Unless you saw people with multiple carts, I wouldn't consider it hoarding. A typical weeks groceries will fill a cart 1/2 - 3/4 the way, most people are buying for two weeks now.  Your typical grocery store isn't set up for everyone to go there. For instance, there are 5 grocery's stores in my city of 250,000, assuming 10% took the advice in February to start buying staples like dried milk, etc, that still leaves 225,000 people who need to buy a finite number of items. Divided by the number of stores, that means these stores are seeing close to 45,000 people in just a few days. That is unimaginable for a lot of these stores. When they order, they order based upon historical data, and this didn't happen this time last year.