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Comment by taylodl | Hacker News Reader

Markets don't work that way. Supply is tuned to demand. When the supply is artificially constrained while the demand remains constant, it further strains already limited supplies, leading to empty shelves and rising prices. This is a fundamental principle of market economics. It's important to understand how these dynamics operate to grasp the broader implications of reduced imports from China.

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I think the above quote is accounting for both constrained supply and reduced demand from rising prices. Vendors consolidate their product lines to remove redundant (ish) offerings due to reduced demand and the new difficulties in managing supply chains. I.e. a shirt may only come in 3 colors instead of 10, and it may be harder to get the popular color because vendors are less likely to keep a large stock in warehouses.

It doesn't violate market dynamics that I can see, though I'm far from an expert.

One possible complication is that there’s quite a lot of waste that’s tolerated in pursuit of fashion and variety. (For example, Ross Dress For Less specializes in liquidating excess inventory.)

So I wonder how that plays out? My guess is that retailers take fewer risks when ordering, sticking with products that they know they can sell, even if prices are higher.

But they will still guess wrong sometimes.

There's a lot of levers and people to squeeze along the way:

Currency Manipulation to relatively increase Chinese manufacturing income

Relocating manufacturing based on tariffs

Retail margin

US based design & engineering of products

Advertising and other marketing activities

Depending on the product some will be passed onto consumers. But for something like Nike's it's probably more like fewer shoe designers, Footlockers, less advertising, smaller contracts to athletes, more manufacturing in non-China countries, and so on. Everyone is going to take a bit of a bit and it's probably not going to be super noticable to any one part.

No reason to expect empty shelves. Higher prices for stuff that can't be moved out of China. Sure. But it's a tariff, not an embargo.

Currency manipulation - No. Inflation concern.

Relocation of mfg - years long process won't help the shelves or the prices.

Retail margin - yeah... retail will balance price hikes to avoid hitting profits with not pricing too high to further reduce demand. This is just one of the reasons prices will go up. It will reduce the demand to less efficient and profitable levels, but won't increase the supply. Shelves will be sparsely filled with more expensive items.

US based engineering and design -- analogous to mfg. Not a near term solution.

Advertising -- it doesn't matter how much you tell people to go buy shit if they don't have money and/or the prices are too high.

Why are you still apologizing for Trump's absolutely incompetent policies?

In addition tik-tok/insta are having post after post warning people that the shelves are going to be empty which tends to feedback into itself.

If you were going to buy 1 of X normally if you think X may be out for sometime you may end up buying 2-4 of X which will run the shelves out very quickly when 10-15% of purchasers do that unexpectedly. Other people see the shelves emptying and buy more too.

Going to be messy.

All I have to say is imagine if Biden did this, what the news would be saying.

> If you were going to buy 1 of X normally if you think X may be out for sometime you may end up buying 2-4 of X which will run the shelves out very quickly when 10-15% of purchasers do that unexpectedly.

There are enough people who buy 0 of X normally, but if they think there might be stockouts, will visit every store in their area and buy 100 of X so they can scalp them and make a buck off their neighbors.

> All I have to say is imagine if Biden did this, what the news would be saying.

Give it a few years. They'll say he did it.

"Why do you think Barack Obama wasn't in the Oval Office on 9/11?" "That, I don't know. Would like to get to the bottom of that." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPfRGJRMbN8

Ah, yes, the difference between taking two slices at a pizza party because you fear it might run out vs taking none because you fear it might run out.

> All I have to say is imagine if Biden did this, what the news would be saying.

Surely you don’t mean to imply the media treated Biden less favorably than Trump?

At least for the 2024 election, I find it difficult to believe one could come to any other conclusion with all the rampant sane-washing that NYT, WaPo, etc. engaged in

Aggregate media bias across TV/Radio/Newspapers is interesting because both the direction and scale matters. Of course bias is only part of the story, do an objectively terrible job and you get more negative stories overall.

As a concrete example a great deal of left leaning media was very critical of Biden running for reelection and especially waiting that long to pull out. You almost never see that kind of thing from right leaning media outlets.

So, yes overall media bias favors Trump not because more outlets favor him but because the ones that do heavily favor him. Far left media is simply a more niche market than far right media. Mother Jones for example is well known but only pulls in ~16 million$ / year and even they where critical of Biden.

NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS are not niche. They all ran cover for Biden until the debate made it too obvious. They were not "very critical". They are, however, extremely critical of anything Trump does.

You can’t ignore scale of bias here.

CNN and Fox don’t come close to canceling each other out because Fox is way to the right and CNN is more subtle. -2 + 4 is not zero.

Similarity Fox viewership is 3 million viewers in primetime vs CNN at 1/6th those numbers.

I wouldn’t say extremely critical of Trump. He brings half of it on himself. Simply reporting what he says and does that makes him look incompetent is not being particularly critical.

The media has been extremely critical of Trump. Sometimes deserved, sometimes not. But impossible to deny the bias.

The media is also extremely critical of shooting yourself in the face.

Is that bias? Or sensible?

Implying the media is sensible is hilarious

Is the media biased against shoot-yourself-in-the-facers?

A neutral stance isn’t an uncritical stance.

It’s undeserved praise vs undeserved damnation that signifies a non neutral position.

The media is far from neutral. Almost all have a major left bias. Fox has a major right bias.

Not when you look at objective metrics of bias such as sentiment analysis or track time spent on positive vs neutral vs negative coverage of various issues. Of course that’s in relation to US political parties, pick a different ‘center’ and you can get any answer you want for how the media is biased overall.

Objectively FOX isn’t pure propaganda they do include some coverage critical of R politicians and policies. It’s just far less than say CNN spends on coverage critical of D politicians and policies.

I can cite multiple studies showing the left bias in the media. I think it's pretty widely held to be true. I'm actually kind of taken aback that anyone would take the other side of that argument.

I’m not arguing about the existence of bias or the numbers of L/R leaning media.

There’s simply more left leaning Americans vs the stance of the Republican Party who’s specifically engineered their message to appeal to voters with more political power. Ex: Losing the popular vote when winning the presidential election only happens to Republicans.

However, simply counting the number of companies leaning left or right doesn’t tell you much. A local newspaper with 5k readers just doesn’t move the needle. Neither does an outlet that’s 0.1% left or right leaning.

So the only accurate measurement is level of lean * number of viewers, and when you do that calculation (as I have) you find the overall media landscape leans Republican.

That makes some sense to me, although the result is surprising. Do have anything you can point to for further reading on the subject?

There’s a few investigations into why Talk Radio became such a Republican dominated market, but I don’t have a good link. They also ignored how NPR fills a similar niche and leans left. But overall I setup a spreadsheet and ran the numbers on viewership vs scores on sites like:

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ Fox: FOX: 6.7, CNN -3.7, another site giving them 4 vs -2 etc.

Then used numbers from sites like https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/first-quarter-2025-cable-new...

So for most watched cable news show you get FOX 4,552k viewers vs CNN 558k viewers. Multiply and you get a rather shockingly different impact.

Yeah, that's an interesting way of looking at it. Also I didn't realize Fox dominates so much.

It makes some sense!

I'd imagine they'd be saying, "Why haven't we seen Biden in over 100 days?"

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