If you feel compelled to buy three months’ worth of toilet paper to survive a severe weather event lasting a couple of days, you’ve got bigger worries than when a cyclone kisses the coast, says editor Lyndon Keane. Photo: Cape York Weekly.
What do the products we immediately lunge for on supermarket shelves when a natural disaster looms say about us as a society?
Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. I guarantee you we’ve all been there, attempting to discreetly hide a questionable purchase in our trolley so we can judge the person beside us who wasn’t quite as quick to hide the same item grabbed in what could only be described as a war preparation quantity?
As Tropical Cyclone Alfred bore down on south-east Queensland and northern New South Wales last week, I wept for humanity as I watched an endless stream of news reports showing people jostling for items that were, quite frankly, going to be as useful as the proverbial on a boar pig once they got home, bunkered down and eventually lost power.
If you’ve ever wondered why intelligent life from elsewhere in the universe has never made contact, I strongly suggest you check out footage of near-rabid shoppers scrambling for things like toilet paper, fresh meat and family-sized bags of frozen dim sims in the event of an impending cyclone, flood, bushfire or global pandemic.
Being someone who’s endured more than a fair share of cyclones and flood events over the years, I thought it my duty to check in on a few Brisbane mates to offer sage advice, see how their preparations were going, and ponder how interesting it was the only time they take seriously something we have to deal with every wet season was when said thing was on their doorstep.
One friend I spoke to had just finished a panic buying dash to the supermarket and proudly told me she had managed to wrangle four 48-roll packs of toilet paper as the shelves around her were stripped bare. I should mention here that my friend lives with a housemate in an inner-city apartment. Two bathrooms, two bums, but enough of Sorbent’s finest to supply a battalion for at least a short-term international deployment.
I’m not a medical expert, but if you need nearly 200 rolls of toilet paper to get you through an event that will likely last a day or two at most, the intensity and tracking of the cyclone is the least of your worries – you need a gastrointestinal surgeon and exorcist urgently, and not necessarily in that order.
Another mate, who lives north-west of Brisbane and got a great view of Alfred’s southern adventure, inexplicably saw fit to purchase six 24-bottle slabs of water. Not such a stupid purchase, I hear you say. This is the point I tell you they live on a farm with a completely self-sufficient, off-grid power system, and about 270,000 litres of rainwater currently at their fingertips. The 80-odd litres they pillaged from a Coles shelf effectively increased their water capacity by less than 0.05 per cent.
The panic buying mentality isn’t unique to our southern cousins, however. You only have to look back to the North Queensland floods last month to realise we’re just as bad when it comes to filling our trollies with enough stuff to prepare for the end of the world. In saying that, however, if you genuinely need a couple of hundred rolls of toilet paper to survive the week, you’re probably calling your predicament – and rightly so – a genuine apocalyptic scenario.
The thing I’ve never understood is that when you see people stockpiling their trollies with enough toilet paper to build a life-sized fortress, you never see them reaching for extra cans of air freshener or those much fancier potpourri bathroom candles. Go figure.
So, what is it about panic buying, and why do we all whinge and bitch about it while we pretend it’s something we absolutely don’t do ourselves? Is it a fear of missing out, or are we all now so self-absorbed we don’t care what’s going on with our neighbours, as long as we have enough supplies to make us feel as though we really have some control when the cyclones, floods and other catastrophes come knocking? All the toilet paper in the world isn’t going to help when the shit really hits the fan.
Editor Lyndon Keane is curious about what our apparent priority trolley inclusions when panic buying sets in say about us as a society. Photo: Cape York Weekly.
