The raising of Singapore’s DORSCON alert level to orange has far-reaching consequences.
Shortly after the announcement, Singaporeans descended on supermarkets, sweeping daily essentials off the shelves.
That’s despite the fact that just before, we were laughing at Hong Kong where people are panic-buying facemasks.
People are even going into JB to sweep items off their shelves.
My handsome colleague, George Young AKA Singapore-most-hidden-writer wrote a beautiful article about it which you can read here.
He found out that the NTUC Fairprice online store was similarly experiencing a downtime.
And so, with both the online store and offline store offline, where else can Singaporeans turn to?
Bingo, the NTUC Fairprice App
The NTUC Fairprice app isn’t exactly what you call a great app.
At least not when you look at its reviews.
It has only 3.6 out of 5 stars and users were complaining about the latest update to the user interface.
And yet, with the NTUC Fairprice website down, the app got a major influx of downloads.
How major are we talking about?
The folks at MSNews took a look and realised that the NTUC Fairprice app reached the #1 position on the Apple app store charts.
There’s Enough For Everybody So Please Don’t Hoard
I went to NTUC Fairprice today to buy a bag of garlic and normally, what will take me 5 minutes turned into a 30-minute queue.
Fairprice, as well as other powers-that-be, announced that they have enough within their warehouses for every Singaporean.
They ask that Singaporeans don’t be so kiasu and try to hoard everything for themselves.
After all, besides Fairprice, we did a check on other online stores and found that there are still plenty of daily essentials available.
And the reason for Fairprice’s recent limiting of purchases? That’s because they want to deter profiteering.
After all, because of people’s profiteering of facemasks, there’s now a global shortage.
So, in short, be considerate and don’t buy more than what you need.
