North Island residents and supermarket workers awoke to a deeply unsettling experience this morning, discovering that potentially hundreds of shampoo bottles at their local Countdown or Four Square were now lying on their side, some even totally inverted on the shelf below the one they were initially sitting on.

Nathan Hodges, who works at the Countdown in Whakatane, said that this “isn’t the position they’re supposed to be in.”

New Zealanders from Auckland to Hawke’s Bay were awoken at 4:37am by what many described as a sinking feeling that at least some bathroom products were not standing correctly in accordance with their design and labelling.

People as far away as Wellington and even Christchurch also reported experiencing the internal sense of dread that can only be associated with tipped-over hair washing liquids.

Gisborne mother of at least two, Jeanine Astle, said that even some things in her own home were on their side, including a tall, top-heavy lamp and several wine glasses, all of which were fortunately intact.

“It certainly gave us all a hell of a fright here,” she said. “I’m going to the supermarket this evening after work and I can only hope that everything there will be the right way up or I don’t know what we’ll do.”

New Zealand Civil Defence issued a warning at 5:10am, roughly 40 minutes after the shampoo bottles began lying on the ground, telling New Zealand residents not to go to the supermarket first thing in the morning, as there was still the possibility that “other products” would be “perhaps not the right way up.”

East Cape residents were warned not to go to the beach today as “some waves” might be moving “a fraction quicker than normal,” and there was a very real risk of accidentally getting your feet wet when you really had no idea the tide was even quite that close.

GNS Science is warning that there may be further tipping events in the next two to three weeks, but they are likely to be isolated incidents caused by “maybe a cat or something.”