This is not a case of toilet paper suddenly costing more to produce. The price gouging law is not bringing toilet paper to levels where the producer of the product is taking some kind of operating loss or even reduction in profit of any kind. This is a case of consumers attempting to create small niches of artificial scarcity so that they can profit.

The free market arguments being made here are baffling, and willfully ignoring the aforementioned truths of this specific set of circumstances that have driven these specific laws. Have we lost all sense of humanity for the sake of our ideology?

We would be doing our entire society a severe disservice if our solution to this problem is simply "create so much toilet paper that people can't hoard it." The fuck are we going to do with that much toilet paper.

A good example of this is in a related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22576225

The article describes how a couple of guys drove from store to store all across their state, buying up all of the antiseptic supplies in stock, and then trying to resell them online for as much money as they could possibly get.

https://abc14news.com/2020/03/14/canadian-couple-make-more-t...

If that's the way the world is then why should anyone be expected to behave any differently? It's not right to vilify these people while we give a free pass to everyone else doing equally unethical things.

Who is this "we" you speak of?

Let me see if I understand your argument: because there is someone out there who will "give a free pass" to big pharma, the rest of us should politely shut up about disaster profiteers? We should all just say "oh well, pharma co's do it, so no biggie". Is that about right?

And the argument is correct. You cannot keep teaching people unlimited greed and profiteering is okay because "it's free market" and then expect them to behave ethically. You have to change what is acceptable and tolerated. The current situation is an excellent starting point, but we shouldn't stop here.

> It's not right to vilify these people while we give a free pass to everyone else doing equally unethical things.

Seems to say, we should stop criticizing these scumbag disaster profiteers, simply because there exist equally loathsome corporate profiteers.

Taken at face value, this is quintessential whataboutist bullshit. Now maybe I misinterpreted, which is why I asked, but your new goal posts have not answered my question.

> It's not right to vilify these people while we give a free pass to everyone else doing equally unethical things.

If "A and not B" is not right, you can conclude that we should stop A, or that we should start B. You interpreted it as the former, I interpreted it as the latter. I guess we have different biases.

Regardless of whether the goal posts have moved or have always been in the same place, I'm not sure which of your questions remains unanswered. If it's "who is this 'we' you speak of", the answer is "look around you". If the majority were truly intolerant of the behavior OP describes, then we would have a lot more social unrest than we do.

People hoarding aren't trying to create artificial scarcity. They are buying because they anticipate scarcity, and want to either (i) be prepared, or (ii) profit from resale.

Hoarding has caused shortages which, in turn, justify the original hoarding. This is a sad situation, but capping prices isn't a solution. If anything, I would expect higher prices would discourage hoarding, resulting in a more even allocation of TP/whatever between people.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/technology/coronavirus-pu...

> On March 1, the day after the first coronavirus death in the United States was announced, brothers Matt and Noah Colvin set out in a silver S.U.V. to pick up some hand sanitizer. Driving around Chattanooga, Tenn., they hit a Dollar Tree, then a Walmart, a Staples and a Home Depot. At each store, they cleaned out the shelves. Over the next three days, Noah Colvin took a 1,300-mile road trip across Tennessee and into Kentucky, filling a U-Haul truck with thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer and thousands of packs of antibacterial wipes, mostly from “little hole-in-the-wall dollar stores in the backwoods,” his brother said. “The major metro areas were cleaned out.”

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2020/03/13/amazon-blocks...

> Ranga said that a six-pack of wipes, which might sell for $20 at Costco, could fetch four times that online, representing a “big opportunity.” He said the couple had spent about $70,000 on Lysol wipes and liquid cleaners over the past few weeks

I don't think someone buying $70k of Lysol is doing it because they're worried they'll run of enough for themselves!

And nobody would buy from them if there was stock remaining at Costco.

Edit -- but apparently that's not enough to deter some from trying:

https://www.reddit.com/r/vancouver/comments/fimz9k/was_leavi...

If a million people normally buy one pack per month spread out evenly on weekends, but all of them think hey, maybe it's a good idea to get two packs this weekend, that's 2M packs where they had stocked for typical sales of 1M / (52 / 12) = 230K.

How would (ii) be a profitable activity if buying in bulk wasn't creating artificial scarcity? I mean, I guess you could argue that the scarcity isn't "artificial", but like, when someone is literally buying more hand sanitizer than they could possibly want to actual use themselves, that seems pretty artificial to me.

smallnamespace's made the same point as I made in the portion you quoted, but made it much more clearly:

"To a very good approximation, the marginal impact of any hoarders on the scarcity of a product is zero. Hoarders are not trying to drive scarcity themselves, they are trying to buy a product now because they think the price will rise, but they're not trying to make the price rise by buying it. The distinction is important!"

The situation in practice is dead simple: widespread hoarding is creating ongoing shortages of various products, and some of these hoarders are using that temporary scarcity to profit from other peoples' desperation. This is entirely predictable and uncomplicated, and it's both ridiculous and irrelevant to quibble over whether the profiteers are "trying to drive" the artificial scarcity to which they're contributing. I honestly don't even know what you're arguing about.

Someone who is trying to understand their motivation (what they're trying to do).

'it's both ridiculous and irrelevant to quibble over whether the profiteers are "trying to drive" the artificial scarcity to which they're contributing'

It's not irrelevant. I responded directly to a claim in the comment to which I replied. No tangent.

'I honestly don't even know what you're arguing about.'

I'm really interested to know why some folks (not you) are so insistent that the hoarders/profiteers are trying to create a situation (rig the game) rather than just being players in it. I thought the logic of my original point was pretty obvious and, as you say, it's not even that interesting compared with the wider point about the collective effects of the individual actions. So why are people so interested in this small point?

And, in any case, you ignored the point made myself and others in this thread, that any individual's actions have ~zero impact on whether there is a shortage. It's the collective result of many individual actions.

This is false. We are seeing artificial shortages due to hoarding that has already occurred. Higher prices would encourage hoarders to profit from their hoarding. I think it’s fair for people to stock up on a few weeks to a month’s worth of food and toiletries to avoid unnecessary trips to the store until they need to stock back up again, but if a hoarder bought way more than they’ll ever need and they can’t profit by selling their wares at higher prices, then they might as well just give them to those in need, or be left with a lifetime supply of toilet paper occupying their guest room.

The stores will restock. This is not a shortage due to production deficits. This is just people taking everything off the shelves as soon as they are restocked. These stores are just going to keep restocking and the panic buying will subside.

