Marketing

Control (management)

Engineering

Theory of planned behavior

Statistics

Geotechnical engineering

Social psychology

Feeding behavior

Nuclear physics

Psychiatry

Economics

Anxiety

Unavailability

Hoarding (animal behavior)

Business

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)

Porosity

Physics

Psychology

Mathematics

Management

Political science

Stockpile

Food service

Panic

Infectious disease (medical specialty)

Internal medicine

Porous medium

Medicine

Disease

Micromodel

Pathology

Appetite

At the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, sales of nonperishable food drastically increased in Germany. Reports of hoarding and panic buying flooded the media. To identify the drivers of the increased sales of these products, we carried out an online survey with n = 495 people living in Germany. We followed a concurrent triangulation design. For the quantitative analysis, we extended the theory of planned behavior to identify possible reasons for stockpiling nonperishable food. The results suggest that "attitude," "subjective norm," and the "fear of future unavailability" were main drivers of stockpiling behavior in our sample. Additionally, we analyzed answers to open questions capturing participants' own explanations of why they did or did not stockpile nonperishable food. By contrasting the results, we found that our qualitative results validate some of our quantitative findings but also deliver new insights. For instance, a key stated reason for stockpiling nonperishable food was to reduce shopping frequency.

Panic buying in times of coronavirus (COVID-19): Extending the theory of planned behavior to understand the stockpiling of nonperishable food in Germany