Same thing happened at the beginning of the pandemic. They apparently don't hold as much as I'd have thought. I was lucky and had some actually in transit when everyone started freaking out about toilet paper. What was really weird about it was the the spot price was dropping while demand supply literally dried up completely. I'm absolutely convinced there was something really weird going on in the metals markets at the time.
The CEO of Kimberly Clarke went on TV and said “don’t worry we have plenty of TP”. At first I didn’t understand why the run on TP. I thought maybe it was needed to, um, deal with symptoms of the virus. But there was a run on everything. Wife and I went to Costco in February and loaded up on canned and dried goods after Trump shut down Asian air travel (a drastic move like that has real meaning, even if they talk it down to try to keep cool heads) so I knew something was up. We went to the supermarket in March and the entire place was literally cleared out - no meats, cheeses, soaps, detergents canned good etc. We took photos of the empty aisles just for posterity. Never saw anything like it, and won’t ever believe ‘them’ when they say ‘it can’t happen here’.
The left mocks us, but Venezuela was a comparatively prosperous country a few decades ago.