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He Has 17,700 Bottles of Hand Sanitizer and Nowhere To Sell Them (nytimes.com) 326

Amazon cracked down on coronavirus price gouging. Now, while the rest of the world searches, some sellers are holding stockpiles of sanitizer and masks. From a report: 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." Matt Colvin stayed home near Chattanooga, preparing for pallets of even more wipes and sanitizer he had ordered, and starting to list them on Amazon. 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.

The next day, Amazon pulled his items and thousands of other listings for sanitizer, wipes and face masks. The company suspended some of the sellers behind the listings and warned many others that if they kept running up prices, they'd lose their accounts. EBay soon followed with even stricter measures, prohibiting any U.S. sales of masks or sanitizer. Now, while millions of people across the country search in vain for hand sanitizer to protect themselves from the spread of the coronavirus, Mr. Colvin is sitting on 17,700 bottles of the stuff with little idea where to sell them. "It's been a huge amount of whiplash," he said. "From being in a situation where what I've got coming and going could potentially put my family in a really good place financially to 'What the heck am I going to do with all of this?'"
A day after the story ran, the Tennessee man donated all of the supplies on Sunday.
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He Has 17,700 Bottles of Hand Sanitizer and Nowhere To Sell Them

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  • Karma (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @11:04AM (#59835700)

    See title

    • Re:Karma (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Presence Eternal ( 56763 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @12:13PM (#59836202)

      "Paper towels? You are in the wrong place, sir. This is the pasta aisle. This is where we have no pasta. Over there is the paper towel aisle. That is where we have no paper towels."

      Forbidding price raises but not mass purchasing just gives everyone a crash course in the stupider forms of communism.

      I learned my lesson though. Next time I hear people are panic buying, I'm going to remember that doing the moral thing when everyone else is doing the immoral thing can only harm me.

      • by tflf ( 4410717 )

        ...gives everyone a crash course in the stupider forms of communism.

        Communism??? There's a lot of price gouging and profiteering going on as well as hoarding. Examples and encouragement of all three practices can be found in any classroom instruction on the basic tenants of the unbridled free enterprise system: buy low, hold to create an artificial shortage, then sell high at whatever the market will pay.
             

    • Re:Karma (Score:5, Funny)

      by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Monday March 16, 2020 @12:33PM (#59836350)

      BTW, I was in a restaurant once called 'Karma', they didn't have a menu, everybody got what they deserved.

  • We all make mistakes. Annoying, greedy, craven mistakes.

    • by sinij ( 911942 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @11:07AM (#59835720)

      We all make mistakes. Annoying, greedy, craven mistakes.

      Very understandable mistake. When I was doing mortgage derivatives arbitrage, I basically did the same thing. Only US gov't bailed me out and this poor schmuck is stuck holding the bag.

      • Arbitrage theoretically plays a useful role, bringing more suppliers into the market. Reality presents corner cases though. Mortgages aren't really a commodity like pork bellies, they're only as good as the people paying them. More isn't always better. But on paper at least mortgage derivative trading performed a valuable function. We just lost track of the risk in a thicket of esoteric math.

        In this case manufacturers are balls to the wall, and by the time new capacity becomes available we won't need it any

    • by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @11:17AM (#59835780) Journal
      You don't need hand sanitizer. Regular soap and water will do the trick.
    • by Pascoea ( 968200 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @11:22AM (#59835812)
      This wasn't a mistake. Accidentally ordering a case when you wanted a bottle is a mistake. This was a deliberate effort to scalp profit off a crisis (manufactured crisis or otherwise) by an asshole with a sociopath's tenancies.
      • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

        Agree. Hope he (and every other asshole currently doing this with everything from soap to canned beans) loses everything.
      • by Nidi62 ( 1525137 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @12:08PM (#59836158)

        This wasn't a mistake. Accidentally ordering a case when you wanted a bottle is a mistake. This was a deliberate effort to scalp profit off a crisis (manufactured crisis or otherwise) by an asshole with a sociopath's tenancies.

        And he in fact helped manufacture a crisis locally since he admitted he drove around to local businesses and bought up all their stock. So he was buying retail stock and reselling it at a huge markup. If he were buying wholesale it would at least have been slightly less immoral.

        I say, force him to drink all of those bottles of hand sanitizer. Pour encourager les autres.

        • Surely most jurisdictions have anti-profiteering laws on the books. I think the appropriate response here should be the local constabulary paying this chap a visit, thanking him for donating his hoard of hand sanitizer, and, as they're placing the handcuffs on him (with, of course, cameras rolling) assuring him that no doubt the local magistrate will take his sudden fit of generosity into account during sentencing.

