Explaining 'Hamsterkauf'

'Hamsterkauf' is a German phrase.

It means you've gone out and bought a lot of items, to hoard, and wait for some catastrophic event to occur.

Over the past forty-odd years in Germany....it's been commonly used when major winter fronts have passed through Germany, and the threat to shut down an entire region has occurred.  So Germans fanned out two or three days prior.....and bought out grocery reserves entirely.

Right now?  It's going on with grocery items (mostly cans of stuff) and disinfectant.

The curious thing here....most of the canned food items come from within Europe.  The disinfectant?  Well....that's a different story.  Most of it comes from China.

The odds that Germans might wake up in late April with a national shortage of disinfectant?  Maybe, but Germans are adaptive and some non-Chinese product will be developed and on the market rather quickly. 

This will probably be talked about to a great extent over the next couple of weeks, as German stores have more problems in stocking items.