Understanding consumer stockpiling: Insights provided during the COVID‐19 pandemic

• Published date: 01 March 2022
• Author: Nelson Borges Amaral,Bin Chang,Rachel Burns
• Date: 01 March 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joca.12434

SPECIAL ISSUE

Understanding consumer stockpiling: Insights

provided during the COVID-19 pandemic

Nelson Borges Amaral

1

| Bin Chang

1

| Rachel Burns

2

1

Faculty of Business and Information

Technology, Ontario Tech University,

Oshawa, Canada

2

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences,

Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Correspondence

Nelson Borges Amaral, Assistant

Professor of Marketing, Faculty of

Business and Information Technology,

Ontario Tech University, 2000 Simcoe St.

N., Oshawa, Ontario L1H 7K4, Canada.

Email: nelson.amaral@ontariotechu.ca

Abstract

This article examines data collected early in the

COVID-19 pandemic to uncover the underlying factors

that are related to consumer stockpiling in response to

a global pandemic. A survey of 1325 American con-

sumers from March 27, 2020 to March 29, 2020 rev-

ealed that 55.5% of respondents stockpiled. Locus of

control (LOC), the extent to which a person believes

the environment is controllable and responsive, is asso-

ciated with the stockpiling decision. More specifically,

after controlling for demographic characteristics, con-

sumers with internal LOC are less likely to stockpiling

than those with external LOC. We also find that con-

sumers with higher health risk are more likely to stock-

pile. Together, our results provide valuable insight for

practitioners and policy makers who are concerned

with understanding and reducing consumer stockpiling

during health-related crises.

KEYWORDS

consumer behavior, covid-19, panic buying, stockpiling

1|INTRODUCTION

Sudden and unexpected changes in the environment can elicit economically destructive behav-

iors from consumers. One such behavior, stockpiling, involves the purchase and storage of

goods for future use in anticipation of expected shortages. Stockpiling behavior has been dem-

onstrated in response to earthquakes (Hori & Iwamoto, 2014), hurricanes (Pan et al., 2020) and

Received: 21 October 2020 Revised: 24 September 2021 Accepted: 2 December 2021

DOI: 10.1111/joca.12434

© 2021 American Council on Consumer Interests.

J Consum Aff. 2022;56:211–236. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/joca 211

government bans (Dong & Klaiberb, 2019). Regardless of the underlying shock event (i.e.,

cause), stockpiling can be economically and socially disruptive, causing supply chain disrup-

tions and negative consequences for vulnerable groups (e.g., lower income consumers and the

elderly), such as product shortages and price increases.

The images of consumer stockpiling in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020

were striking. People rushed to stores, grasped at food, and fought over basic needs such as toi-

let paper. Daily headlines, such as, “No milk, no bleach: Americans awake to coronavirus panic

buying”(Borter, 2020) were common, despite assurances from suppliers that there was no

shortage of production capacity, and that any empty shelves would be temporary (Macias, 2020;

Rubenstein, 2020). At that time, the COVID-19 pandemic was just beginning to markedly

impact the United States with an increasing number of states implementing various restrictions,

including complete lock downs being instituted at both the county and state level. By March 27,

when we had completed our data collection, 105,217 Americans had been infected with

COVID-19, 2110 (2% of cases) had died, and many Americans expected that the worst was yet

to come (Murray, 2020); at the time of submission, 42 million Americans had been infected and

over 69,000 of those had lost their lives to COVID-19 (1.6%). Despite the far-reaching effects of

stockpiling behavior, prior research relied on events that were relatively local and short-lived

(e.g., hurricanes and earthquakes) (see Table 1 for a review). The beginning of the on-going

pandemic provided an opportunity to investigate this behavior during a global crisis event. At

the time of this publication only a handful of researchers have attempted to study stockpiling

behavior in this context, and the literature that did exist relied mainly on macro-level data via

social media textual analysis (e.g., Barnes et al., 2021) or retail aggregate data (e.g., Hall

et al., 2020).

For practitioners, product shortages and the relatively widespread stockpiling behavior pro-

vided a valuable opportunity to better understand consumer responses to global health emer-

gencies. A better understanding of this behavior is particularly important for policy makers

who wish to mitigate the disproportionate impacts that economic shocks like these tend to have

on more vulnerable groups (e.g., elderly or poor), who are in greater need of access to such

products (Hill & Sharma, 2020; Wesseler, 2020). For marketing practitioners, a better under-

standing of the factors that underlie stockpiling may help to mitigate disruptions to supply

chains (Zheng et al., 2021) and broader economic impacts resulting from global pandemics

(Kabadayi et al., 2020).

For researchers, despite the importance of this topic and several calls having been made for

a better understanding of stockpiling behavior (e.g., Arafat et al., 2020; Hall et al., 2020; Yuen

et al., 2020), a recent review of literature revealed that our current “understanding of the causes

of panic buying is quite limited”(Yuen et al., 2020, p. 10). Perhaps this is to be expected, given

the disasters that cause stockpiling are unusual, unpredictable, and rare events. As a result, the

insight that might be gained from the present results, in which individual consumer-level data

are analyzed, could become an important tool for practitioners, policy-makers, and consumers

to better prepare for future shock events.

The present research collected individual level survey data in the United States from March

27, 2020 to March 29, 2020. We asked the respondents specific questions regarding their

stockpiling behavior (e.g., did they stockpile, what did they buy, and why did they buy) and

demographic characteristics. More importantly, we also collected data related to potentially

broader underlying psychological and social processes: job security, health risks, and locus of

control (LOC). Our analyses reveal that 55.5% of respondents had stockpiled while also provid-

ing some details about the products that were stockpiled and consumers' self-reported reasons

212 AMARAL ET AL.