Please. Stop Panic Buying.

By ALLAN J. BASSLER

Publisher

Can we please stop panic buying?

My daughter Helena and I were making the rounds last week, just as the first “quit going anywhere” order came down.

We were looking for some basics for the weekend ahead: Milk, bread, eggs, frozen pizzas. We thought we’d dash into a local grocery store, pick up what we needed and be on our way in minutes.

I see now that we were fools. Instead of the usual rows of shelves stocked in the good old American way with a tremendous variety of colorful products, we found row after row of emptiness. There were entire sections bought out of...