What Panic Buying of Toilet Paper Teaches Us About Contracting

When uncertainty spikes, people do not behave rationally, they behave defensively. The panic buying of toilet paper during the pandemic was not about hygiene. It was about control, reassurance, and fear of being exposed if systems failed.

The same dynamics play out inside organisations.

When markets become volatile, organisations retreat to what feels safe: rigid templates, maximum liability, prescriptive SLAs, and heavy approval gates. Like stockpiling toilet paper, these actions offer psychological comfort, not real protection. Individually, they seem prudent. Collectively, they create friction, delay, and value loss.

Panic buying accelerates because people observe others doing it. Empty shelves become proof that “someone knows something I don’t.” In contracting, the equivalent is defensive escalation—legal tightening terms because procurement is nervous, finance imposing controls because risk feels opaque, operations bypassing governance because it is too slow. Fragmentation amplifies fear.

The deeper issue is not behaviour; it is system design. Retail supply chains optimised for efficiency lacked shock absorbers. Many contracts are the same: designed for stability, not disruption. When change occurs, every issue feels existential because contracts lack tolerance bands, graduated responses, or clear authority to adapt.

This is where contract and commercial management proves its value. CCM is not an administrative function—it is a stabilising discipline. Its purpose is to create confidence under stress: confidence to act without escalation, to collaborate without hoarding rights, and to absorb change without triggering conflict.

Panic buying stops when people trust the system will still work tomorrow. Poor contracting persists when organisations do not trust their relationships to survive change. Mature CCM exists to prevent both