Stockpiling moral panics: The politics of anxiety and the securitization of ‘panic buyers’ in news media reporting of Covid-19

People often respond to existential threats by stocking up on items they deem essential for survival. At the onset of COVID-19, Australians were among the fastest and most ardent to bulk buy supplies – especially toilet paper – leading to widespread shortages and tense scenes in supermarkets nationwide. In this article, we examine online and print news media representations of bulk buying behaviours at this time. Results highlight that the media disproportionately blamed shortages on lower socio-economic and migrant consumers and vilified them for panicking irrationally, threatening social decency and order, and being ‘un-Australian’. In turn, this rhetoric justified the logic that these shoppers should be criminalized, leading to heightened securitization in supermarkets. Paradoxically a moral panic about panic, this case study offers three contributions to moral panic literature. First, it reveals how different forms of anxiety receive differential responses. Both the compulsion to stockpile and the need to find someone to blame for the shortages were anxious responses to the conjunctural crisis of COVID-19. Yet bulk buying was widely denounced as irrational, while the expression of deep-seated anxieties about the behaviour of racialized and class-based ‘others’ was legitimated and popularized. Secondly, moral panics converge and exacerbate each other: widespread concern about ‘panic buyers’ was inflamed by being conceptually linked with earlier moral panics about hooded tops, gangs and Chinese migrants. Thirdly, moral panics not only direct blame but also deflect it. In this case, the imagined figure of a ‘crazy hoarder’ allowed wealthier, white Australians to morally differentiate their own bulk buying practices as reasonable preparation. It also distracted from structural precarities such as supermarket profiteering and weakened supply chains, highlighting how moral panics can exonerate those at the elite end of society for their involvement in conjunctural crises.