What if you went to the store for necessities and found the shelves bare?  You can live without shampoo using body wash as a substitute. Tide will cover the dishwasher in a pinch but what about toilet paper?  Paper towels are the quickest way to a smelly plumbing bill. Paper towels are not a substitute.

Last March, we experienced the unexpected of the toilet paper hand sanitizer shelves being empty. Junior Delaney Dodson said, “I didn’t ever imagine something like this could happen because I never thought about it before.” When supplies arrived at stores, people would swarm to the particular store that was popular in text group chats among friends and co workers having been identified as just receiving a shipment of toilet paper and the very needed hand sanitizer.

Some entrepreneurs tried to buy large quantities in the hope of up-charging any toilet paper for a premium price.  People would even buy hand sanitizer from stores to take to offices since the usual office supply sources had hand sanitizer and toilet paper on back order.

Stores had to move to internal regulation of what consumers could buy each time they visited a store. And stores refused large returns of excessive supply purchases because the toilet paper and hand sanitizer black market was quickly identified as unethical and dried up. There is a standard of trust between manufacturers, retailers and consumers do not have a lot of additional trust for second party sellers in mainstream US culture. Reselling toilet paper and hand sanitizer was an unsuccessful venture for many black market sellers. They will have ample personal supply for years to come.

Schools, banks, medical offices and stores all need hand sanitizer so retailers would allow purchase of regular price toilet paper and hand sanitizer in limited quantities. Junior Christian Salas said, “When I went to the store they had limited quantities like one pack of toilet paper per customer and two hand soap or hand sanitizer total. This was a change for my family because we would typically stock up in the items to make less trips to the store.”

Moving forward, many people are on a strict buying regime having extra packs in their homes just in case of the unexpected occurrence. Junior Brooke Clark shared her thoughts. “The experiences are definitely a result of the state of unpreparedness our country was in. seeing  barren grocery stores was something I’ll probably never forget. However, in the grand scheme of things, we do live in a first world country where critical resources were able to be mass produced to fit our needs. these bizarre slight inconveniences had little impact on me, but never in a million years would i think that that would become a reality.”