          • by Nidi62 ( 1525137 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @01:03PM (#59836570)

            Surely most jurisdictions have anti-profiteering laws on the books. I think the appropriate response here should be the local constabulary paying this chap a visit, thanking him for donating his hoard of hand sanitizer, and, as they're placing the handcuffs on him (with, of course, cameras rolling) assuring him that no doubt the local magistrate will take his sudden fit of generosity into account during sentencing.

            According to the radio, the State AG pretty much forced him to "donate" his supplies. But he made himself way to high profile. They will have to go after him even just to make an example out of him. The government doesn't even have to win, they just need to make it expensive for him.

          • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @01:15PM (#59836654)

            According to the story in the Atlantic, the attorneys general of both Washington and California are trying to put cases together to charge this person.. While he doesn't live in their states, he was attempting to sell to consumers in all states - including theirs.

    • Agreed. I don't even think it was necessarily greedy or craven. As humans, we're wired to look for clever ways to gain resources and exploit those for our own advantage. Anyone who enjoys playing games more complicated than rolling dice can relate to this. Guy probably thought he was clever for predicting the run on hand sanitizer (and he was), and then got excited and went for it without really, carefully thinking through what might happen as a result, and the optics of the situation. Maybe it eventua
  • Is it not bad enough to not have access to a major supermarket that someone with that access comes and cleans out what little retail capacity exists "in the backwoods". The guy should just take them all back and see if he can get a refund.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Re:Confiscate it (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RedK ( 112790 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @11:18AM (#59835782)

      Just confiscate the stuff.

      As much as the guy is a dick, it's still his stuff. Government seizure of private property should not be tolerated or embraced by any freedom loving Westerners.

      I would accept FEMA offering to buy back his stock for the same price he paid for it however and distributing it as emergency supplies. That way he doesn't get rewarded, his travel expenses were still his to cover as a lesson against greed and all our property rights are intact.

      • > That way he doesn't get rewarded,

        He also doesn't get punished

        • by Jerry ( 6400 )
          Wrong. He probably spent a few hundred dollars in gasoline, fast food and motel bills accumulating that stuff. Having to "eat" those expenses is appropriate punishment unless, of course, you are all for ex post facto laws and punishment. If so, then welcome to the "Workers Utopia".
      • Re:Confiscate it (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ludux ( 6308946 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @11:28AM (#59835864)
        Suffering the tyranny of those who profiteer from tragedy is not freedom.
        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by RedK ( 112790 )

          Suffering the tyranny of those who profiteer from tragedy is not freedom.

          I'd rather suffer through profiteering than Government dictated seizures and destruction of property rights of individuals. With profiteering, the market can always give this guy the finger. When you empower Governments to seize your assets for any reason they deem valid, then you have no right to property at all.

          • Funny story. Those laws that get applied in cases like this are passed by elected representatives. If you don't like the laws that are in place around property seizure, then by all means vote for a candidate who commits to modifying or ending such laws. Conflating duly elected representatives passing laws to tyranny is ludicrous.

            • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

              by msauve ( 701917 )
              So, you're argument is tyranny is OK, as long as it's done by the majority.
      • by RobinH ( 124750 )
        There are certainly times when the government can, and does, commandeer private property for government use, particularly in a crisis, but there's usually compensation paid.
      • I can't quote it but I am sure there already exist laws against hoarding, particularly in times of crisis. There are also anti-profiteering laws in times of crisis, which is what he tried to do.

        He is just lucky some gun wielding profiteer didn't come along and take his stuff over his dead body.
        • by RedK ( 112790 )

          I can't quote it but I am sure there already exist laws against hoarding, particularly in times of crisis. There are also anti-profiteering laws in times of crisis, which is what he tried to do.

          Probably because there's so such law. Most statutes on the books have a requirement of an "Emergency" being declared and most have Civil penalties attached, or at most Misdemeanor charges and then only if the price gouging is over a certain treshold. This guy purchased and tried to sell his stock before the Emergency declaration which would make him safe.

          https://consumer.findlaw.com/consumer-transactions/price-gouging-laws-by-state.html [findlaw.com]

      • As much as the guy is a dick, it's still his stuff. Government seizure of private property should not be tolerated or embraced by any freedom loving Westerners.

        He is - according to US law - a criminal. Take the money away that he made from sales (proceeds of crimes) and take the bottles away (in his possession to commit crimes).

