A "warehouse" is the tissue company's holdings facility? I don't know what that means.
I worked in Navy warehouses for a decade (reserve duty one weekend a month) mainly pulling requisitions and packaging them for shipping. Needless to say, when Trump said his second stupidest thing at the start of his totally f**king up our COVID response ("We're not a shipping company", completely overlooking the primary function of the DLA (Defense Logistics Agency), perhaps the biggest shipping company ever), I had a few choice words to say about him.
Warehousing cost. One of our reserve unit's SUPPOs (Supply officer) worked for Toyota who gained fame through their use of "just-in-time" (JIT) techniques intended to minimize the amount of inventory you need to keep warehoused -- at khaki calls or reserve-weekend dining, he would set up a JIT supply line of sugar packets for our coffee, staging a new packet for each one we would pick up and use.
Included in such a system is keeping track of your bench stock so that whenever the quantity of a part dropped below a certain point, you would order more (factoring in lead time, etc) so that you would never run out of the part while still minimizing the size of your bench stock. That was also an important factor taught us in the Supply Corps UADPS class.
Now we can apply that to the disappearance of TP when the pandemic hit. In normal times, a store knows from its point-of-sale system how fast TP sells and how much they still have in stock, so they apply that to their known lead-time for ordering (if you need X amount of an item, how long before it will be delivered?) and they place the replenishment order for the TP. TP takes up a lot of space (in warehousing, space is money) while also being a low profit item.
That means that a store cannot afford to "have more in the back". Nor can a distribution center afford to keep a lot of TP warehoused, but only just enough, based on a history of past demand, to respond to replenishment orders and to trigger them to send their own replenishment orders to the factory.
So the description I heard of what happened was that there was panic buying by the public trying to hoard what they could (canned soup and pasta were also big items to disappear, along with yeast which led to a revival of sourdough baking). That threw off the stores' buying practices, so they placed sudden high demand on the distributors, which stripped them of their "just-in-time" stock so they placed sudden high demand on the factories who could churn out TP only so fast -- IOW, the factories normally work at a slow and steady that cannot respond to such sudden high demand.
But it gets weirder. There are actually two different and separate TP markets in the US: commercial and residential. Commercial is the single ply stuff you find in public restrooms and in company restrooms, while residential is what you buy for use at home. Suddenly with nobody going in to work, commercial TP was not being used and residential use skyrocketed, making the TP shortage in the stores even worse. Commercial TP factories cannot be retooled to make residential and vice-versa. Plus, there would be no financial incentive for them to do so since TP is such a low-profit item which can only make money in large bulk, which in turn would be far too expensive to store in warehouses (thus dashing any plans for a national emergency TP stockpile).
I would think that the logistics of tissues are not much different than that of TP.
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