You neglected to mention that demand is increased. If it wasn't, then people would be hoarding lysol wipes and reselling them year round. But they're not, because it only makes sense when demand has increased. The lack of correct pricing by the stores is incentivizing hoarders, because, given the increased demand, they can make a profit on the difference people will buy it at vs the difference that they can acquire it. The stores should be pricing in this increased demand.

If this is indeed a case of people "creating small niches of artificial scarcity so that they can profit", then I would like to hear your explanation as to why they aren't doing it with toilet paper all the time. Why can I ever buy tp in the stores? Shouldn't a hoarder have taken it all and is charging double somewhere online?

There's two kinds of hoarding happening here: fear-alleviating and profit-seeking, which allows the profit seeking form of acquisition to be possible. Several weeks ago, it wouldn't have been feasible for someone to scoop up the entire market. Profit-seeking acquisition is however both a self fulfilling prophecy for the fake headlines about insufficient production, and a means by which the people seeking these products to alleviate fear have their fears justified.

So is your solution "good on them, they're taking advantage of people's fears to help make the rumors true?" Just what price do you think toilet paper should be right now in stores?

All stores had to do was limit quantities, but they didn't.

After coming back from a trip to India, an old housemate of mine told me that a huge part of the world uses their hand to wipe, and he decided to adopt the practice himself. He then warned me not to drink out of a cup he'd left on the floor in the bathroom.

I'm also reminded of a story I'd heard about an American traveling on a train in the Middle East, who'd offered to share some tomatoes he'd brought with him and divided up at lunch, when everyone else in his train compartment was sharing their food. All the other people were happy to share their own food, but none would touch the tomato sliced he offered them. He couldn't figure out why, but in retrospect he realized that it was because he'd touched them with his left hand, which in that part of the world was commonly used to wipe. So everyone would only shake hands with and touch food with their right hand.

I'm not sure how common such practices still are in the modern world, but if paper and bidets wind up in short supply, they're something to think about.

And you promptly moved out of the house, right?

Worst case scenario I made too many products and I cut back on shifts next month and run a few less productions.

I hope it doesn't reach that.

>I would much rather be able to buy one package of toilet paper for 50 dollars versus being able to buy zero for 5 dollars.

Yeah, because you have 50 dollars to spend on that. What's a person supposed to do who is only barely making ends meet? Do they forsake eating so they can wipe themselves? Underpay their rent? Go into debt so they can wipe their ass?

My point here is that this isn't an either/or situation. There's other alternatives, though some people won't like it.

Rationing - at least by stores if not by the government - is one that we don't like these days, but that has worked for us in historical times of trouble.

This law is meant to be another alternative. It's certainly not perfect - I'd have taken rationing initiated by stores over that - but it is an alternative to the "pay 50 for a roll or not have a roll at all" options.

AFAIK it's an anti-flamewar mechanism. Successively deeper comments require longer cooldowns before replies can be made.

So raising the price on something doesn't reduce the number of "normal people" purchasing it? Are you honestly telling me that you don't think they are fundamentally linked?

Indeed, at that point I think rationing - either by the companies selling the product, or by the government (as we have done in times of crisis in the past) is in order. Would people be yelling about free markets like this if World War 2 happened today, and there was the kind of rationing we saw in those times? What would have happened to our country if people were so selfish back then?

The shelves are getting fully restocked every single morning. Go to your local Target/Walmart/Grocery store when they open if you don't believe me. Stores, suppliers, and producers have already begun rationing and metering out goods onto shelves explicitly because of people hoarding. The shelves being empty are a result of idiots running around trying to buy up everything they can, and stores reacting properly. The "free market" is already acting in response to those hoarders, they're discouraging it, and preventing it on a grand scale pretty effectively.

Your complaint about "not allowing the price to float" is a complete non sequitur even if you're still the type to swallow free market ideology hook, line, sinker, because people buying in surplus isn't demand. It's just, well, hoarding. Coronavirus isn't going to cause people to be thirstier, hungrier, or need to wipe their ass more. People are just buying in advance. Without people fearing for a worldwide pandemic nobody would be willing to pay increased prices for these goods. So it's not actually about demand, it's about artificial scarcity driven by a global pandemic. Thus, price gouging tickets.

But even if you don't buy any of that, the vast majority of our supply lines are JIT, so "empty shelves" aren't really a thing... what we'd really see is a dwindling of supply over a period of time. Which isn't happening.

Of course it is demand. You may also call it "hoarding" those aren't mutually exclusive concepts.

Existence is not the Market, and the Market does not take place in a void. You cannot reduce the world to a bunch of economic models, because at the end of the day, people will get tired of your Quant's BS and do something that generally doesn't end well for the person who ignores human nature.

As a bonus, we all have a series of examples of what not to be that have soared into the limelight to remind us all that even if we are stuck in a pandemic, at least we weren't horrible enough to have to figure out what to do with more stock than we can feasibly sell or distribute for more than it cost to consolidate it into a single location because we were intending to pull one over on everyone else.

Win/win. Supply goes home. Everyone reminded not to be a dick, and a few people have learned a very valuable lesson about logistics, society, the economy, and what not to do during an international fucking pandemic. Maybe no one else has to deal with the damage caused by asshole speculators.

Why do you prefer that? Why do you think that individuals have no ability to adjust their personal spending such that they can purchase TP or hand sanitizer even at 2x, 3x or even 5x price points.

Where did I say they would charge the same as the hoarders? I simply said the prices should respond faster to the supply and demand. Yes that will make prices go up accordingly, and it will also decrease the incentive to hoard and resell.

Prices of goods are already set largely by this model. For you to think that the prices responding faster to supply/demand is insane is to also suggest that all prices set by supply/demand is insane.

It's expensive to tool up your production line for extra production when you'll just have to shut it down again a few weeks later as the surplus makes its way through the system. Why would a toilet paper plant operator do that? They know that average consumption of toilet paper hasn't increased whatsoever.

How can toilet paper become worthless? You're always going to need to use it yourself even.

This only makes sense if no refund policy was posted ahead of time. I don't know about the situation in Australia, but most stores in my area have their return policies printed on the receipt, and nearly all of them have them posted in-store or online.

Production and logistics have gotten more expensive. That has happened economy-wide, and will only get worse as the pandemic exponentiates. They’ve also become less reliable, which is why we have hoarding.

The purpose of price spikes is to incentivise production, to create slack in the system. (It also reduces the quantity demanded. Toilet paper at a 100% premium doesn’t do much to someone purchasing a normal amount. But it is material at hoarding volumes.)

