In times of crisis, you see the best in people and you see the worst in people.
Case in point, we have neighbors that one of them overheard my wife in the backyard talking on the phone to a member of the family about how when she was able to get out next she needed to go to the store and get a certain type of pickles.
Two days later, that neighbor knocks on the door and points to a jar of pickles sitting on our front porch. She didn’t know that the member of the family was 2,000 miles away. She just knew that someone needed a jar of pickles.
On the other hand, you see people like the one that I saw when I was in a grocery store a few weeks ago. My wife and I were in the store and we spotted some lady at the checkout raising a stink about how she couldn’t buy six loaves of bread. She lost it and destroyed the bread, telling the cashier if she couldn’t have it then nobody could.
John-Paul Drake of Drakes Supermarkets, a Down Under chain, has become a bit of a social media celebrity due to his coronavirus crisis updates on social media. They’re just short videos about what’s happening on the front lines of retail.
In one outrageous anecdote, he dealt with a reseller whose hoarding scheme had gone awry and was now trying to return some toilet paper and hand sanitizer. How much, you ask?
According to Drake, the guy had 150 packs of 32-roll toilet paper and 150 one-liter sanitizer bottles.
He had a simple, wordless response to the customer, as seen below:
WARNING: The following videos contains some mildly vulgar content that some viewers will find offensive.
You know those customer surveys that cashiers try to get you to fill out after your visit? I don’t think this guy was asked to fill out one.
According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Drake said the man had bought the items, worth $10,000 AUD ($6,353.80 USD), with a “team” of people who stockpiled them across Drakes stores.
“In that conversation [the shopper said] ‘my eBay site has been shut down, so we couldn’t profiteer off that,’” Drake told the ABC, calling it “absolutely disgraceful.”
“The rest of my team [is] over this sort of behavior and having to police people taking more than they need — that’s a tough thing to deal with,” Drake said.
“I never thought I’d been in a situation that I’m seeing here. We’re not used to it, no one is used to it, when people take advantage of the system,” he added.
“It’s not necessarily being sold here or used here, or hoarded here — it’s being marked up [online] for a considerable amount.”
Drake, who says supermarkets need to “band together” to stop hoarding, said he’d been talking to manufacturers about making smaller packs, but they told him larger packs were more efficient during times of high demand.
“For them to get more toilet rolls into the hands of the consumer, doing the bulk packs is the most efficient run that they can do,” he said.
Even if you’re not a hoarder who’s selling toilet paper on eBay, you still don’t need to be hoarding for yourself.