Coronavirus fears spark panic-buying in Western Pa.

As the novel coronavirus shuts down schools, sporting events and concerts, locals were stocking up Thursday on essentials — especially toilet paper.

There were a few stray items in the toilet paper section at the Walmart near Pittsburgh Mills mall, and even those disappeared by late morning. The shelves where disinfectant wipes and cleaning sprays would normally be were similarly bare.

Many shoppers came through the aisles and shook their heads at the empty, overturned Charmin boxes.

Judy Parry of Lower Burrell wasn’t buying it, literally or figuratively.

“It’s a bunch of crap,” she said of the covid-19 panic. “I needed toilet paper, so I’m buying some. I wish people would stop hyping (the virus panic). More people get hit by cars.”

Signs hung on the shelf in place of disinfectant wipes: “Due to supply and demand issues, we are experiencing shortages with all items in the sanitizing chemicals and sanitizing wipes category. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. We are working quickly with our suppliers to resolve this issue.”

A similar sign regarding hand sanitizer hung on a shelf at Giant Eagle on Pittsburgh’s South Side. The store still had toilet paper as well as mounds of rice and canned tuna on sale. A store leader directed all questions to the store’s corporate communications office.

A Target employee stocking shelves in the household section of the Harmar store saw the few containers of disinfectant wipes he had in his pallet of stock snatched up as soon as he put them up.

He said it’s been like this all week.

“It’s gone as soon as I put it out,” he said.

A sign on the shelves said that because of high demand, hand sanitizer, hand and face wipes, and disinfectant wipes were limited to six per customer.

Consumer psychologist Paul Marsden told CNBC that panic-buying relates to the idea of “retail therapy.”

“It’s about ‘taking back control’ in a world where you feel out of control,” Marsden, a psychologist at the University of Arts London, told the outlet. “More generally, panic-buying can be understood as playing to our three fundamental psychology needs.”

Dimitrios Tsivrikos, who specializes in consumer and business psychology at the University College London, told CNBC that toilet paper has become an “icon of mass panic.”

“In times of uncertainty, people enter a panic zone that makes them irrational and completely neurotic,” he told CNBC. “In other disaster conditions like a flood, we can prepare because we know how many supplies we need, but we have a virus now we know nothing about.”