One could say “we don’t want more price discrimination.” But that is a choice to prefer shortages over price increases. (Which is fair.) If I have a warehouse of toilet paper, I am incentivised to ship it to Texas or New York over California. (Counterpoint: low income consumers there are going to face pressure to use alternatives.)

Bottom line: these are not costless policies. (That doesn’t make them bad per se.)

At present TP demand is simply higher than normal (from panic) and manufacturers are having to scale up. This is all avoidable.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2020/03/12/how-kochs...

In places more severely affected, delivery/handling workers may be unavailable to work.

Except we're not really limited to only two options. Rationing might be an unpopular option, but it works just fine.

It's not like it goes bad (on a meaningful timescale); it'll get used eventually.

This situation is just as bad for the manufacturer as it is for the consumer.

Stock it somewhere, and release it gradually over the following months, perhaps at a loss. Some hoarders will actually stock it as a reserve for the next emergency and brief price spike, which is socially beneficial behavior. Think of it as a kind of insurance.

This would be more of a problem if we were talking about perishable products, but we're not. Toilet paper and personal protective equipment (masks) are not perishable. Canned food and lysol are only mildly perishable.

And if there are, it's too soon to feel the impacts.

And who knows how long it takes for TP to switch from commercial/industrial sales to residential sales. People are spending far more time at home instead of work/school/malls/restaurants/vacations.

But if Chinese pollution studies are to be believed, we could be feeling a lot of shortages over the coming months.

I'm not worried TP, but I am about pharma APIs.

Does this double, triple or quadruple costs? Likely not. Yet costs do increase, unless the manufacturer does not increase production capacity to match demand. In which case supply dwindles to zero, with predictable consequences.

The point is: No factory or service provider operates with 10x production capacity they can turn on at a moments notice, that would bankrupt any business instantly.

Perhaps the law we need is one to control hoarding behavior or the rate of change. With that you avoid shocking businesses with unreasonable step changes in demand.

You know what would control hoarding? Higher prices.

I don't understand people who advocate for policies that almost guarantee empty shelves instead of a policy that would avoid shortages but at a higher price temporarily.

In my mind the higher price followed by a return to normalcy is a much better outcome for rich and poor alike than a complete shortage with nothing on the shelves.

B: Price controls, at least some distrubution of everyone gets some, less incentive to hoard, stores still allowed to raise prices a little (just not a predatory amount detached from real costs) when the manufacturer does when ramping up production.

The shelves are empty in either case, the difference being a nonzero amount going to poorer people in B.

So you are forcing a false choice between your A and B scenarios.

Why are you throwing up straw man arguments? I'm not in favor of $100 toilet paper. I'm in favor of letting market mechanisms resolve supply and demand imbalances. Anyone who thinks that restricting price increases is required to prevent $100 toilet paper really doesn't have a clue as to how the market works.

I am most definitely a free market person, yet one has to recognize controls are important in order to deal with degenerate or corner cases. One such case is when panic sets in.

I don’t know the answer. Not an easy problem.

Aside from an authoritarian system of governance where all purchases are tracked, and one must only purchase their "allotted" amount of goods, how exactly would one control hoarding?

i hope you are not proposing such a dystopian future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Kingdo...

Not just in the U.K., rationing was also introduced in the United States during wartime:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_States

I don't buy into it necessarily; temporary rationing seems an appropriate response so long as it is guaranteed to be temporary.

I can sympathize with his concern of embracing authoritarianism in exchange for safety; I do abhor the practice, but in this environment, rationing is by far the least intrusive measure in ensuring the widest swath of people maintain access to a minimum reasonable level of supplies.

If people want more, let them negotiate with the manufacturer for additional output after existing orders have been met.

A self-imposed limit per customer enforced by retailers should be sufficient. No need to start getting the government into the business of looking for hoarders.

That is NOT what people are calling for in this thread, I am fine with that

People are calling for Government imposed rationing and price controls

https://i.imgur.com/m0Efz3E.gifv

There are obvious ways to cheat it, but it still means more people end up with TP. You don't have to go full police state to make the distribution of goods more even.

It is perfectly fine for a business to choose to only sell 1 package per customer

It is not fine for government to mandate a business only sell 1 package per customer.

This was my entire point, people here are advocating for GOVERNMENT action when none is needed

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/fiag4b/handing_o...

2. https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/fiajl0/props_to_this_...

I am not.

I don’t know how one might implement something like this or if it is even possible. Not an easy problem.

What options do they have? Hiring new employees requires training, and that takes time. Meeting demand quickly requires a significant increase in payroll per unit produced, so why shouldn't they be able to charge more? What incentive do they have to increase their costs for a diminished return?

[1]https://www.tsheets.com/resources/overtime-laws-california

There has been a lot of strict adherence to ideology in spite of critical thinking and logic going around lately.

Both of those parties are equally incentivized to produce stock and sell it if the price goes up. From the point of view of a potential buyer, toilet paper straight from the factory, and toilet paper from the guy next door who bought some ahead of time are equally good.

> This is a case of consumers attempting to create small niches of artificial scarcity so that they can profit.

To a very good approximation, the marginal impact of any hoarders on the scarcity of a product is zero. Hoarders are not trying to drive scarcity themselves, they are trying to buy a product now because they think the price will rise, but they're not trying to make the price rise by buying it. The distinction is important!

> The price gouging law is not bringing toilet paper to levels where the producer of the product is taking some kind of operating loss or even reduction in profit of any kind.

This completely ignores the fact that the cost to produce a product is not a fixed amount, but rather that higher prices induce producers to make more product sooner.

Here's the crux of the issue: when supply is judged to be sufficient, nobody will hoard. When the supply of an item in the short term is in doubt, one of three things happen:

0) The price does not change, but the item goes out of stock. Some proportion of people are unable to procure the item, independently of their need for it.

1) Hoarders step in and cause the price of an item to rise. The higher price means that those who demonstrate a higher desire for an item (by their willingness to pay) end up getting it. The hoarding profits are a charge to the rest of society for a more efficient distribution of the item compared to 0.

What bothers people here primarily is that hoarders made money while everyone else is suffering.

2) The government steps in and does the distribution directly, e.g. via rationing. Here, the government decides who needs the item the most.

> What bothers people here primarily is that hoarders made money while everyone else is suffering.

