Milk, bread and eggs: The trinity of winter-storm panic-shopping
By Joe Pinsker The Atlantic
Lines of frantic shoppers have mobbed grocery stores in Washington,
D.C., after the National Weather Service gently advised residents that
an intense weekend storm will pose “a threat to life and property” and
impact “you, your family, and your community.”
Which led me to wonder: After people hear a message so ominous, and
after reminders of their employers’ inclement-weather policies hit
inboxes, what do they buy to prepare for spending a good deal of time
indoors? I called up the managers of some grocery stores in D.C. to find
out, and they all had more or less the same answer: bread, milk and
eggs. This holy trinity of winter-storm preparedness is not some quirk
of the nation’s capital — bread, milk and eggs are popular panic-buys
everywhere from Knoxville to New England.
Now, I get bread. It doesn’t need to be cooked or refrigerated, and
it goes with just about anything. The CDC even recommends it as
something to have on hand for storms. But milk and eggs? Why, when the
concern is that the power might go out, do people hoard things that need
refrigeration, or even cooking?
There are some theories out there about the roots of pre-storm
hoarding, most of them reasonable enough. “We spend a lot of time and
energy trying to feel in control, and buying things you might throw out
still gives the person a sense of control in an uncontrollable
situation,” a psychotherapist told How Stuff Works. And one clinical
psychologist suggested that buying things that might spoil is an
assertion of optimism: It’s “like saying, ‘The storm will be over soon
and I won’t be stuck in this situation for long.’”
But those explanations cover stockpiling in general, not why people
particularly like hoarding bread, milk, and eggs. Peter Moore, the
author of The Weather Experiment: The Pioneers Who Sought to See the
Future, told me that while he didn’t have any definitive answers, he did
have an idea. “We’re encouraged, both by the modern media and by our
primitive survival impulses, to project these extreme narratives—‘We’re
going to be buried in the house for a week,’ etc.
— and people generally end up feeling very vulnerable,” he wrote to
me in an email. “It must have something to do with the perceived comfort
and safety of [those] particular products.”
That may sound like a stretch — the imposition of a highly abstract
explanation on a banal shopping decision — but it has some merit.
Weather, Moore reminded me, “is still the most capricious and mysterious
force in nature.”
That might hint at why these particular foods are popular right
before extreme weather, but it doesn’t get at why they are so popular.
In the days preceding a big storm, stores are mobbed — shelves of bread
are left skeletally bare, baskets are left abandoned near checkouts by
the impatient, and the tiled floor near dairy fridges can be speckled
with fallen egg cartons. Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke
University, thinks that this might be the product of group-think. “If we
go somewhere and we see other people buying those particular things,” he
says, “all of a sudden [we’re] even more interested in those [things].”
One consumer psychologist quoted by Time has taken this a step further,
speculating that “we are pre-wired to fight for food when we sense that
resources are scarce.”
My experience, for what it’s worth, is that I go into a different
mindset when I imagine myself cooped up indoors. Storms can of course
wreak awful damage, but for most people they are a harmless annoyance
and perhaps even an excuse to stay inside
— a culture-wide justification for renouncing FOMO for a day. To
stock up on cozy foods like milk and eggs is to clearly demarcate the
storm as a time to put on sweatpants and not go anywhere. Buying a bunch
of canned foods — a more practical choice — is decidedly less cozy, and
may even carry unwanted survivalist overtones.
There is also the chance that it’s simpler than any of these
theories. “I’m thinking you’re over-thinking this,” says Perry Samson, a
professor at the University of Michigan and a co-founder of Weather
Underground. “People simply feel that they have to do something and
staples are easy. If the storm is bad they’re covered, if not they’ll
use it sooner or later.”
Regardless, in all this theorizing, I’ve left out a notable
pre-storm purchase. Ben Orlove, an anthropologist at Columbia University
who specializes in climate science, points out: “The other thing that
people stock up on for hurricanes, in Florida at least, is alcohol,” he
says. “There are these hurricane parties, and people buy beer. I don’t
know if that’s the case during winter storms.” It probably is.
--
*================================================ Duane Whittingham -
N9SSN (ARES/RACES, EmComm, Skywarn & Red Cross)
http://www.radiodude.info ================================================*
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