Hoarding

For information about the large outdoor signboard known as a hoarding, see Billboard (advertising).

Hoarding is the storing of food or other goods. Hoarding of food is a natural behaviour in certain species of animals. It occurs in two forms:

• larder hoarding, the collection of large amounts of food in a single place, which usually also serves as the nest where the animal lives. Hamsters are famous larder hoarders. Indeed, some languages have a verb which is derived from hamster that means "to hoard" (e.g. German hamstern, Dutch hamsteren, and Swedish hamstra).
• scatter hoarding, the formation of a large number of small hoards or caches. Many species of squirrel, including the Eastern Gray Squirrel and the fox squirrel are well known for scatter hoarding.

Humans are not natural hoarders in the same way. However, hoarding does occur in humans, as a common response to fear, whether fear of imminent society-wide danger or simple fear of a shortage of some good. When trouble looms (such as civil unrest or natural disaster), people's first instinct is to collect foodstuffs, water, gasoline and other essentials which they believe, rightly or wrongly, will soon be in short supply. (They also hoard money, especially if they expect deflation, in which falling prices mean that the purchasing power of money will rise.) This behaviour can often cause the very shortage which has been feared, and governments sometimes choose to introduce rationing in order to combat hoarding. However, those who have successfully hoarded the desired goods will not have to worry about the shortage, whether it was their fault or not. The compulsive collecting of objects is known as pathological or compulsive hoarding.

On a larger scale hoarding can be a business strategy similar to monopolisation, where an individual or organization attempts to temporarily control all available supplies of a given good in order to artificially increase the price. This strategy is also known as "cornering the market".