GOVERNMENT announcements of possible electricity blackouts across, Austria, Germany and Sweden have urged many people in the Balearic Islands to stock up on food and other items.
On the Spanish island of Palma in Mallorca, camping gas stoves, butane bottles, battery-operated lighting and torches are being bought in quantity and hoarded due to the widespread alarm caused by the fear of outages this winter. Google has reported a massive upswing in searches using the phrase ‘how to cook without electricity’.
The last time panic buying reared its ugly head in Palma was in January 2021, when supermarkets appealed to the Government to limit the number of products people could buy. The semi-lockdown in Mallorca caused by the COVID pandemic, coupled with a delay in supplies arriving from the Peninsula after Storm ‘Filomena’ struck, prompted massive queues at supermarkets, with store owners reporting that shelves were emptying fast.
“There should have been a proactive message of reassurance from the very beginning, especially when there was going to be a shortage of products from the Peninsula, but there has been nothing. For a few days this week the level of hoarding of food and all kinds of other products was higher than it was in March 2020 during the State of Emergency,” said Bartomeu Servera, President of the Association of Food, Beverage & Cleaning Products Distribution Companies in the Balearic Islands.
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