No, what bothers me is the assumption that "higher desire" means "more willingness [and ability] to pay," and that "more efficient" means "assigned to the people with higher desire." For reasons of life and death (which I, personally, find more important than the principle of a free market), I think a "more efficient" tool should be one that distributes to people with higher need, and need is generally not correlated with ability to pay. It may even be inversely correlated: I as a tech worker can just stay home for weeks, and I haven't needed a drop of hand sanitizer. Someone who drives buses or makes hamburgers can't do that and must be out in the world for their job, and their jobs pay them a lot less than my job does.

So, government rationing would be an "efficient" solution in my definition, yes, but there's a milder option here: use the government's influence to artificially prevent the price of the product from rising. Then there's no incentive for people to buy large quantities with the purpose of reselling it, and it's more likely that everyone will buy the small amount that they need.

How would that work? If Dollar Tree were fully stocked with hand sanitizer, I would go there right now and buy 10 bottles. But so would 99 other people. So we 100 would get all the 1000 bottles, and everyone else would be SOL.

Are you afraid they're going to run out? Why? (Put another way, why aren't you buying 10 bottles of drain cleaner right now?)

One of my local pharmacies had hand sanitizer in stock for $3 and no obvious limit on purchases. I bought one, because I needed one, and I expected that (because my locality had announced anti-price-gouging laws) I could go back and buy another one if I needed it. But it kind of lasts for a long while.

"I expected that (because my locality had announced anti-price-gouging laws) I could go back and buy another one if I needed it"

Anti-price-gouging laws might stop people selling at high prices near you, but they don't stop people buying up all local supply, and re-routing it to places without such laws.

This is pure ideology. Do you have any evidence that a single person buying 10,000 masks from every hardware store in an entire state has no marginal impact on the scarcity of a product? Basic math would suggest this is not the case.

Are you sure? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/technology/coronavirus-pu...

"Mr. Colvin said he had posted 300 bottles of hand sanitizer and immediately sold them all for between $8 and $70 each, multiples higher than what he had bought them for. To him, “it was crazy money.” To many others, it was profiteering from a pandemic."

> This completely ignores the fact that the cost to produce a product is not a fixed amount, but rather that higher prices induce producers to make more product sooner.

How will they make more product sooner? By expanding their businesses - making new factories, procuring new manufacturing machinery, hiring new workers? What happens when demand reduces, and they're back to not only having a normal amount of demand, but having that further reduced by the glut of supply - supply of a nonperishable good in particular?

We have certainly fallen back on rationing during times of emergency in our society - even here in America. If it comes to that, I know many people will find it distasteful, but your point of:

> The higher price means that those who demonstrate a higher desire for an item (by their willingness to pay) end up getting it.

Is unfortunately the truth (though it's interesting that you chose to phrase "ability to pay" as "willingness to pay" - that discounts the fact that many people have a high desire for these items, but could be forced to choose between them and other items needed for basic survival), and left unchecked it will result in a pretty quick reversal of the "rising tide lifts all boats" argument for Capitalism if this situation continues long enough. It'll be pretty hard to argue that the free markets help all Americans when only people who can afford to do so can wipe their ass, or have access to basic health necessities.

So are you suggesting:

- I create a toilet paper cartel with all my buddies

- we hit surrounding area grocery stores with surgical TP buying

- Hoard til prices rise

- dump on muppet consumers

- profit??

this is ridiculous

https://abc14news.com/2020/03/14/canadian-couple-make-more-t...

So it seems from reporting that n95 masks are NOT being made in sufficient quantity for healthcare workers - let alone everyone.

http://www.startribune.com/3m-can-t-confirm-pence-comments-a...

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/28/us-mulls-using-sweeping-powe...

If the people want to hoard toilet paper, who are we to deny them?

Literally any exasperated parent who has to deal with little children having a tantrum because they can't get what they want.

Yes, that sounds harsh, but it's exactly how this works. Your statement is simply saying that society - you, me and everyone - should obediently and without criticizing enable those who can't cater to their own emotional needs; those who don't know how to deal with their own drive towards self-gratification; those who haven't learned to not indulge in their own irrational fears.

People don't need toilet paper, they need to talk and understand that hoarding is a dysfunctional way of approaching their own fears about the future. And that hoarding - ultimately - is a self fulfilling prophecy as it puts unnecessary pressure on supply chains and creates even more unrest and fear.

That's why your comment is not constructive nor even remotely funny.

>Yes, that sounds harsh, but it's exactly how this works. Your statement is simply saying that society - you, me and everyone - should obediently and without criticizing enable those who can't cater to their own emotional needs; those who don't know how to deal with their own drive towards self-gratification; those who haven't learned to not indulge in their own irrational fears.

So other people should do what you want, not what they want, because you know better than them? How would you feel if people compared you to "little children having a tantrum" just because your values differed from theirs?

>That's why your comment is not constructive nor even remotely funny.

Having so little respect for other human beings that you compare them to little children is not constructive foundation upon which to base policy making.

You seem to be opposed to policy making at all. So what's your point? Furthermore, reasoning from past experience and generalizing the approach to a population is at it's essence what cultures do.

>So other people should do what you want, not what they want, because you know better than them? How would you feel if people compared you to "little children having a tantrum" just because your values differed from theirs?

How one feels is unfortunately somewhat irrelevant in the face of an existential systemic crisis. Learning and internalizing this is part of becoming an adult, or managing any social unit larger than oneself. That the train is barreling down the tracks at you does not change just because you feel inconvenienced. You and everyone else in your community are on the tracks, and need to organize to get everyone safely off in the time you have left. Part of that may be coming to terms with the fact that not everyone can get what they want (getting off the track right now) if the means of doing so is constrained.

By all means though, if you wish to give the finger to your society that's actually trying to do the best it can for everyone; go ahead. Just don't be surprised if it turns out that the fact you did makes life difficult for you down the road.

If one of those values is “society holds together during a crisis”, it’s a better value and I would feel deeply secure about my criticism.

What is the value of individual, civil rights (as opposed to social rights, like not being unnecessarily infected or starved through artificially manipulated markets) during a crisis like this?

Yes, I feel deeply secure about my criticisms thus far.

If people want that much toilet paper, the only solution that's going to satisfy them is producing all the toilet paper they want. Society is just an aggregate of people, and if enough of them want for whatever reason a shit-tonne of toilet paper, it would be doing them a disservice to stop the market from giving them what they want.

Also, price-gouging laws do not "stop the market from giving them what they want." If anything, price gouging does - if someone who has $100 in savings wants a year's worth of toilet paper, they're less able to successfully get it if the market can run unchecked. It's true that an unregulated free market is good at getting products sold at the best price for the sellers - that's very different from giving people what they want.

