My sister called from Atlanta on Tuesday to say she had sat in a gas line for forty minutes and the station ran dry two cars ahead of her. She did not need gas. Her tank was better than half full when she got in that line, and she knew it, and she got in the line anyway.
By Wednesday the photographs were everywhere. People filling plastic grocery sacks. Somebody filling a storage tote in the bed of a pickup. A state official having to say out loud, in public, in 2021, that you may not put gasoline in a plastic bag.
A pipeline went down to ransomware, and the shortage that followed was made mostly of people, not of petroleum.
We ran this same play fourteen months ago with toilet paper. Nothing was wrong with that supply chain until everyone began behaving as though something was, and then something was.
Panic buying is not a supply failure. It is a trust failure, and trust is a brand problem, which means words could have prevented it and words are exactly what went missing.
Consider what people were actually working with last week. A pipeline operator most of them had never heard of, saying very little and saying it slowly. Governors declaring emergencies, which is prudent and also reads as alarm. Bags going over pump handles with no note about when the truck comes. Into that vacuum walks the neighbor with a rumor, and the rumor is specific, and specificity beats silence every single time.
Here is what separated the retailers who held their nerve last spring from the ones who did not. It was not inventory. It was arithmetic said out loud. Costco posted purchase limits early and explained them, and a limit that arrives with a reason attached reads as competence rather than scarcity. Charmin spent those weeks telling people in plain sentences that the mills were running. You could disagree with the number. You could not accuse anyone of hiding it.
Vagueness is the thing people hoard against. Nobody stockpiles when they can see the schedule. So if you run anything with a supply behind it, write the sentence now, before you need it. What you have. When the next shipment lands. What you are asking people to do in the meantime. Say the number. A wrong number you correct on Thursday costs you far less than a week of monitoring the situation.
Into that vacuum walks the neighbor with a rumor, and the rumor is specific, and specificity beats silence every single time.
We are a continent away from that pipeline. I walked down for ice cream anyway and stood in a line at Salt & Straw that ran most of the way around the block, which is its own species of hoarding and better tempered. Nobody panicked. Everyone could see exactly how long the wait was.