People went on a panic buying frenzy in Singapore on Friday, Feb. 7, after the alert level was raised to DORSCON Orange in response to the novel coronavirus outbreak spreading.
While this raising of alert level from Yellow to Orange has no bearing whatsoever on Singapore's food and toiletries supply, people ran amok in supermarkets by clearing shelves of instant noodles, cans of luncheon meat, and toilet paper, highlighting once and for, the priorities of people here.
A great many people then took to social media to share about how RedMart and FairPrice online delivery for groceries was no longer functioning, as clearly there was nothing left to buy and delivery personnel have been maxed out due to a backlog of orders.
FairPrice website stopped working
One of the biggest casualties is the FairPrice website.
Over the course of Saturday, it went down due to high traffic.
In other words, in the absence of a real foreign threat, Singaporeans took down their own supermarket website by visiting it incessantly.
There were a few likely reasons for this.
FairPrice might have voluntarily taken the site down to prevent more orders for groceries online, and not to give the impression that what cannot be bought offline can still be found online and induce more panic buying.
The site subsequently came back online by about 6pm on Saturday, but had to put up a sign warning that the supermarket is experiencing high demand.
At one point, the FairPrice app was even ranked number 1 on the download chart in Singapore, a formidable achievement considering that nobody had ever been this hard up for groceries before:
As the situation in Singapore has calmed down somewhat over the start of the weekend, some common sense is being restored.
Overnight, supermarkets restocked goods in record time, going from empty to full shelves in a manner of hours.
This showed there was no need for Singaporeans to fill their own premises with products that were still widely available.
However, the ugly side of Singaporeans also showed as there were shoppers who wanted to hoard items but gave up in the supermarket as the queues were too long, which left groceries strewn all over the place.
Following this episode, Singaporeans should be more attuned to the economic signals they should take heed of.
For example, if gold and oil prices shoot up overnight, it is perhaps the appropriate time to panic.