February 08, 2020, 06:02 PM
People went on a panic buying frenzy in Singapore on Friday, Feb. 7, after the alert level was raised to DORSCON Orange.
And boy, was it chaos.
Not only were food and toiletries flying off the shelves, plenty of items removed from their original locations in the supermarkets ended up strewn on the ground in baskets as shoppers without patience decided to abandon the groceries as the queues got insanely long.
This not only caused problems for fellow shoppers who cannot locate the items as they are no longer on the shelves, it translated into more work for staff who are required to put them back at their original locations.
This inanity and irrationality of hoarders and and buying horde was subsequently called out by other Singaporeans.
Speaker of Parliament Tan Chuan-Jin addressed this issue in a Facebook post:
Tan wrote that staff in supermarkets have to deal with rude shoppers and then they are given more work as a result of grocery abandonment.
This other Facebook post showed the extent of the abandonment, with baskets filled with eggs and bananas left on the ground with no shopper attending to them.
The worst outcome is the state of frozen food and perishables that are left to thaw as they are not returned back in the chiller and freezers.
Shame.
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