NEW YORK (AP) - For some, shopping madness has been about the essentials, only super-sized: 10-pound bags of rice; 25-pound sacks of flour; 50 pounds worth of sugar; pickles and pancake mix for a crowd.
For some, it's impulse shoe purchases, with nowhere to go. And mistaken multiple pounds of blueberries when a single container was the goal.
Remember the toilet paper scare? George Pav found some in an unlikely place in Berlin, Germany.
"When the mayor of Berlin announced the lockdown, I knew that I wouldn't have the chance to drink a cup of coffee from a cafe for quite some time. My first thought was to find a cafe and enjoy an espresso. Alas, most of them were already shut," he recalled.
He ventured into one, but a woman there said they were closed.
"No coffee. Then I looked behind her. There was a pile of toilet paper. She said she was selling them for 50 cents per piece," Pav said.
He bought four squares.
For Beth Wilson, of New York, it was a bistro table and chairs to match the ones at a Paris cafe where she and her husband "ate every morning for breakfast on our honeymoon." The chairs, she said, look great, "but the table came broken."
The panic buying, the over-buying, the emotional buying aren't unique to this extraordinary world-shaking event, but it's the kind of world-shaking event that sent the world home with plenty of anxiety and few shopping options other than the online kind.
In the U.S., retail sales tumbled by a record 16.4 percent from March to April as business shutdowns caused by the coronavirus kept shoppers away, threatened stores and weighed down a tanking economy. The Commerce Department reported a long-standing migration toward online purchases accelerated, posting an 8.4 percent monthly gain.
Measured year over year, online sales surged 21.6 percent.
"It's panic on lots of levels," said Wendy Liebmann, CEO of WSL Strategic Retail, a global consulting firm specializing in retail strategy and shopper insights. "All of the traditional buying patterns are tossed up in the air."
She called it "shopping chaos" with no anchors. And the chaos has come with some unique calculus.
The "instant" feeling is key to much of the coronavirus shopping, said Jeff Galak, associate professor of marketing at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business.
"Shopping as therapy has been shown to reduce negative moods and boost overall happiness," he said. "The big downside, however, is that such relief is very short-lived. That good feeling very quickly dissipates."