This is missing the original point: the rise in price incentivises the market to produce more of the product / incentivises more producers to enter the market. This means more product is produced, so that in the end more people have it than they would otherwise. Without that, whether the guy with $100 worth of toilet paper gets what he wants is just determined by how fast he is to get to the store.

I really don't see evidence that it does. Remember that there are two steps here: production and retail sale. It certainly incentivizes price-gouging resellers to collect more of the product and incentivizes people to become resellers - see the various folks who are "hustling" by buying out their local Costco and reselling online for a markup. I haven't seen evidence that e.g. Charmin is saying, "Thanks to higher prices, we're able to see more toilet paper" or "We're limited in supply, we're going to have to raise prices."

That was the original point. At the top of the thread you're replying to:

> These products are being made in sufficient quantity for everyone. There is not a significant decrease in production. There is a significant increase in hoarding, and in many cases it is for the explicit purpose of creating artificial scarcity to increase the price of a product.

If you disagree with that, please present evidence of decreases in production / insufficient production / etc. There's been plenty of evidence in this comment section about the existence of profiteers.

(Perhaps the confusion here is whether price-gouging laws prevent your local corner store from selling more expensive toilet paper if their actual wholesale cost goes up? I would think they don't, and I would in fact agree that they should not and such a law would be a bad thing. It should prevent them from charging more markup, and either it should prevent them from buying from opportunistic intermediaries who are charging them more or it should apply to such intermediaries directly.)

Do you honestly believe that manufacturers are currently at 100% capacity, and have been at 100% capacity for years?

That's ridiculous.

Manufacturers always have spare capacity. One simple solution is that they can increase hours that the factory runs (ex, by giving overtime pay). Or they can delay upgrades/maintenance to keep things running longer, or any number of things.

> If you disagree with that, please present evidence of decreases in production

You are the one who is making the claim that manufacturers have somehow been in a perpetual state of 100% capacity. That is an insanely strong claim to make.

The idea that it is impossibility for manufacturers to take any action at all to increase capacity is the actual claim that would require evidence.

You are also ignoring things such as the amount of supply that manufacturers have stocked up. If demand temporarily increases, then they can sell that stocked up supply, that is in warehouses, until they increase capacity.

The world is not running out of toilet paper. Instead, what we are seeing, is temporary, local shortages, at stores, until the next shipment comes in.

Those stores will just increase the number of shipments.

I'm claiming (or more specifically, the person I quoted is claiming) that there isn't an underlying genuine shortage (i.e., that any inability to buy things in practice are caused by things other than "the product you want to buy literally hasn't been produced yet"), and so whether a manufacturer is at 100% capacity or 20%, they're still producing enough. That is, I think, the same claim you're making - that the world is not running out of toilet paper and all we have is local shortages.

I'm also claiming that if a manufacturer is not at sufficient capacity to meet demand, the cause is something other than a need for the per-unit price to go up. Generally, as production increases, the cost of production per item goes down. I certainly agree that manufacturers can take plenty of actions to increase capacity - I do not agree that those actions necessarily require them to raise prices.

Cool. So that means that manufactures have spare capacity which they can use to make more product.

So, there is no real problem here with everyone buying a bit of extra toilet paper. Manufacturers, will just use that spare capacity, to fulfill that demand.

> the cause is something other than a need for the per-unit price to go up.

Ah, here is the mistake. The extra capacity that I am talking about, still costs extra money to activate. IE, running the factory for longer hours requires overtime pay, as one example.

That is how the increase in price would cause capacity to be used more, and for the local shortages to be solved faster.

Marginal cost generally increases in the short term, as temporary, but expensive methods are used to reactive unused capacity.

In the long term, cost per unit goes down, because of economics of scale. But in the short term, you have to do things like pay overtime pay, ect.

The expensive short term costs are why the increase in price helps increase short term capacity.

You're claiming that both

a) not enough toilet paper exists to satisfy genuine demand

b) in order to meet that demand, they need to raise prices

I agree that it is theoretically possible that not enough toilet paper exists, and I agree that there exist ways to increase production that involve spending more money. Both of those are different from saying that in reality not enough toilet paper exists, and in reality manufacturers need (or even want) to increase capacity by increasing per-unit expenses. That's what my question is about.

More importantly, those seem like testable claims. Again - have any toilet paper (or hand sanitizer, or whatever) manufacturers raised prices? Have any of them said that they're unable to supply enough to meet demand? Have any of them said they could meet demand better if they could raise prices?

And back on topic, have any of them found themselves unable to raise prices because of price-gouging laws? I'm pretty sure that if a manufacturer raises prices, and if resellers pass that cost on to consumers (and do not disproportionately increase their margins), that isn't price gouging, and therefore resellers can actually charge more, and therefore they can actually accommodate manufacturers charging more, and so we have nothing to worry about. Do you disagree with that?

> b) in order to meet that demand, they need to raise prices

I am claiming that there is not enough local capacity to satisfy a very very short term local demand. And that an increase in prices can help satisfy the local capacity issue.

IE, if there is a bunch of supply in a different place, transporting that is possible, but costs money.

(I should have just talked about transportation, now that I think about it. The "problem" is actually way more short term than something where factory hours matter at all)

> Do you disagree with that?

My main argument that I attempted and failed to communicate is actually more that freaking out about "hoarders" is really silly, and that none of this is actually a big deal.

The amount of time that these local shortages last, is measured in days, before the next shipment arrives.

Which is why enforcement of this law is misguided. It is making a huge deal of an extremely minimal issue.

Worst case scenario, some people have to wait a couple days for the store to get the shipment in, or they have to travel a half hour to the nearest Costco. Not a big deal.

Ask yourself this question: if a TP manufacturer were to double their production effectively immediately, how long would it take for that extra product to reach the shelves? I don't know the answer specifically for toilet paper, but it's generally going to be in the region of a month or two for most consumer products.

Price gouging isn't a signal to manufacturers to produce more; it's opportunistic middlemen profiting off of the inability of the supply chain to absorb a temporary shifting of demand.

So what you're saying is, they wouldn't have scaled production, so your entire proposition about why the price increase would be an effective means to alleviate the problem was false.

It sounds like this is built under an assumption that there is extra capacity available without significant or permanent costs. I don't know the level of capacity at which they are currently producing, but rationally speaking the mere fact that the shelves are empty due to demand would mean that intelligent companies would already have ramped up that capacity in response. So if the shelves remain empty, is that a sign that we've reached the level of demand where the cost of additional supply becomes more expensive/ongoing?