    • I doubt very much people will die without hand sanitizer. Regular bars of soap can still be used to wash your hands and last I checked there wasn’t any shortage there. At least this is less stupid than the people hoarding toilet paper. I still haven’t figured out why people anticipate needing so much of that for a respiratory infection. Worse still people have turned to buying out Kleenex and napkins and you just know the idiots are going to fuck up the sewer system by flushing them.
      • Good luck, finding soap and toilet paper in central europe right now. You guys are at least a week behind the curve. So, why buy (not hoard) toilet paper right now? Because all the antisocial idiots will hoard it - and some people don't have a faucet right next to their toilet where they could wash their ass and save ob TP...
      • by qzzpjs ( 1224510 )

        I still havenâ(TM)t figured out why people anticipate needing so much of that for a respiratory infection

        You don't need it for the infection. They think they're going to be stuck at home for a month and maybe not able to go to a store to pick up more before running out. Of course, now that the stores are sold out, they're sh... out of luck either way :^).

    • by dvice ( 6309704 )

      > People will be dying without this stuff.

      Washing your hands is more effective than hand sanitizer. Hand sanitizer doesn't actually have much effect at all if your hands are dirty. Sanitizer also needs to have at least 60% alcohol to be effective and not all have that much (not sure about these bottles).

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by Jerry ( 6400 )

        > People will be dying without this stuff.

        Washing your hands is more effective than hand sanitizer. Hand sanitizer doesn't actually have much effect at all if your hands are dirty. Sanitizer also needs to have at least 60% alcohol to be effective and not all have that much (not sure about these bottles).

        Soap and 70%+ (not 60 or 58% that just mfgrs being cheap. 90-95% Rubbing alcohol is even better) Ethanol both work in the same way -- breaking down the cell wall and membrane, allowing cytoplasm to escape containment. You and several others assume that someone out in public will just remain contaminated until they can visit a public restroom or return home to use soap and water. Meanwhile, folks touch their faces 2 or 3 or more times a minute subconsciously, getting any viruses on their hands into mout

    • by Pascoea ( 968200 )

      Just confiscate the stuff. Seriously.

      Under what legal precedent? Yeah, the guy is an asshole, but confiscating personal property without due process violates the bedrock of our constitution.

      • by rldp ( 6381096 )

        It is illegal to profiteer in time of a national emergency. There are laws against this everywhere in the US, put in place after 9/11.

        You'd think the men in the article would at least have a lawyer advising them.

        You confiscate it all because it is now evidence in a criminal case.

        • by RedK ( 112790 )

          You'd think the men in the article would at least have a lawyer advising them.

          I would advise you do the same. For one, can you even cite the statute these guys are in violation of ? A quick glance at Google indicates there are no such laws in place so long as you procured your stock legally and are selling it through legal means.

          You confiscate it all because it is now evidence in a criminal case.

          For one, you'd first need a criminal charge for such a seizure, for two, such seized evidence still can't be distributed. That's 2/2 fails on your part.

          • by sjames ( 1099 )

            The whole reason Ebay and Amazon got serious about this is the realization of how many state and local laws they would likely run afoul of if they didn't curb the gouging.

            • by RedK ( 112790 )

              The whole reason Ebay and Amazon got serious about this is the realization of how many state and local laws they would likely run afoul of if they didn't curb the gouging.

              Cite these laws then. Ebay and Amazon are simply exercising their free market rights to not enable this, as is their perogative as private entities. I welcome their initiative.

              I linked a source to all state laws, and it seems the requirement is that an Emergency declaration is in place, something that was only done after this man purchased his stock and tried to sell it for more than the required tresholds (seems to be 10%) than the laws on the books. You can't retroactively charge him.

              The United States

    • Just confiscate the stuff. Seriously.

      There's a good job waiting for you at the TSA. Apply now.

  • Creating panic, price gauging, engendering others - plenty of reasons to lock him up and size his assets (including profits from this endavour).
  • by Todd Knarr ( 15451 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @11:16AM (#59835770) Homepage

    This is just the ugly side of capitalism: what happens when there are no restraints on it. And it's not just him for the first thing he thinks of being how to corner the market and profit off the situation. It's the stores for going along with him and not saying "Whoa there, that's way more than you could possibly need for the month. Either you leave plenty for our other customers or we're not going to do business with you and we're going to ask you to leave the premises.".

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by colonslash ( 544210 )
      This is not unrestrained capitalism - the outrage over this shows that there are some decency limits and that stuff like this gets caught and stopped.

      > It's the stores for going along with him ...

      That's an awful lot to ask of a clerk at a dollar store because someone is buying their last 8 bottles of hand sanitizer.
      • Shouldn't be much to ask a clerk to follow store policy, along with using "Let me get the manager." when customers get irate. "Don't let one customer wipe out our entire stock." should be a standard policy for all retailers. After all, it makes no business sense to make one customer happy while in the process alienating 90+% of your customer base.

