicker the rise, the quicker the fall,’ he said.
And predicting next Tuesday for no reason at all, seems to be as good a day as any to call it a day on this incredible hand jive of shame had people fighting each other in the isles.
Some supermarkets have even taken to selling single rolls only from behind the counter in an attempt to stop violent scenes in the aisles.
And as so many people got bogged down in this ridiculousness, the sight of empty toilet paper shelves started them worrying they would miss out, and so they went on a buying spree too!
After three women knocked 10 bells of **** out of each other at Woolworths in Sydney’s western suburb of Chullora, NSW Police Acting Inspector Andrew New told the public ‘to calm down’.
But seriously, the worldwide spread of the novel coronavirus is leading to some very very curious side effects … store shelves are being stripped bare from Singapore to Seattle. Supermarkets in the U.K. have started rationing items and in Hong Kong a delivery man was apparently robbed at knife-point of hundreds of toilet-paper rolls.
That actually begs the question, where was he going with them?
But psychologists are viewing it as a fundamental human reaction.
One said: “People are really not equipped psychologically to process this type of thing,” said Andrew Stephen, a marketing professor at the University of Oxford’s Said Business School. “So that just makes it worse for a lot of people in terms of uncertainty, and then they do whatever they need to do to try and get back some control.”
And the U.S. Surgeon General has told Americans to stop buying face masks to ensure that health care workers have them.
EBay is banning listings for health products – packs of hand sanitizer that usually sell for a couple of pounds were going up for hundreds.
Similar panic buying often heralds snow storms and typhoons, but the global nature of the coronavirus’ spread — along with access to information facilitated by social media — means hysteria today is travelling in ways not seen in previous epidemics.