Scaling production is not a binary yes/no thing; they wouldn't scale it so much that scaling back hurt them more than the profit they made from scaling gained them. Or to look at it another way, only the producers who could scale without "too much" cost would scale.

And I have one anecdatum: I was going to buy TP myself -- not because I hear "pandemic" and my thoughts immediately turn to my anus, but simply because it was getting to be time to reorder the ol' 48-roll brick. But because of this situation, my usual seller was out of stock, and everyone else was in fact, price gouging. So I'm just going to wait. I'll wipe my ass with my hand before I pay those prices. That's the thing, we're not talking penicillin here - you could permanently do without TP. I'll spare you the specific details of how. But one of the things you would need is bleach, which come to think of it, is probably also covered under this anti-price-gouging order, so hey, thumbs-up emoji!

* https://www.nytimes.com./2020/03/14/technology/coronavirus-p...

Manufacturers producing enough quantities to sell is not the issue. The assholes that swoop in and buy out all the stock in a store temporarily to quickly turn around and sell the items for much more are doing the gouging. It's like going to the gas station right after a refill with a big-rig tanker during a time of high demand, filling up all the gas from the station, and then sitting next to the now-empty gas station all day and charging people 500% more for gas.

That is why stores are now implementing quantity limits for certain supplies, so people don't just hoard them for profit and to deny everyone else access to buying the supplies.

In a shortage situation, I suspect they dial-up the production of the higher-margin product lines.

The house-brand manufacturing line won't be the one that gets the extra shifts or equipment installed.

You can still try to argue that it's economically reasonable to reward people for being in the right place at the right time (to incentivize people to ship goods around etc.), but that's a very different argument from whether companies are able to fund increases of production.

The day congress declares war on Iran, if you significantly raise fuel prices at your gas station but the wholesale supply hasn't changed, you're generally trying to take advantage of the consumer's fear.

We're for some reason cool with this in the financial markets, but for tangible consumer goods like food and fuel it's (rightly) considered predatory and criminally anti-social. Unchecked gouging can lead to real and dangerous social destabilization.

What does end up happening is something (like a outbreak or natural disaster) causes a regional shortage of a good, which is often extended because there is no real incentive to divert goods to fill the shortage.

Today that if often mitigated because of large national companies like CVS, Walmart, Lowes, Home Dept, etc who will move their supplies around based on normal prices

But in some situations Mr. Bill that owns the local store may have an excess supply of Good X, and would be incentivized to move them to an area of shortage if the price was higher. With Price gouging laws he will not bother.

Further Increasing in prices also in some ways allows for people with the greatest NEED for the items to actually get them, and discouraging hoarding.

The other issue is people, like in the article, just buying up a bunch of stuff so that other people literally can only buy from the opportunist. Consider the battle for concert tickets, which the band might sell for $20 but a scalper would buy and try to resell for $100. Yes it’s technically possible, but it’s fine for a society to determine it’s better for everyone if you’re not allowed to take advantage of people’s needs or vulnerabilities like that (when it comes to health supplies, for example).

While I am sure there are opportunists as you call them, that is not the primary reason people are buying up the stocks of goods. Most people are not bulk buying with the intent on reselling.

>>Consider the battle for concert tickets, which the band might sell for $20 but a scalper would buy and try to resell for $100.

That is not what is happening right now, and personally i have no issues with scalpers but I am also anti-social and never attend events for which a scalper would be able profit from. The solution to scalping is not price gouging laws, but non-transferable tickets, or individually named tickets. Many events are already doing that because the practice of scalping hurts attendance and the fan base. No government intervention is needed to resolve that issue

>but it’s fine for a society to determine it’s better for everyone

This will be our deviation point in philosophy, I am an individualist, holding the individual rights are in fact more important thank what society determines to be "better"

It is this attitude that creates these opportunities. If we collectively understood that allow "surge" pricing is the fastest way to respond to a spike in demand and to quickly return to a more normal market equilibrium we would have fewer and shorter situations like this.

There's a pretty prevalent model for Risk Communication that compares the actual hazard (how bad something will be if it happens) against a person's outrage (how bad a person thinks a thing will be).

When the prevalent authority communicates risk in a way that lowers a person's outrage too low you can get inaction (like a president saying "don't worry" or “I think that whole situation will start working out.")

When the prevalent authority communicates risk in a way that raises a person's outrage (like surprising a population who were told to ignore a situation by then banning travel, closing borders and telling people we don't have testing capacity) you can get very strong reactions.

It's good when outrage matches hazard, that's where we want to be. But when hazard is, say, in the middle, and outrage is raised above that, you can end up with people feeling like they desperately need things.

At this point, they throw whatever money they have to at the things in order to mitigate their perceived hazard, and that's where opportunists and gougers come in. These people aren't acting rationally (they're perceiving a higher hazard than is real) and are vulnerable to ignoring market conditions in that "a free market works when both parties have perfect knowledge" sort of way.

So understanding this, we take actions that kneecap the unrestricted free market, because it doesn't have compassion and we want to be compassionate toward our neighbors that got too freaked out for their own good.

No one should try and take advantage of a vulnerable party, and it's a good thing to have safeguards against that.

No thanks. I'd prefer inflicting a social cost to disincentivize the behavior in light of the taint on one's reputation for doing it.

You are choosing to create shortages and encourage irrational purchasing behavior because it is better to "inflict a social cost". I just don't understand that tradeoff.

If you cannot understand why this type of middleman profit-taking centric arbitrage by which no product is created but merely has it's destination altered via people looking to move the supply to the highest bidder, I don't know what to say to you other than you are clearly not thinking with the best interests of those where you're raiding that stock from. There was no shortage until these speculators created it. And no, the production, was fine, or would have been less problematic without their intervention.

Information does not magically propagate. The manufacturer has to receive orders through their customer's acquisition processes; which is triggered through the data that feeds them. In order to have an accurate forecast of what real affordable growth they can manage to fund or pull off goes into their (the supplier's) calculation of backlog time and CapEx to satisfy demand for new equipment or hiring, which influences what they can commit to, which then feeds back intopurchasing decisions by retailers, as well as requiring them to forward the orders to their suppliers, and so on and so forth. None of that gets done lightly or pivots on a dime, rendering disruptive arbitrage transactions as a highly destabilizing occurrence to the supply chain that only ends up being made obvious through careful analysis of data exterior to the in-place logistical chain. Something no directly involved actors tend to specialize at doing, seeing as they are the typical supplier. Furthermore, seeing as these people failed to make arrangements in the sense of properly batching their shipping, the energy cost per delivered goes through the damn roof.

