Shoppers buy up bulk sanitiser in virus’ wake
An Auckland supermarket says people have started to buy antiseptic sprays and liquids by the box as the world continues to grapple with the coronavirus outbreak.
Countdown Meadowlands, in east Auckland, is bringing in extra hand sanitisers, antiseptic liquids and antibacterial sprays — particularly Dettol — as people are now buying them in bulk.
Duty manager Kumar Than told the Herald on Sunday its warehouse was sending extra stock for those items regularly now — something they had not seen before.
“All the shelves are getting empty very quickly.
“Those items like the hand sanitisers, Dettol, are selling very good, certainly after the coronavirus warning.”
It comes after shoppers overseas were amazed when they spotted “human coronavirus” listed on the label as one of the germs Dettol could kill.
It was later reported it was a different strain of coronavirus and not the novel coronavirus that has so far killed more than 250 people.
Than could not say how many Dettol sprays had sold in the past week but he had seen people pushing out trolleys with boxes of the items.
An Auckland resident who contacted the newspaper said he approached a group of people who had purchased bulk Dettol products from the supermarket this week.
“I [asked] this group of people buying all the hand sanitiser and cleaning products for one bottle of the hand sanitiser — they said no.
“I went to a few other supermarkets around east Auckland — they’ve all sold out, too.”
Meanwhile, an online auction site has reported a huge jump in people searching for hand sanitisers and face masks.
Head of Trade Me’s Marketplace, Lisa Stewart, said, as of Friday, there had been 22,000 searches for the term “face mask” in the past seven days.
That was an increase of 816 per cent on results for the same time last year.