Panic buying ahead of the winter storm isn’t preparedness. Here’s who it hurts.

Emptying supermarket shelves. Driving from store to store, hunting for milk, bread, and water. Ignoring the signs instructing shoppers to “Take one.” 

It’s a song and dance consumers across the country typically engage in when confronted with an incoming extreme weather event, and a pattern we’re seeing repeated as images have circulated of grocery shelves from North Carolina to New York City stripped bare leading into Winter Storm Fern. Now, with a second major winter storm brewing, shoppers and retailers across the East Coast are bracing for another rush. 

Experts warn that these stockpiling frenzies have lasting consequences — both personal and planetary. In times of turmoil, the irrational desire to overbuy things a household doesn’t really want or need can be difficult to distinguish from just regular emergency preparedness. 

To some extent, according to Parke Wilde, a food economist at Tufts University, the pre-storm frenzy can be “a real nuisance, because people show up at the store and the shelves are already clear, or at the very least, there’s a sense of tension in the room, as you see unusually big crowds in the grocery store.” 

On the other hand, Wilde continued, “the buying patterns are sometimes partly sensible.” Many people, in fact, are merely following federal and state emergency management recommendations to stock up on enough food to last your household anywhere between three days to two weeks. 

Still, there is a big difference between buying what you need to ensure you and your family have enough to eat as you hunker down in extreme weather, and filling your cart with far more than that — especially when it includes fresh foods that just end up in the trash. 

Minerva Ringland, senior climate and insights manager at national food waste nonprofit ReFED, says that while she is unaware of any data that directly captures the effects of panic buying on food waste emissions, it “makes a lot of sense intuitively” that when emotion trumps rationale in periods of extreme weather, “it’s unlikely that what extra food you buy would be consumed in the appropriate amount of time.” 

Researchers have discovered that this pattern of storm “stockpiling” applies to virtually all food groups. Bread and milk, however, tend to be first among what people regularly race to buy, particularly before a bout of extreme winter weather. And if electricity gets knocked out, like it did for more than 1 million U.S. households who lost power last weekend because of Fern, much of that perishable stockpiled food will surely end up in the garbage. 

Americans already waste a staggering amount of food in fair weather. An analysis by ReFED found that of the around 70.7 million tons of “surplus” food generated nationwide in 2024, more than 33 percent was created by U.S. households. And nearly half of that food that went uneaten at home ended up rotting in landfills, where it produces methane — a potent greenhouse gas that accounts for about 11 percent of global emissions.

To put that into context, the amount of surplus food that ends up in U.S. landfills every year produces the planet-polluting equivalent of nearly 5 industrial coal plants, according to Ringland. “I, of course, would not advocate that someone not prepare themselves in these situations because they’re worried about their climate impact,” said Ringland, “but my personal opinion is that every decision that we make in our daily lives should at least have an awareness or a consciousness or consideration of what environmental impact that has.” 

She also points to the affordability complex behind panic buying, as food prices continue to rise. According to a report from Democrats on the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, a typical U.S. family spent about $310 more overall for groceries last year as compared to 2024. “Wasted food in households is essentially like money that you are throwing out with the food. And so if we can be a little bit more conscious and careful about the food that we’re bringing into the home, you’re actually saving yourself money,” said Ringland.

What’s more, when people engage in fear-fueled buying sprees, accessing food and storm supplies only gets harder for lower-income households. 

“Panic buying has a direct impact and an indirect impact for families that are in households that are experiencing food insecurity,” says LaMonika Jones, director of state initiatives at the Food Research & Action Center. “It makes it even more difficult for them, because when they do go to the grocery store, the store may not have had the opportunity quite yet to restock their shelves. Or when they do go to prepare, they may find out that their resources, their food items, are not available, so there’s nothing left for them to purchase.” And that struggle doesn’t instantly abate once the storm subsides, according to Jones. The remnants of the phenomenon means food-insecure people may then have to wait for stores to restock their shelves. 

As the planet heats up, making extreme weather events more frequent and severe, the likelihood of panic buying may increase in tandem. 

“Our food distribution system does not have a good braking mechanism to slow down and mitigate the panic buying,” said Seungki Lee, an agricultural economist at Ohio State University. 

But the answer, according to Cony Ho, an assistant professor of marketing at Florida Atlantic University who has studied the psychological motives driving panic buying in periods of extreme weather, is not what we tend to see now: retailers attempting to control their stock by setting limits on how much of a certain product can be purchased. Doing so, said Ho, can actually set off a cycle of more panic buying, because it signals scarcity to already-panicked shoppers. 

Whatever the solution may be, according to University of Central Florida disaster sociologist Fernando Rivera, it shouldn’t be the sole responsibility of individuals, but incorporated into how a whole community prepares for emergencies. “In the ideal world, people will have their disaster kits ready to go, instead of just reacting to the news two days or a couple of hours before the event,” said Rivera. “That would be an emergency manager’s dream.”

Ho agrees that clearer government-led communications could encourage people to buy more nonperishable goods in preparation for a disaster, which at least may help mitigate overstocking on food that quickly spoils. For their part, Ho says, retailers could better incorporate weather forecasting into their plans for inventory distribution. 

By now, though, the impulse to rush to the store and grab as much as you can is a rather entrenched consumer pattern. So a quick or easy fix is unlikely. 

“All of these different disasters are hitting these places back-to-back,” Rivera said. “We have been exposed in the last decade or so to crises that we never imagined were going to happen, right? And I think that might be testing our ability to respond to them in a very logical way.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Panic buying ahead of the winter storm isn’t preparedness. Here’s who it hurts. on Jan 30, 2026.