        • Not that easy, unless you place a security guy in every grocery shop (correct me, if that's standard practice in the US, never seen it here in Europe). Last week, some bigger food shops over here got security guys who spent most of their time discussing with antisocial idiots, maximizing the time, people were standing and coughing in queues. But I guess in the US with their lax gun laws, things will get resolved faster.
    • by rho ( 6063 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @11:34AM (#59835902) Journal

      It's like the guy who drives in the breakdown lane during traffic jams. He's thinking "man, I'm so smart, I'm not sitting in traffic like the rest of these losers," while everybody else is thinking "what kind of a jerk drives in the breakdown lane?"

      Sanitizer Man didn't think up something new. Even little kids know to set up the lemonade stand in the heat of summer, not during a blizzard. He's not clever, he's not savvy. He was actively trying to profit from a public crisis. Civilized people should not act this way because it undermines the civilization. It's how African warlords behave, and why huge swathes of the third world are shitholes.

      • by CubicleZombie ( 2590497 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @12:14PM (#59836206)

        It's like the guy who drives in the breakdown lane during traffic jams. He's thinking "man, I'm so smart, I'm not sitting in traffic like the rest of these losers," while everybody else is thinking "what kind of a jerk drives in the breakdown lane?"

        No, no, that's totally different. That's how BMW drivers act.

    • No because these items are more privileged items than needed for safety. The one bottle of this I use was running out so I went to purchase and while they were all gone the row was filled with bars of soap.
      If safety was the primary concern the bars of soap would have been gone; people are looking for the convenience of pumps.
  • Just Use Soap (Score:5, Informative)

    by nagora ( 177841 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @11:16AM (#59835772)

    Soap and hot water works just fine. Really.

    • by OzPeter ( 195038 )

      Soap and hot water works just fine. Really.

      It's hard to carry around hot water when you are out and about touching things that you don't know where they have been or the provenance of who has just previously touched them*. For those situations hand sanitizer may be the better option.

      * Like the arsehole the other day who was tested for COVID-19, jumped on a Jet Blue flight, and then when he landed informed the crew that "Oh yeah, my test results just came back, and BTW I'm positive"

      • It's hard to carry around hot water when you are out and about touching things

        You ever find yourself needing to go to the bathroom? While in there I suggest you check that thing that is in every bathroom next to the toilet.

        I don't get you crazy people. There are ample opportunities for you to wash your hands wherever you go, yet you don't seem to realise it which scares me into thinking that you've never actually washed your hands after taking a piss before.

  • They should be charged with reckless endangerment and face the death penalty. No jury would let them out.
  • I hope he takes a huge loss. And before the "sUpPlY aNd DeMaNd!!! crowd jumps in,
    -It would take longer than the disaster lasts to ramp up manufacturing capacity. Expanding manufacturing capacity is a very large capital outlay, unless the shortage was extremely long lived (not weeks or a couple months), it would represent a loss since demand would normalize before recovering the outlay.
    -Any marginal excess capacity possible with existing lines will already be taken advantage of, since meeting an excess d
  • Folks on OpenBazaar are making supplies available on the Darknet to people who desperately need them, and whose governments have dropped the ball and left people to fend for themselves.
  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @11:23AM (#59835822)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by rkhalloran ( 136467 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @11:24AM (#59835828) Homepage
    As I saw in the followup article, the quick donation to relief agencies came after the TN Attorney General's office announced an investigation into price gouging. Hopefully Kentucky jumps on as well and slams this bozo for not just hoarding supplies in an emergency, but trying to profit off his greed.
  • You could make your own hand sanitiser from alcohol and glycerine [youtu.be].

    Every discerning nerd should have isopropylalcohol or denatured ethanol at home already.

    • by mssymrvn ( 15684 )

      As a person with really bad eczema on his hands (it's like having at least six or eight open paper cuts at any given time), watching that video made me silently shriek with pain.

    • by Misagon ( 1135 )

      Before some "smart-ass" comments: I know that glycerine (glycerol) is chemically also an alcohol -- but it is not one that kills bacteria.

      BTW. Desinfectants for clinical use use both isopropylalcohol, ethanol and surfactants to kill a multitude of microorganisms effectively.
      I'm sure those better recipes exist out there on the web.

  • Historically, In my personal experience, tragedy has always seemed to bring out the "best" in people. I think back to somewhere around 2003 we had a big hurricane devastate the area, no power for a week and a half, flooding, major infrastructure damage, etc. The whole community started checking on neighbors, those with water shared it, we cooked up all the food in the fridge (because it would go bad anyways), ate what we needed and gave the rest to neighbors who didn't have any.

