The panic-buying myth
Watching the lead up to Cyclone Alfred crossing the coast at Brisbane in March 2025, there were two key narratives.
Get ready for the storm and…
…Queenslanders are all a state of panic artists.
Once upon a time in emergency management – until the 1990s - panic was a widely accepted outcome of giving people about to be hit by a natural hazard too much information.
The concept of the population default state of mind being panic has since been debunked, with disaster scientists - such as the great Henry Quarantelli and the father of disaster communication research, Denis Mileti, and their research teams - finding that in most cases, panic is not the predominant state of mind when a community faces a disaster.
So when Cyclone Alfred appeared over the horizon near Brisbane, Queensland Australia, home of 4 million people - emergency managers were on top of the narrative about getting ready. The south-east Queensland community listened and millions of people actively got ready and helped their neighbours get ready.
There were days of news stories of amazing people getting their belongings up out harms way, organising sandbags from our volunteer State Emergency Service, and even planning evacuations.
But all this was apparently too much of a good thing – the media needed some conflict to spice things up, so reporters went back to a 1990s time warp where getting ready was labelled ‘panic’.
Almost every news story about Cyclone Alfred carried the word panic, relating to people stocking up on things they’d need if they were preparing for a disaster.
The Queensland daily, the Courier Mail was among one of the worst, saying that panic buying ‘explodes’ in the lead up to the cyclone.
Photos of shelves empty of bottled water, milk, bread and toilet paper were especially popular.
But let’s think about this.
Many people do a weekly shop. So what if you listened to the forecasts about the worst days for the cyclone and brought forward your shop by four days. We only need forty people to do that to find the shelves bare of milk, bread and toilet paper!
This seems to be a trivial complaint by a grumpy disaster researcher – but there are a few BIG problems with the media’s insistence that normal preparation is actually panic-buying.
First is that social scientists working in disaster preparation talk about a concept called social norms and their effect on people taking action to keep themselves safe. One demonstrated effect is that people who see their neighbours getting ready are also more likely to get ready. The flip side of that is that people don’t want to be thought of as ‘panicking’ if they get ready for a disaster and others are not getting ready, or if the predicted disaster was a fizzer.
Some people will take on board the media pointing the finger at ‘panic-buyers’ and will be reluctant to become one of those people who took the cyclone seriously. They are probably the same people that got onto community Facebook pages to gloat about the waste of time all their neighbours spent on getting ready.
Second, the emergency management sector spends a great deal of money and volunteer hours trying to get the community to get ready – to have three days’ supplies in the pantry and the fridge, to have an emergency kit, to have a safe supply of water and to practice their emergency plan.
The Queensland state premier, David Crisafulli had very consistent and positive messages about getting ready – as a north Queenslander he takes cyclones very seriously.
But even then, panic was wedged into the story by reporters – this one from the Brisbane Times. Crisafulli’s elegant deflection should have embarrassed the reporter:
“Crisafulli said people should prepare to be without power and water supply, and have batteries for a radio.
As for reports of panic buying, Crisafulli said there was no harm in preparing for the worst and then not needing what was bought.
“The message to the supermarkets is restock the shelves as much as you can, and to Queenslanders it’s heed the warning and buy what you need,” he said”. (Brisbane Times, March 3, 2025)
At least we didn’t have looting - but that’s another story!
Last words: some last paragraph advice from an ABC online news story that opened with panic buying hysteria:
“What should I put in my emergency kit?
An emergency kit should contain the basics and be able to sustain your family at home for three days.”
Here are some excellent reads on panic in disaster:
Gantt & Gantt, 2012, Disaster Psychology: Dispelling the myths of panic, Professional Safety. Park Ridge, Illinois.
