A historic drop in the May 2020 futures for WTI crude was recorded at around minus $37.63 per barrel on April 21, 2020 due to the combination of rising supply, falling demand and diminishing storage availability during the pandemic. Thecrude oil market appeared to be in a state of what I refer to as hyper-contango. Hyper- contango is a rare event in which the costs of storage are so high that owners in the spot market or hedgers in long positions are squeezed by the demand for storage and the non-disposability of the commodity. The research develops a theory of storage that allows the relation between storage cost and spot price under hyper-contango to drive prices negatively. In particular, the research links a storage decision to the framework of marginal costs of production and utility maximization to demonstrate the pressure of dramatically high storage cost on the crash of spot and nearby futures to the extent that the crude oil market is in hyper-contango during the pandemic. In addition, the research analyzes the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the spot price, basis, arithmetic spot price changes, logarithmic spot price changes and arithmetic basis changes of WTI crude, milk and agricultural commodities. The research also compares the changes in basis and spot prices of soybeans between the COVID-19 pandemic and Sino-US trade war.