How to Control Impulse Buying
By Mu’en, Italy
In February 2018, while I was talking with a friend in Taiwan on the phone, she said, “I’m going to buy some toilet paper because in March its price will be rising thirty percent.” After hanging up, I did not think too much. But in the following days, I saw a lot of posts about people snapping up toilet paper on Facebook. Even when people met each other, they would ask: “Have you bought toilet paper?” The most incredible thing was that the toilet paper in some big malls was snapped up only in an hour or so after the mall opened in the morning. These phenomena sparked heated debate on the internet. One post said, “A profit or a loss? To snap up toilet paper, we will not only pay several hundred NT dollars per hour for the gas and parking, but also expend time and energy.” Another post was more interesting: “Now people in Taiwan are snapping up toilet paper again, but I didn’t follow the trend this time, for I don’t want to be controlled by material desires. In addition, I have bought enough toilet paper before Chinese New Year.” The web discussion aroused my reflections.
