As a potentially historic winter storm has already knocked out power to 112,000 homes and warnings are in place for some 140 million Americans, many in the storm’s path have rushed to stores to stock up on supplies.
Images of shelves stripped bare at stores across the country have found their way to social media as the storm started to sweep its way east from Texas on saturday morning, with freezing rain and snow reports in Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas.
Read More: How to Prepare for a Winter Storm Power Outage
Images of Trader Joe’s stores in Washington, D.C., and Chelsea, New york City, show empty aisles. Meanwhile, further south, grocery stores in Charlotte, North Carolina, saw an influx of customers stocking up on water, non-perishable food items and canned goods, as well as batteries.Locals in the area reported that water was so
Hersh Shefrin, professor of behavioral finance at Santa Clara University, says that this phenomenon is not uncommon in the face of a major weather event or high-stress situation.
“It is indeed certainly reasonable to stock up for a few days,” he says, but once the buying is driven by a “fight or flight” emotional response, that’s when it transforms into panic buying.
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Content Creation & Verification Protocol – v1.0
This document outlines the mandatory process for researching, writing, and formatting content to ensure accuracy, authority, and readability.
PHASE 1: FACTUAL VERIFICATION & TIMELINESS
- every factual assertion must be independently confirmed using recognized, authoritative sources.
- Proactively seek out facts that challenges, corrects, or updates the initial source material.
- Breaking News Check: For topics concerning ongoing events (legal proceedings, political developments, corporate actions, crises), confirm the latest status as of January 24, 2026, at 20:36:47.
- Prioritize and incorporate any newer,verified information discovered.
- if no newer information is available, explicitly state the moast recent verified status.
- avoid speculation, invention, or unsubstantiated claims regarding facts, dates, statistics, or direct quotes.
PHASE 2: ENTITY & GEOGRAPHIC OPTIMIZATION
- Clearly identify the Primary entity – the central subject of the content (person, place, organization, or event).
- Identify related Entities – individuals, institutions, locations, legislation, or companies connected to the Primary Entity.
- Integrate these entities organically within
and
headings.
- provide citations to authoritative sources (governmental websites, court records, regulatory bodies, official statements, and reputable news organizations) using only inline HTML links.
Links must point to specific, relevant pages within these sources (official documents, rulings, press releases, reports) – not generic homepages or broad index pages.
- Absolutely avoid linking to low-quality, SEO-optimized, or irrelevant websites.
PHASE 3: SEMANTIC ANSWER STRUCTURE (REQUIRED)
Each major
section must adhere to the following format:
- Definition / Direct Answer: Begin with a concise, factual sentence directly answering the section’s core question.
- Detail: Expand upon the initial answer with verified context,background information,or explanatory details.
- Example or Evidence: Support the information with a concrete example, official statement, statistic, date, or documented event.
This structure is non-negotiable to maximize accuracy for AI search and automated summarization.
PHASE 4: DATA-DRIVEN REPORTING
- Prioritize precise data over ambiguous language.
- Utilize:
- Specific dates
- official job titles
- Precise percentages
- Exact dollar amounts
- Vote totals
- Case identifiers
- formal institutional names
- Avoid vague terms such as: “meaningful,” “many,” “major,” “a number of,” “recently,” or “sources say.”
- All factual claims must be verifiable and traceable to a source.
PHASE 5: HTML STRUCTURE & COMPATIBILITY
- Output only clean HTML code.
- Permitted tags:
-