With Glenn Beck and others hyping companies selling “gournet survival food”, it may be helpful to remember how easily people can be stampeded into doing stupid things by irresponsible things said on TV.
It was 1973 – Johnny Carson was the host of The Tonight Show on NBC, the show that most of the country watched after the late news. ABC didn’t have network feed after 11 PM. Most TV stations either turned off the transmitter after the news or had “test patterns” after 1 AM in the morning, as all decent peple were asleep by then.
Johnny Carson was making some joke about politics, and the punch line to the joke was “And by tomorrow, there will be a shortage of toilet paper”. There was no impending shortage of toilet paper – he was joking about the fecal matter from a politician.
That’s all it took – the next morning, the masses were off and running – stampeding to their local supermaket and filling up shopping carts with a 5 year supply of toilet paper. Supply chains are built around the premise of predictable demand. Charmin doesn’t keep 5 years worth of toilet paper sitting in a warehouse – so the joke quickly turned into reality. Despite Johnny Carson explaining the next night that it was only a joke, that didn’t undo the damage. Once people panic as a group, the damage is done. It took months to return the supply back to normal.
The problem coincided with a newsprint shortage in 1973, caused by labor strikes in Canada. Newspapers were scrambling to print their paper on any type of paper they could find. The paper in the small town where I lived resorted to printing the entire paper on pink, blue and green paper stock. Having to divert pulp into making toilet paper just made that situation even more of a problem.
Have you heard there is a peanut butter shortage? All the people on Radio and TV are telling us about it, so it must be true. The 4 pound can of it I bought in 2008 is getting a bit rancid by now.
After the Halloween storm, there seems to be a shortage of almost everything here. The prices I noticed going up are on coffee and hamburg…………….but Peanut Butter? Why?
The U.S. Peanut crop was smaller this year than normal – partly due to weather, partly due to farmers growing other more profitable crops this year (corn for ethanol?).
The media inspired panic over the alleged deaths in nursing homes a few years ago and the recall of millions of cases of peanut products – totally unrelated to the plant that was responsible (maybe) for the bad peanut butter a couple years ago – did significant damage to demand for peanuts. The resulting “Food Safety” bill that gave the Federal Government power to raid your local farmers market because the local farmers aren’t registered with the Federal Government and haven’t attached a tracking label to the box of blueberries – may also be scaring small farmers out of growing food. Peanuts are mostly grown in the areas where the soil was “worn out” by growing cotton and not rotating crops – the coastal plains of Virginia and the Carolinas and Georgia and Missippi. Much of the peanuts are grown by small black farmers who own land that was “worn out” growing cotton and isn’t capable of growing anything else (basically sand with no topsoil). The land has been in their family since Reconstruction when the Republican Yankees “redistributed the wealth” of the rich Southern plantation owners.
After I wrote this, I remember there was a year around that same time when the U.S. had a peanut shortage. The peanut butter companies ended up importing a lot of peanuts from China that year – but they tasted a bit different. Peanuts are genetically related to soybeans that were selectively bred for their taste and other properties, and the Chinese “peanuts” were probably closer to soybeans than to American peanuts.
The fact that peanuts and the lore of George Washington Carver “inventing” them resonating in the Black community is just a bonus. Look for lots of stories with crying black children who are starving because their unwed mom can’t afford JIF with her food stamps.
http://admin.peanutsusa.com/documents/Document_Library/Peanut%20Crop%20Production%20Report%209.12.11.pdf
There is a state by state breakdown of the Peanut crop this year. A lot of the drop was due to a decrease in planting in Texas, which had a very bad drought this year.
Reminds me of the impending rice shortage reported a few years ago…
There was plenty of rice on the shelves until the news ‘covered’ it.
It took about a week for people to realize there was no shortage, per se.
Didn’t the ole USSR have toilet paper and shoes lines down to a blocks-long science?
I “met” a woman in the last week from Singapore. She educated me about Kiasu.
One aspect of Kiasu is this curious habit people there have of jumping into lines when they have no idea what the line is for – one of the old routines of the Soviet Union. It was so rare in Russia for any store to have anything that people would queue in line not knowing what they were going to buy, figuring if they actually got something before it ran out, they could resell it on the black market.
Such as incandescent light bulbs here in the USA?