If you want to solve increased demand, you go to the supplier directly, and get in line. You don't arbitrarily make the decision for an entire town that they don't need those supplies their demand facilitated the staging of at the local Dollar Store, and schluff them off elsewhere because you want an effing 3.5 to 7x profit factor. Not when everyone everywhere needs it at the same time. This isn't a case of statistical multiplexing. There is no "well they don't need it as much as we/they do."

When probability is unity, you spread your finite supply of mitigation of new viral spread as far and thin as you can in order to slow the viral propagation as much as possible, and damp it's intensity as low as you can overall; the more "holes" you create by arbitrage buying, the more vulnerable and intense will be the resulting propagation of the disease through the locale.

It isn't my fault these people can't seem to grok higher order consequences well enough to realize they should have left well enough a-damn-lone. Nor is it my fault you seem to think the laws of physics can be bent by throwing enough money around. It's a bloody crisis man. Information and supplies being where they need to be saves lives. Not sticking your %;&_ in everyone else's slice of the bloody logistical pie!

These aren't securities! These aren't "potential value". These are physical lots on which people's lives will be dependent upon. There should be a damn social cost to this destabilizing behavior, because it's like being a damn agitator in an already on the brink confrontation. We cannot afford for everyone to engage in this type of behavior throwing off everyone else's capability to plan and smoothly execute a bloody response which doesn't upset the overall allocation of finite human capital too disruptively.

You want to engage in arbitrage and play "the Free Market cures all ills"? You do that with your own community. Don't go and start ransacking everyone else's supplies, and expect everyone else to clap you on the back and say "Good on you, lad! Making all that profit! Hell, I'll miss Gram/Mom/Dad and I'll have to figure out how to pay Little Johnny's/Jane's/my wife's emergency room bill due to not getting my hands on some sanitizer/masks for them, but I'm pleased as punch you managed to eke so much more profit selling that product that we through our purchasing habits managed to keep stocked at a local business we fund as a support to the logistical needs of our own community. Bloody genius move!"

I'm not the one encouraging irrational behavior. You are, by applying magical thinking to just how all that signalling has to get translated before any meaningful intervention can take place.

I know what these systems look like. I know as much gets done as it is within the capability of the people making up the chain can manage to sift through, and I damn well know how disruptive particularly egregious acts of greed can change the logistical landscape because of the long-cycle nature of the signalling and pattern recognition. Thankfully, we have this wonderful communication network, and mechanisms for modifying human behavior through social pressure and legal processes to be able to short-circuit these malevolent practices before things get too chaotic or too much damage is done!

Free market is already solving this problem. I was at my local store today and they were restocking the shelves with TP and paper towels. There was no line.

You seem to have completely missed my point that the price surge should have been happening in the regular stores. By not raising their prices, the stores enable the hoarding, speculation and secondary market nonsense you are blabbering about. By threatening to fine vendors when they raise prices, the government enables these arbitrage schemes. By arguing as vociferously as you are that the market can't solve these problems you also enable these schemes because this attitude changes the nature of the regular market in favor of these ad-hoc markets.

You and many like you seem to think that being in favor of price surges is the same thing as being in favor of the hoarding and speculation. But that is not true. I also am not arguing against sellers choosing to limit quantities, that is their prerogative. I'm arguing against government intervention when the market will address this all on its own. The Mayor of New York City seems to be in your club. He is arguing for the nationalization of industries to solve the shortages (https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bethbaumann/2020/03/14/de-blas...).

> Thankfully, we have this wonderful communication network, and mechanisms for modifying human behavior through social pressure and legal processes to be able to short-circuit these malevolent practices before things get too chaotic or too much damage is done!

> Information does not magically propagate. The manufacturer has to receive orders through their customer's acquisition processes; which is triggered through the data that feeds them.

Which is it? Information does or doesn't propagate quickly?

> I'm not the one encouraging irrational behavior. You are, by applying magical thinking to just how all that signalling has to get translated before any meaningful intervention can take place.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2020/03/12/how-kochs...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-companys-hands-on-effort-to...

Prices going up does not achieve the goal of enabling universal access to current supply in order to damp the strain on the currently existing medical/distribution infrastructure, which is the primary goal to be achieved in a global pandemic situation. By looking at the problem through a primarily economic lens, the resulting world does not accurately reflect those meddlesome details that economists handwave. Like the fact that there are portions of the population that won't be able to make the tradeoff of paying higher prices for these goods, and still get other necessities. That trade-off, more shock to the medical infrastructure before we have effective mitigation/treatment is not the kind of thing we can just handwave through more money.

Furthermore, it isn't price hiking that is so much an issue as unconscionable price-hiking facilitated by sub-optimal logistics, or outright greed. The end problem is getting supplier output to an area where people in need can get it. Any unnecessary obstacles in that chain for the express purpose of profit-taking are the problem.

>You and many like you seem to think that being in favor is the same thing as being in favor of the hoarding and speculation. But that is not true.

Saying that is is easy, but it doesn't make it true. People interpret the baseline increase of price as being an externally imposed privation. This degenerates to a man v. society response encouraging an every-man-for-themselves attitude which doesn't result in an optimal outcome, and instead encourages the type of half-thought out environment where you'll find desperate secondary market buyers, and secondary market suppliers creating a self-reinforcing disruption created by seeking sources of dwindling supply to reroute everywhere else willy-nilly. The system thrashes, in short. A non-price surge mediated response however aims at enabling access to the resource across the board, and degenerates down to a logistics problem of getting product from here to there and matching replacement rates with consumption rates in lock-step. This approach doesn't inspire fear, but instead relies on wide-scale disciplined thinking, along with the ability to know with reasonable certainty that product earmarked for a particular geographical area is still there.

>I also am not arguing against sellers choosing to limit quantities, that is their prerogative.

We are agreed somewhere!

>I'm arguing against government intervention when the market will address this all on its own. The Mayor of New York City seems to be in your club. He is arguing for the nationalization of industries to solve the shortages.

