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Comment by card_zero | Hacker News Reader

That implies that everything with a price is always out of stock.

No, it implies that everything with a price and a supply issue will likely still face that supply issue even with a higher price.

Everything with a price has a supply issue.

No, it doesn't.

Oh, OK.

I'm really glad we sorted this out.

I don't know where you got that honestly.

The situation here is that there is a temporary supply shortage. If you raise the prices to drop sales and guarantee you have stock it means you priced out most of the people. You narrowed your market only to the few who can afford it and those few are slowly going through that stock.

How does that help the situation? At the end of the day some people will have the bread (because they were in the store early, or because they have money) and other won't.

Raising prices in this situation only helps make more profit, extract more from the existing market. It does nothing to solve the problem of people having bread.

Of course it helps, pricing increases make it more attractive to build more supply.

Not in this case. You're citing Economics 101 without addressing the situation from the article.

The current primary supplier had a temporary setback caused by a fire in mid-March and operated at reduced capacity, before going back to full capacity in July. Whatever flexibility competitors had to increase capacity with little to no investment was probably captured. A few months of marginally improved prices won't incentivize any competitor to invest. Hard bread isn't the kind of product that can command a big price before customers lose interest.

It implies no such thing.

The presence of a price "selects who can access it", hence there's not enough stock to give it away for free. (Sometimes deliberately.)

Wut? That makes no sense.

Which part? You see this depends on your prior assumptions about how much stock there should be, and those are based on the state of affairs that you're used to and that you consider to be the natural order of things. But if you imagine that the proper natural order of things is for everybody to have as much of everything as they like, to squander profligately, then there's always a shortage of everything, relative to that state. On the other hand, if you consider the natural order of things to be that hard bread is very expensive, then raising the price (to stop it being too cheap) would indeed remove the shortage. You see? I'm saying that declaring a shortage is a kind of mild Chauvinism, an assumption that what you're used to having is proper and correct. But of course that might be true, in a way.

There’s plenty of stuff you couldn’t get rid of if you gave it away for free. You seem to be ignoring demand.

I considered that. It's a fair point, there are things that you couldn't give away, but almost always somebody would want them, if the price was zero. Hard bread, for example, would become like a natural resource, full of calories, to be turned into nicer bread.

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