When news outlets report that a basic grocery item like cooking oil or eggs is running low, it is easy to assume that shoppers will immediately rush to the store and clear the shelves. Past consumer research has largely supported the idea that hearing about product shortages prompts people to buy more than they need.
A new study published in Psychology & Marketing finds that real-life stockpiling is more conditional than simple laboratory tests suggest. By comparing experimental survey results with five years of supermarket checkout data, the researchers found that media reports about shortages only linked to larger shopping baskets when consumers were also actively searching for information about scarcity online.
Beyond the limited-edition promotion
Much of what marketers know about scarcity comes from studying promotional tactics, such as limited-edition product drops or flash sales. When a brand intentionally limits supply, shoppers often view the item as more exclusive, valuable, and desirable.
Loreta Axhami of the University of Tirana and her colleagues at the University of Tirana and Italy’s LIUC Carlo Cattaneo University wanted to look at a different kind of shortage. They focused on scarcity caused by external disruptions, such as extreme weather, supply chain breakdowns, geopolitical conflicts, or pandemics.
Unlike a marketing campaign, real supply shortages attract national news coverage and often trigger anxiety, frustration, and hoarding. Yet most prior studies on this behavior relied on short-term experiments and treated awareness of shortages as a single, uniform trigger. Axhami and her team wondered whether passive exposure to news stories worked differently than active concern, such as when consumers go online to investigate shortages for themselves.
Testing immediate reactions in the lab
To establish a baseline, the researchers first ran a controlled online experiment with adults living in Italy. They recruited 200 participants and excluded 17 who said they do not eat eggs, leaving 183 people in the analysis.
The team randomly assigned participants to read one of two fabricated news articles about major Italian supermarket chains, Esselunga and Lidl. One group read a story reporting nationwide egg shortages accompanied by a photo of nearly empty store shelves, while the control group read an article reassuring the public that egg supplies were plentiful alongside a photo of fully stocked aisles.
After reading the assigned article, participants stated how many eggs they planned to buy on their next trip to the grocery store. Reading the shortage article caused an immediate jump in intended buying: participants who saw the scarcity news planned to buy an average of 11.6 eggs, compared to 9.2 eggs among those who read that supplies were abundant.
This first test confirmed that a sudden scarcity cue can directly increase a shopper’s intention to buy in bulk. However, an immediate reaction to a single article in a survey does not show how people actually shop over months and years when shortage news fluctuates.
Five years at the supermarket checkout
To see how scarcity signals play out in everyday life, the researchers turned to longitudinal supermarket data from Albania. They analyzed loyalty card records for a random sample of 500 shoppers across a national retail chain from August 2019 to July 2024, a five-year span that included the COVID-19 pandemic and global supply disruptions.
The dataset captured nearly 3.3 million individual invoices (checkout transactions) across more than 700,000 monthly shopping baskets. Tracking the exact same shoppers over time allowed the team to measure how an individual’s basket size and store visit frequency changed from month to month, while accounting for each person’s baseline shopping habits, total spending, and store location.
Next, the researchers built two monthly indicators to track how visible product shortages were in Albania during that same five-year period. To measure media coverage, they manually searched major Albanian print and online newspapers each month and counted every article mentioning scarcity or shortages of essentials like food, groceries, medicine, and fuel.
To measure whether the public was actively paying attention to those shortages, the team pulled monthly Google Trends data for Albania, tracking how often residents searched for the word “scarcity” and related terms. Combining the newspaper counts, search trends, and loyalty card records allowed the team to test how passive news coverage and active online searching worked together to shape real purchasing behavior.
More trips versus bigger baskets
When the researchers looked at newspaper coverage in isolation, they found a surprising pattern. During months when media coverage of shortages rose but online search activity remained low, shoppers actually bought slightly fewer items per trip.
At the same time, higher media coverage was linked to a noticeable increase in the number of times shoppers visited the store each month. The authors interpret this pattern as cautious preparedness: when people merely see news about potential shortages, they initially adjust their timing by making more frequent, smaller trips rather than immediately hoarding goods.
Higher levels of Google search activity on their own were also linked to slightly smaller basket sizes. The shift toward true over-purchasing only appeared when both indicators climbed at the same time.
When heavy newspaper coverage of shortages coincided with a spike in consumers searching for scarcity information on Google, shoppers not only visited the store more often, they also bought larger quantities of items during each trip. The authors argue that media coverage and personal online searches play distinct, complementary roles in driving consumer behavior.
News reports create broad public awareness that a shortage might be happening in the market. Active online searching signals that shoppers are taking the threat personally and trying to verify how it will affect their own households, creating a heightened sense of urgency that translates into fuller shopping carts.
Takeaways for communicators and study caveats
The findings carry practical lessons for retail managers, public relations professionals, and policymakers who communicate with the public during supply chain disruptions. Because alarming news naturally attracts clicks and audience attention, media outlets have an incentive to highlight stories about empty shelves.
While news coverage alone may only prompt shoppers to visit stores more frequently, it sets the stage for panic buying if the public begins actively fixating on the threat online. Because stockpiling and over-purchasing can lead to overspending and waste, the researchers advise public officials and marketers to discuss shortages with restraint and only when necessary.
The authors also point out several limitations to keep in mind when interpreting their results. Both the newspaper article counts and the Google Trends data are national-level proxies, meaning the researchers could not verify whether a specific loyalty card holder actually read a given news story or typed a search query into Google.
In addition, the five-year checkout dataset came from a single country and did not separate basic household necessities, like flour or medicine, from non-essential treats. The researchers expect that the urge to stockpile is stronger for everyday staples than for hedonic items, but they did not test this distinction; their Italian experiment examined only a single staple product, eggs.
