Obviously the people who were stockpiling sugar were onto something, considering that I can't seem to find any in my stores this week. If I was uncharitable I would blame the highly regulated EU sugar market with all its quotas and what not, but I'm actually not sure whether there is some widespread supply-demand problem like in last year when the EU had to release non-quota sugar onto the market and eased the import quotas too to meet demand, or whether it's just one of my local supermarkets having been inept with their orders, which then caused sugar to be out in the next nearest one too. I mean, unlike last year I haven't seen any news articles about sugar being in short supply, so that would indicate a more local problem, and anyway, usually the sugar issues only affect industry needing huge amounts, not supermarket sugar.
I don't think hoarding is an American thing. My father used to buy large amounts of soap, saying that his mother did okay when trading it on the black market in WWI and WWII, because the rationing of all kinds of fats meant all the soap available was crappy or something, and you could store soap easily without it going bad or anything like that. And it apparently did okay to keep its value for trade in the hyperinflation of the 1920s too. So he was of the opinion that having a whole shelf stacked with large amounts of soap would do well for crisis preparation compared to say keeping precious metals, because in his experience people never got good worth for their gold or silver once they needed to trade it for food and other essential items in a crisis, whereas stockpiling good quality soap during non-crisis times was a relatively small investment, but it would be sure to become scarce once an economy starts to seriously break down.
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I don't think hoarding is an American thing. My father used to buy large amounts of soap, saying that his mother did okay when trading it on the black market in WWI and WWII, because the rationing of all kinds of fats meant all the soap available was crappy or something, and you could store soap easily without it going bad or anything like that. And it apparently did okay to keep its value for trade in the hyperinflation of the 1920s too. So he was of the opinion that having a whole shelf stacked with large amounts of soap would do well for crisis preparation compared to say keeping precious metals, because in his experience people never got good worth for their gold or silver once they needed to trade it for food and other essential items in a crisis, whereas stockpiling good quality soap during non-crisis times was a relatively small investment, but it would be sure to become scarce once an economy starts to seriously break down.