COVID-19 Pandemic Panic Buying and National Emergency Declarations
The United States experienced a surge in panic shopping following President Donald Trump's Wednesday evening address and the subsequent national emergency declaration on Friday, March 13, 2020. Retailers like Costco saw massive traffic backups as consumers cleared shelves of paper products, cleaning supplies, and frozen foods. Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin reported that while travel spending has decreased, the surge in grocery and medical supply purchases has temporarily offset the economic impact.
jared kushner· costco· national emergency· toilet paper· steven mnuchin
00:00 Clean out your bong water, people. Beware the Ides of March and broadcasting live from Opportunity Zone 33 here in the frontier of Austin, Texas, capital of the drone star state. In the morning everybody, I'm Adam Curry. And from Northern Silicon Valley where the freeways are deserted, I'm John C. Dvorak. It's Crackpot and Buzzkill. In the morning. I admit I'm loving the traffic sitch. Yes. The traffic sitch is da best.
00:40 It's pretty good. Wow. Hey, so we were talking on Thursday how we were so surprised about all this panic shopping. I hadn't seen it, you hadn't seen it, but I guess none of that happened until after the president's disastrous Wednesday evening performance, which apparently was written by Jared Kushner. Well that explains a little bit. It explains a lot. It's awkward trying to read it, but I don't believe this is true. That it was written by Jared? No, about this happening after the announcements. Well, everything started to sell out here. Do you have a time stamp on when he did it? No, Thursday. Well, he did it Wednesday evening and then Thursday... Oh, no, I thought about... Okay, well, the national emergency was called on Friday. No, I know, I know, but the nutso buying of products... Because I went out shopping Friday and I... Here in Austin as well, I ran into empty shelves.
01:38 So, you know, it kind of, I think it right after the president did that crappy D-minus performance, that's when people went, and then the stock market was dropping. So I think that's what happened. Well, it dropped and it went up. No, we're talking about Thursday. Thursday. Friday. Friday it skyrocketed, of course. So we have the, so we had here a And I'd gone to the store the day before and it was after Trump's thing, but it wasn't, it didn't seem to be the disaster it was on Friday. Now on Friday, we had, and this was reported in the news, the traffic is backed up on the freeway. Like backed up on the freeway for as far as I can see. And I thought it was a wreck. Oh, it's a wreck. Somebody wrecked.
02:31 No, and it turned out that that traffic was backed up for the purpose of going to Costco, which is... Yes, we had the same at some of our Costcos. But on Friday, not... Why Costco? What has Costco done to the public? Did they hypnotize people? Well, first of all, Costco has big carts, which makes you feel good and powerful because we're going to get lots of stuff. I went to the supermarket and indeed we had no paper products, no cleaning products, no frozen food, lots of fresh produce, low on potatoes, but I was in line for about an hour and I just looked at what everyone was buying.
03:08 So two things. One, this was around two o'clock Austin time, so people were on their phones watching the president in the Rose Garden. This was kind of surreal. They're, oh, whoa, yeah, the president's talking. All right, all right. Yeah, he's doing, this is how people, you hear, yeah, he's doing the State of the Union. This is, that's when I realized, oh, Curry, you're way too deep, you know way too much about this stuff. This is the level that people understand. He's doing the State of the Union. Okay. But they have 15 bags of chips, 5 boxes of Elite brand mac and cheese. It's just like all these things. No canned, no tuna fish. Normally, they can't sell the tuna fish. And the only thing that was left was colorful boxes that looked like they might be Asian. That contained some tuna fish can or something. But the Great Toilet Paper Scare is a fractal.
04:03 This is a fractal of 1973 and I was living in the Netherlands so I don't recall it but maybe you do. In 73 people started to freak out and buy toilet paper because Johnny Carson cracked a joke about it on the Tonight Show. Actually I read the same article, actually it predated that. Carson cracked a joke because it was in the newspaper, wasn't it? It was in the newspaper, yes. Somebody had announced, and I don't know where, by the way, and I just read this, to kind of answer your earlier question that I might remember this. I don't remember this, but okay. I don't even know that it happened, but maybe that's where my mom's thing came from. It might have started right there. And that's the first thing I was thinking of, 1973. That would be a time when your mom might have said, whoa, the Chinese! And it was a Chinese thing, wasn't it? Or Japanese. It was a Japanese shortage, I think.
05:03 Well, there's a shortage somewhere and then Carson made some comment and then it was all over and it became, according to the same article or one of the articles like you read, it became like a big thing. I don't know if there's, it is a fractal of that, but it, I don't know what the triggering mechanism is. Here's the fractal. We go to Stephen Colbert. Procter and Gamble says 17,600 products could be affected by coronavirus in China. Over 17,000 products including Charmin, Dawn, Bounty, and Crest toothpaste. So get ready to start brushing your teeth with a hygiene product still made in America. Jack Daniels. It's possible that he may have kicked that off. That was the beginning of the week.
05:50 Maybe possible something kicked it off, but it did mania about it. It is Laughable yes It's sad it shows you how how dysfunctional people are minimally and the thing is they're not, nobody's ever even thought to stop manufacturing toilet paper and as I've mentioned when we talk about toilet paper which we apparently do once a year or so, the, cause I talked about Z, the brand Z, and since I get some toilet paper from grocery outlet, mainly because, there goes the zephyr, let's go, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven,
06:37 Eight, they're short on cars. Ah, eight, economy stable, all things normal, we're good to go. No, no, eight is short, it should be nine. Oh, I thought, oh you're right, nine is normal. We are short, economy down, economy down. Economy down. Economy down, economy down, only eight cars on the Zephyr. I realize by doing that, buying at this place, there are probably 100 separate brands of toilet paper. And I don't know how many come in from China, which seems unlikely, because it's kind of a waste, or it's kind of a stupid thing to do. But there's a lot of different, nobody is stopping the manufacturing of toilet paper any time soon if there's not a glut on the market. So the people who went out and bought,
07:28 bushel baskets full of toilet paper, it's just, it's beyond comprehension. I think there's an op going on. Well, before we get to ops, let's listen to our Secretary of the Treasury and fellow Tourette sufferer, although he's much better at suppressing it, Steven Mnuchin. Only recently. I know, but I got to get his tips. I got to figure out what he's doing. I think he's being injected. He still has it. I can see it. When a question comes, he moves his head and his neck a certain way. And of course, I recognize what that is. It's a stifled tick. But he's good at it. And he weighed in, of course, on the economy. And very interesting, as we kind of thought this buying would
08:14 Would affect the overall economy and it has there's there's area of the economies that have been hurt very hard immediately There's area of the economies is the best thing this ever has occurred. So as you said people are shopping from the data I have from the credit card companies and what we've seen is although travel spending is way down and spending on supplies, food, medical, pharmacy has almost offset that in the short term. And again, any supply chain issues, the task force is focused on and will be dealing with. Don't see that as a major problem at the moment. I think as you know, people were concerned about China. China's opened back up. China opened for business. And thank you for helping the economy, the overall economy of course, because
