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> Yet repeated attempts by authorities to spread calm and urge against panic buying have had the opposite effect. Did that ever work in any country?

• tarboreus 5y ago
  Where there's obviously no reason to panic you don't need to go on TV and say, hey, don't panic.
• Arnt 5y ago
  Sure. It's a classic rhetorical technique, and the conditions for it to work are well known. It's a variant of "trust me", and that works if and only if the audience considers you trustworthy. So it wasn't terribly likely to work for someone like Boris Johnson, whose recent history chiefly consists of using bonmots to deflect blame for a series of failures. But it worked for Angela Merkel six years ago, when she said "wir schaffen das" about an impending crisis, and the great majority trusted her judgment.
• bsd44 5y ago
  Yes it does, in every other country. This is exactly what happened last year with the toilet paper "shortage" where people emptied the stock by panic buying and then the food "shortage" when Curry's went out of freezers because people were panic buying and stockpiling food. These images could only be seen in the UK, no other European country had this problem. Now it's happening again. Exactly the same. The British are morons, on average, at best, hopefully.
  • _Wintermute 5y ago
    I'm British and agree that our general public are morons, but I was living in France at the time of coronavirus panic buying, and it definitely happened in other European countries. Pasta aisles laid bare, fights at checkout queues - stupidity has no borders.
    • bsd44 5y ago
      If you were in the UK at the time you would've seen much worse than pasta shortage, eg. people were getting stabbed in London over toilet paper. There are times when it's completely acceptable to panic. This is not one of those times. A shortage of anything in this country is a self-fulfilling prophecy. What these panic-buying idiots don't understand is that their stockpiling of fuel will have negative consequences for the entire economy. Entities who really depend on fuel, such as delivery drivers, will have to stop working which will actually cause a shortage of goods and services, which will fuel the panic even further. This madness is created by the people, brainless morons who read The Sun like Muslims read Koran.