Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, I'm a big believer in the market, and that rising costs in times of scarcity prevent individuals from buying more than they need. And if Uber charges 20x for a ride on New Year's Eve, fine -- that's just what happens with supply and demand.

BUT -- it feels like a big problem when a few profiteers are creating that very scarcity in the first place. I don't mind this guy buying a bunch of kits in bulk liquidation... but driving around to empty every store of its shelves? That really rubs me the wrong way. Same as when ticket resellers buy huge chunks of concert tickets to arbitrage, creating the sold-out situation.

But it still confuses me how there is zero hand sanitizer on Amazon right now. Why isn't this guy selling it at least for a non-gouging price? Purell will surely come back in stock in a couple of weeks, no? Now is literally the only time for him recoup his investment... while spending a couple weeks packing, labeling and shipping nonstop.

Why is he sitting still?

There is a much more effective way to prevent people from buying more than they need... limit sales to x items per buyer, or rationing. The only thing rising costs ensure is that people without money don't get anything.

It's not so simple. What do you say to the family with seven kids who also has grandma and grandpa living at home? Do they get only one bottle of sanitizer the same as the college student? For some people, time is more valuable than money; for others, the opposite is true; and in even other cases, other structural issues will make fairness very difficult to achieve. Someone will lose out in all of these scenarios, and therefore it's quite difficult to evaluate which regime is preferable to the others in all cases.

For a store it really is that simple, and they do it all the time with really good sales (esp. loss-leaders).

The "preferable" regime is whichever one is easy to implement, appears fair, and ensures primarily that the store has a reputation for things being in-stock even when on sale.

Which is usually max 1, 2 or 4 per customer. If you really want more, you can usually put them in your car, go back in, get in line again and pay again. If you do this more than two or three times, a manager will probably ask you to stop and prevent any further. But you can always come back tomorrow.

It works pretty well. People who really need double or triple can get it with just a little extra work, but it absolutely prevents people from clearing out the store's stock in a single, quick easy transaction.

This response did not answer the core question of my comment: any allocation scheme will choose winners and losers, so how do you pick which is worse? I see an assertion that rationing via quotas is "simple and fair," but it's not clear at all that it is more fair. What is "fair," and according to whom? Certainly the mother with seven kids and elderly parents in the home, she'd find the "go through the line, go to your car and go back in again" to be totally unacceptable, especially with the exceptionally long lines we've seen (it wouldn't be a "little extra work" but would involve doing nothing but waiting in line for hours).

And the whole point of this article is that it's not normal times where prices can fluctuate.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. In every game you have winners and losers, but you can try to make the game fairer for most people.

>> There is a much more effective way to prevent people from buying more than they need... limit sales to x items per buyer, or rationing. The only thing rising costs ensure is that people without money don't get anything.

> It's not so simple. What do you say to the family with seven kids who also has grandma and grandpa living at home? Do they get only one bottle of sanitizer the same as the college student?

It is that simple. People who legitimately need the item have the time to come back later for more, but price gougers don't have that time and need to clean the store's inventory efficiently in a short time.

If it is that simple, then someone should be able to simply answer the scenario I presented and why non-price rationing with fixed prices is preferable to variable price.

> If it is that simple, then someone should be able to simply answer the scenario I presented and why non-price rationing with fixed prices is preferable to variable price.

Because variable prices simply ration to the people with more money, which isn't always the best rationing scheme.

For instance, for hand sanitizer to do the most good, you want it widely distributed, even to people with little money. Non-price rationing does that decently well in a crisis. The fixed prices keeps the resource affordable, while the rationing discourages hoarding (either due to fear or profiteering schemes). Variable pricing encourages hoarding, as fearful but wealthy are allowed hoard they reasonable need and "entrepreneurs" hoard to flip the resource to the first group at surge prices.

This would have been a much more intelligent question for this NYT reporter to have asked, and it would be a much better indication of whether the guy is a scumbag or just naive.

Because Amazon banned all sellers from listing hand sanitizer, wipes, and masks, regardless of the price.

It's mentioned in the article.

Why would Uber be allowed to charge 20x when people really need rides, but individuals (NYC taxi drivers, savvy and/or forward-looking Amazon hand-sanitizer sellers, ...) can't? That way, you're just creating a binary economy of winners and losers. It's like tax avoidance - losers (people like me, the working population without millions in savings) have to pay taxes (and the most productive are taxed the most, way more than capital owners), whereas winners (politicians, Apple, ...) have tax-free accounts in the Caribbean...

The rules should be the same for everyone. Or else don't expect people to comply with being losers.

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