Six data points on why ordinary people empty shelves that were never actually short, from a hurricane spending spike that beat its own warning window to a pipeline hack that never touched the fuel supply, including why the researchers who study this increasingly think panic is the wrong word for it
The Panic-Buying Dataset & Dashboard, DT Linux
The Panic-Buying Dataset & Dashboard
An interactive companion to DT Linux's briefing on why humans panic-buy: two hurricanes that produced two different spending patterns, a pipeline hack that never touched a drop of fuel, and a growing body of research arguing that panic buying may be the wrong name for most of it.
Filter by case
Three stages of a shortage
How each case compares
What's in this dataset, by composition
Why people said they stocked up
A genuine part-to-whole composition: of everyone in a large international survey who stockpiled during a disaster or public emergency, this is the reason they gave first. This is the one place in this dataset where the numbers are shares of a single total; every other comparison here is an independent-category comparison and stays a bar chart on purpose.
Dataset schema
| Field | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| case_name | The event, experiment, or model this row describes | "The pipeline panic" |
| tier | This report's own categorization of where in the cycle this case sits, not a severity ranking | "The Spread" |
| key_metric | The headline sourced figure for this case | "Emptied 81% of DC gas stations within nine days" |
| source | Citation for the key metric | "GasBuddy fuel-availability data via NPR, May 2021" |
| last_verified | Date the figure was last checked against its original source | "2026-09-10" |
About this dataset
How this data was collected
Every figure behind this dataset comes from a named institutional data set, a peer-reviewed model, government testimony, or a documented real-world event: the JPMorgan Chase Institute's Hurricane Harvey and Irma transaction research, the 1975 Worchel, Lee, and Adewole scarcity experiment, GasBuddy fuel-availability tracking from the 2021 Colonial Pipeline shutdown, the Diamond and Dybvig bank run model plus Federal Reserve testimony on Silicon Valley Bank, the Institute for Fiscal Studies' UK transaction-data study of the 2020 toilet paper shortage, and several recent peer-reviewed studies questioning the term panic buying itself. DT Linux's research process cross-references each figure against its original publication; this report does not involve DT Linux running its own consumer surveys.
Data handling and compliance
Built entirely from published academic research, institutional transaction data, and government testimony, never from personal or proprietary data collected by DT Linux. Full practices in our privacy policy.
API and pipeline access
Want a disaster-response, supply-chain, or consumer-behavior analysis like this refreshed on a schedule, or piped into your own systems? DT Linux builds custom research and data pipeline work per client; there is no self-serve API today, so delivery is handled directly by our team. Get in touch.
More from the DT Linux data store
Want this kind of consumer-behavior or disaster-response research built for your own organization?
DT Linux designs custom supply-chain risk assessments, survey design, and behavioral research for organizations that need to understand demand surges before they happen, not just after. Get in touch if you need deeper or more customized research behind this report.