Pandemic lessons: Don’t grab unneeded stuff

COVID-19 caused chaos in almost every aspect of daily life, including consumer and retailer behavior. In Israel, people rushed from store to store to find alcohol gel, masks, and saliva tests. When the pandemic slowed, lots of face masks and alcohol gel containers were left on the shelf.

Prof. Xiaodan Pan, of the supply chain and business technology department at Canada’s Concordia University has published a new paper on the topic in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services under the title “Stocking up on hand sanitizer: Pandemic lessons for retailers and consumers.”

In her study, Pan studied the hand-sanitizer market to see what was learned from the 2009-10 swine flu event and to develop lessons for consumers and retailers today. They looked at sales of the alcohol gels in the US over a period of a decade from 2008 to 2017. Weekly statistics were gathered from a database that tracks product prices and sales volumes as well as store characteristics from more than 38,000 stores across more than 90 participating retail chains. The researchers also collected data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track seasonal flu epidemics and the swine flu pandemic across the country.

She found that there was a surge in demand for hand sanitizer as the swine flu pandemic was declared – initially causing shortages in alcohol gel, but the industry strategically adapted to the stockpiling behavior, increasing the supply of large pack-size sanitizer products that were in greatest demand.

By the second wave of the swine flu pandemic, large pack-size hand sanitizer sales exceeded small pack-size sales, marking a shift in consumer behavior and retailer product availability. The researchers found no evidence of price gouging by the major retailers and noted that there were clear winners among retailer types, with warehouse clubs that specialized in large packsize products and drug stores that provided a great variety of products leading hand sanitizer sales.

In framing her study, Pan gathered a decade’s worth of weekly sanitizer sales data.

Overall, research suggested that while sales declined during subsequent seasonal flu epidemics, it took four seasons for sales to return to pre-pandemic levels, indicating that both consumers and retailers held onto their pandemic behaviors after the pandemic concluded. “I think the biggest lesson here is that there is no need for panic-buying,” Pan said.