(Submitted photo/Mel Rothenburger).
ARMCHAIR MAYOR

ROTHENBURGER: It’s panic buying, not hoarding, and our brains make us do it

Nov 20, 2021 | 6:45 AM

I ONCE RAN INTO ELVIS in frozen foods. He was wearing his jump suit and checking out the Lean Cuisine fridge.

“I’m a huge fan,” I told him. “I have all your LPs.”

“Thank yuh, thank yuh very mush,” he said, gracious as ever and flashing his famous lop-sided grin.

He left the building just before I woke up. It seemed so real.

Of course, if it had been real, he would have been shovelling toilet paper, milk and leafy greens into his cart and fighting little old grandmothers over the last pound of hamburger.

Hoarding is an irrational act and seems to confirm that the whole world is going insane. We shake our heads in righteous indignation and condemn it as irrational and selfish. But, on closer examination, we shouldn’t be surprised nor quite so indignant.

The urge to hoard, it turns out, is hard-wired into our brain. “Hoarding” is actually the wrong term for what’s been going on in our grocery stores this week, and what happened in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hoarding, say the experts, is not to be confused with stockpiling or panic buying. Hoarding is what you see on the TV shows in which people have a phobia about throwing anything out, and who fill their houses and yards with junk they’ll never use, to the detriment of their health.

Stockpiling is what my great grandparents did in their root cellars to make sure they didn’t run out of food during the winter.

Panic buying is what’s been going on in the stores the past several days. Psychologists say we do it to relieve anxiety in times of crisis. When bad things happen that are out of our control, it helps us to cope.

Panic buying becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy — we fear shortages and then create them by depleting the shelves faster than they can be re-stocked. The result is that some people have too much while others can’t get enough.

According to behavioural neuroscientist Stephanie Preston, such behaviour is “motivated less by logic and more by a deeply felt drive to feel safer.”

Stress, she says, signals the brain to start hoarding. Kangaroo rats, for example, increase their hoarding if a neighbouring animal steals from them. “Once, I returned to the lab to find the victim of theft with all his remaining food stuffed into his cheek pouches — the only safe place.

“People do the same.”

The parts of the brain that help organize goals and motivations to satisfy needs are the same ones that prompt us to panic and rush to the supermarket for toilet paper and bottled water.

But, she says, even while we’re trying to buy up every carton of milk and every roll of paper towel we can find, we become upset with others who are doing the same thing. Why? Our sense of fairness kicks in.

Both behaviours are normal. It’s not normal, of course, to buy up supplies in order to create shortages and re-sell them at exorbitant prices.

So, no, panic buying (as opposed to pure hoarding) is not an illness, nor is it simple greed, and it doesn’t mean the entire world is going crazy. When hundreds of people show up to a rally on the grassy knoll in Dallas expecting John F. Kennedy Jr. — who died more than 20 years ago —

to re-appear and announce his candidacy for vice president on the same ticket as Donald Trump… that’s group insanity.

Panic buying isn’t a good thing, and we should fight the urge, but it’s not based on selfishness and it’s not something to necessarily be ashamed of. It’s not logical, so assuring us that the supply chain is secure and everything we need will arrive from the East in due course won’t change what goes on deep in our frontal lobes.

Mel Rothenburger is a former mayor of Kamloops and a retired newspaper editor. He is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a director on the Thompson-Nicola Regional District board. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or Pattison Media.

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