Did the ‘Toilet Paper Crisis’ increase public interest in supply chain management?

Getting to the bottom of it.

As the Covid-19 Pandemic hit Europe and North America in March and April 2020, the threat of lockdowns led to panic-buying of many products. Perhaps most infamously of these was the shortage of toilet paper, as supply chains and logistics systems struggled to respond to the demand surge. In the operations and supply chain management world, the shortage garnered a lot of attention. But, did the wider public connect supply chain management to the toilet paper shortage?

To try to answer this question, I turned to Google Trends which analyses the frequency of search queries in the world’s most popular search engine. As people were desperately searching online, trying to find other sources of their most critical household consumable, I hypothesised that they might also be wondering why this problem had happened. Google trends has previously shown the world that ‘love’ and ‘porn’ are strongly correlated search terms, and that people are most likely to google the season they are in.

Let’s start with our baseline variable, did people search more for toilet paper during March and April 2020? We see a 2000% increase in toilet paper searches between February and March 2020. Perhaps most interestingly is how short-lived the crisis was.

Next, I considered how related semi-technical terms might be correlated to this crisis. Terms such as “disruption”, “delivery”, and “supply chains” are good examples of these. One challenge is making sure a search terms gets enough traffic to produce a useful result, some terms just aren’t common enough. Pulling the Google trends on these and normalising each so that its peak was 100 revealed some interesting results.

Searches for “supply chains” peak in exactly the same week that searches for “toilet paper” peak. Although there could be common causes for these, I suspect there was a loo roll-fueled peak in supply chain interest!

Our other two terms above suffer more heavily from common causes. Just as many parts of the world went into lockdowns, global search interest in “delivery” peaked. It’s interesting to see how “toilet paper” concerns led “delivery” issues by a week - this may support the view that the toilet paper crisis was a contributor to the surge in supply chain interest.

When is comes to “disruption” the pattern is harder to intuit. The spike in February 2020 may be caused by concerns about disruption to production and China went into lockdown before the rest of the world.

All of this leads to a slightly wider question, did search queries for “supply chains” get permanently higher during the covid-19 pandemic? if such a trend exists, it may point to a shift in attention to the field of supply chain management. As the graph below shows, there was been a 50% increase in searches for “supply chains” after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Whether or not this was caused by the toilet roll crisis, there is early evidence to suggest the general public is more conscious of the impact of supply chains on daily life.

Of course, this blog doesn’t draw concrete statistical conclusions. But I think it does point to some intriguing questions that may be worth looking at more rigorously. Academia is often criticised for being insular and the practical contribution of much research is overstated. Can supply chain management, at least, leverage the Covid-19 pandemic to change this?