Port Strike Leads to Panic-buying, but Experts Say There’s No Need

by Juliann Ventura 

10/02/24 5:50 PM ET

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While the major port strike on the East Coast and Gulf Coast could threaten Americans’ supply of bananas, it likely won’t directly cause a toilet paper shortage — but that hasn’t stopped consumers from panic-buying the product. 

After thousands of members of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) stopped working and started striking Tuesday for a substantial pay increase and protections from automation after years of record profits for the shipping companies that employ them, users started taking to social media to document what many have deemed a toilet paper shortage. 

“Hope you have some toilet paper stock piled. It’s started. Sam’s and Costco are depleted,” one user said on the social platform X, with a photo of near-empty shelves. 

“My husband and I went to Costco tonight. There was no toilet paper,” another user posted on X. “The remaining paper towels were flying off the shelves. So many people were grabbing 2 or 3 big packages.” 

But the shortage isn’t necessarily from the strike — it’s from panic-buying toilet paper in large quantities. 

“I think the problem that we’re going to have mainly will be because of people’s hoarding behavior … panic-buying,” Arzum Akkas, an associate professor in the operations and information management department at University of Massachusetts Amherst, said in an interview.

Akkas added that she’s “not worried” about the strike directly affecting toilet paper supply for a number of reasons. For one, she said, most toilet paper is locally made. Secondly, manufacturers have “buffer inventory,” or surplus items that are kept in a warehouse. 

About 90 percent of all toilet paper in the U.S. is made in America, CNN reported. The rest comes from Mexico or Canada, which likely means it arrives by truck or rail. 

American Forest and Paper Association, the trade group representing paper manufacturers, told CNN it was concerned about how the port strike could impact exports to foreign markets — not imports. 

Ryan Peterson, the CEO of Flexport, a company that manages shipping and trucking for major brands in several industries, echoed Akkas’s sentiment about the shortages in toilet paper being mostly related to panic-buying rather than the strike itself.  

“Brands stocked up in advance of this,” Peterson said in an interview with The Hill.  

“They knew that this was coming for the better part of this year and has been pulling inventory … as well as diverting some shipments through the West Coast that might have gone East Coast,” he said. 

Peterson added that people are in a good place now and “it’s too early” to worry about potential shortages or price hikes if the strike were to continue longer than what companies originally had forecast demand to be. 

“I think it’s really just about waiting to see how long this strike lasts, and we’ll know a lot more next week. If it [goes into] the second week, I think it’s much more likely to drag on, so I think this is crunch time right now,” Peterson said. 

Walmart, one of the biggest importers over the past year, told Axios earlier this week that it prepares for “unforeseen disruptions.” 

“We prepare for unforeseen disruptions in our supply chain and maintain additional sources of supply to ensure we have key products available for our customers when and how they want them,” a Walmart spokesperson said, according to Axios.