To be clear, the only "government intervention" I'm advocating for is for the prosecution of those that participate in widespread buying out of supply for arbitrage purposes in order to ensure the primary market with visibility is the primary means of distribution, and to minimize the level of chaos. I in no way endorse transition of manufacturer or distributor, or logistical mover to government control. Hence my advocation of The enactment of voluntary purchase limits by the end distributor. I'm not that hot on nationalization, nor do I believe we're at the point where things are severe enough for the overhead of having to legislate out the details involved in fully specifying the response. I'm just trying to make it clear that right now everyone is in the same boat, and the best way forward is to not let ourselves fall to the temptation to turn a universal crisis into a mint. The entire system can handle it as long as we give it the room to work while at the same time constraining it to work for the end goal of not enriching a few outrageously, but getting things where they need to be.

We may be somewhat talking passed each other for some reason. The only major difference I'm seeing in our approaches after a few re-reads and attempts at trying to coax out an alternate message from what you wrote is I'm coming at it from the grounds of a logistics problem, and you from the economic market side, where mine makes the implicit assumption the work must be done, and yours doesn't seem to account for that axiom in any way, or at least in a way explicit enough for my sensibilities.

>Which is it? Information does or doesn't propagate quickly?

It's both. Social signals such as shame or disapproval travel quickly and can facilitate rapid modification of individual behavior based on consistent responses to undesired behavior. Logistical signalling is not that. It requires existing relationships, confirmation that funding is staged properly, several stages of analysis and propagation through particular human actors who are still burdened with everything else that isn't the crisis as well. These are longer cycle signals that are more rigid, but most importantly, have exhaustive levels of in place infrastructure to increase the visibility of the overall signal; something lacking in secondary markets.

Again, to summarize:

>Not advocating nationalization.

>Am advocating intervention where purchasing for arbitrage purpose disrupts the smooth logistical flow of output (I.e. buying out the next town's supply to sell at a markup online)

>Universal access is the priority until the severity of the crisis is dampened sufficiently by developing herd immunity/vaccines/treatment

>Do not be a dick. If someone else you know is being a duck, make sure they know it; because now isn't the time for it.

>Stable logistical picture facilitates smooth Market based optimization without excessive distortions created by ghost supply flow.

>Don't Panic.

That's it.

The market is penalizing those people long before the government will get around to it. Shelves will soon be stocked again, there are alternatives to pretty much everything that is in short supply, the arbitragers have found themselves with stock that they can't easily get rid of without loosing money as well as finding themselves hated by the public in general. They made poor choices and the market is penalizing them.

The danger of your prosecutorial approach is that it is often applied to the wrong people. The current situation is somewhat unusual in that demand is increasing everywhere but these laws are often applied during localized disaster situations (hurricane, etc.) where it would be helpful for people to take unusual/more-expensive steps to get supply relocated. That involves extra costs and price controls work against those initiatives.

I think the biggest failure here is the media, whose terrible reporting caused people to believe that there would be a shortage of things like TP and also caused people to focus on hand-sanitizer as opposed to plain old soap, for example. The not-quite-panic buying is unwise and ill-conceived.\

Markets are a way of managing information. That's why things like "the stock market went up" or "the stock market went down" matter: it communicates what people believe about whether things are underpriced or overpriced. In turn, those beliefs are only worth paying attention to if participants have some reasonable information about the things they're buying and selling. While my individual purchase of a $50 bottle of hand sanitizer is a small drop in a bucket of information, it is conveying information, and everyone else paying for it absolutely does influence the market. When we communicate that we're willing to pay $50 for a bottle of hand sanitizer even if the cost of production has not gone up, it tells resellers that they should start hoarding. A clever reseller will stop selling their reserves entirely and wait for discovered prices to max out. That does matter quite a bit to me as a buyer!

If the buyer is giving the factory an extra 19x the price, the factory is incentivized to produce more, the buyer is substantially more likely to be able to buy more then next time they want to. Averaged over society the buyer is much more likely to be able to buy whatever they need the next time they need to buy anything.

If it's Joe Schmoe Markup Inc getting the extra 19x the price, there is no benefit to society or the buyer. Joe Schmoe is just an asshole profiting off of making other people worse off. That should be criminal.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

"While the pricing of consumer goods and services is generally best left to the marketplace under ordinary conditions, when a declared state of emergency or local emergency results in abnormal disruptions of the market, the public interest requires that excessive and unjustified increases in the prices of essential consumer goods and services be prohibited."

Emphasis mine. This definition still allows producers to pass on increased costs, as long as they are not excessive and unjustified.

They forget to mention that the marketplace is highly optimized at the foundation to make this bullshit.

There’s no open marketplace. The government protects concepts like inflation which is the deflation of buying power of the masses to prop up the power of aristocrats.

I have zero qualms with government stepping in to actually create some pricing competition.

Financial “value” is not a property of an objection reality. It’s a human ideology. No one in economics disputes this.

And somehow we’re convinced old gits dumber than us, outnumbered us have sold us on truth of markets.

They pray on confusing and controlling our innate behavior to model our future. “Oh guess my model will be these cube walls forever.”

And I’m talking specifically about the bulk producers of basic human needs, food, material supplies, medicine.

How shallow and self aggrandizing America as a culture is is on display right now.

A weak ass people who coddle old gits because they can’t source local TP, and toothpaste?

The people are so incapable of absorbing a true calamity in this nation is frightening.

Not subjective is exporting to Japan.

"He quickly sold all 2,000 of the 50-packs of masks on eBay, pricing them from $40 to $50 each, and sometimes higher. He declined to disclose his profit on the record but said it was substantial."

$100,000 gross revenue ($50 each), let's say shipping, fees, and price variance were 25%. That's still $75,000 for a $7,000 investment. 10x returns.

When I sold on Amazon, every so often I'd be able to 10X my money on a product, but it was rare and balanced out by the many more times that I would lose money on a product or have to write off completely because it didn't sell.

I think if there'd be no price gouging laws and everyone expected to be allowed to sell on Amazon, people would end up pricing lower and there'd be more supply and competition.

There's also uncertainty because when Amazon was banning for price gouging they never made it clear what price level counted as gouging. Wholesale prices shot up, and it was unclear whether selling at a reasonable margin, but based on a higher cost, would be considered gouging.

Also, Amazon this week banned all offers, not just ones that were deemed to be price gouging. eBay did the same already more than a week ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22576051

It's the just-in-time nature of distribution. Demand doubles from "normal" and all of the sudden nothing is sitting on the shelf.

However, while no sales tax on hand sanitizers is hardly going to be of a measurable impact for an individual, when you're hoarding to squeeze people in crisis, no sales tax makes for a nice 'bulk discount'.