    But this is different, peop

    • But this is different, people are really freaked out.

      [snip]

      I'm not sure what changed, but I guess a good 15 years has passed.

      Social Media and millennials....

  • He horded emergency supplies that other people needed.
  • Hey, it's an option.

    During WW I and WW II people like him used to be run out of town on a rail.

  • I visualize Burgess Meredith sitting in his garage with cases upon cases of hand sanitizer... Then again, Henry Bemis was a very sympathetic character. The Colvins deserve leprosy.

  • "...sitting on 17,700 bottles of the stuff with little idea where to sell them."

    You drove hundreds of miles through dozens of tiny-ass towns to collect thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer to sell, and yet you can't figure out how to sell it without using Amazon or eBay? FFS, you can't stand up your own website? Take payments through any number of merchant processors? Believe it or not, there is more to the online world than Amazon or eBay when it comes to selling shit.

    These are the same morons who will argue that monopolies don't exist, and there's no reason to be worried about t

  • These guys are real assholes. They don't know how to return the stuff to where it came from?

    The CDC has stated (very quietly) that most people will be just fine with this, yet polls keep showing that people are afraid they'll get this. If you are young and healthy and under 60 you're going to be fine, in fact 50% may not even know they're infected.

    Seems to me we should consider infecting the the healthy population in waves while we have the medical capacity so that we have a small army of immune folks t

  • Fuck that guy, I hope he goes bankrupt.
  • by virtig01 ( 414328 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @11:42AM (#59835956)

    Banning price gouging is harmful, especially in disaster scenarios. The laws of supply and demand do not change because there's a natural disaster or a pandemic.

    Firstly, it destroys incentives for conservation and encourages hoarding. When people rush out to buy hand sanitizer, of course they're going to buy more than one bottle when they cost $4 each. If stores were allow to charge $10 per bottle, people would think twice about loading up.

    Secondly, it reduces supply, because sellers don't have enough incentive to supply the market. And the suppliers are both the manufacturers and the people who have some stockpiled. Right now there are thousands of empty office buildings with hand sanitizer stocked in janitorial supply closets. But that supply won't get to consumers, because it's not worth it for most businesses to unload the stuff at $4/bottle. And because online marketplaces have cracked down, there isn't a good venue to sell it.

    By setting a price ceiling, the law aims to prevent price exploitation, but at the cost of actually distributing goods. To put it another way, the law is saying that instead of being able to buy hand sanitizer at $20/bottle, it's better for you to *not* be able buy it at all. The price ceiling creates the shortage, and an empty shelf is like an infinite price, from the consumer point-of-view.

    No one like a profiteer, but the alternative isn't that the shelves would be full. The shelves would still be empty, and other people would have cleared them out.

    • by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @11:51AM (#59836014) Homepage
      But your suggestion just discriminates against those with less money, once again it will be the rich benefiting and the poor left with nothing. For the poor those $20 bottles might as well not exist. We are supposed to be a civilized society.

      Limit one per customer. Done. But no solution will be perfect even if you go to government rationing.
    • by ludux ( 6308946 )
      You're full of shit. Profiteers should be imprisoned for making an already bad situation worse. Ban price gouging but also ban hoarding. Restrict quantities allowed sold to individuals. Problem solved.
    • by sjames ( 1099 )

      All the gouging did here is take supplies off of the shelves where people could get them easily and locked them up in some guy's garage. It didn't encourage more production (they're already ramped up to full capacity) The anti-gouging measures caused him to release the product so it could actually do some good somewhere.

      Better that the shelves are cleared out because people who needed it got it than to have it gathering dust in someone's garage.

  • Hand sanitiser (60%+ alcohol) isn't particularly effective on viruses. If you have nothing else, then use it but it isn't a substitute for soap & warm water. Soap & warm water is the ultimate virus killer. Nothing works better. That's why medical professionals use it.

    How about some well-coordinated public information announcements to tell people to use soap & warm water instead of hand sanitiser?

    And yeah, people who profiteer out of causing people to get sick & possibly die through creating

  • Basic economics (Score:2, Insightful)

    by andy2020 ( 6693738 )
    Price ceiling is a _guaranteed_ way to cause shortages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Economics doesn't care that you don't like it. It just happens anyway.

    Now for this particular case: before the problem the big stores owned sterilizer. Now a few other guys own the sterilizer. How is such situation different? It isn't. There isn't one guy, there's more of them and there are stiil producers. Quite a competitive market. No reason to think the equilibrium market price changed a notch just because these

    • by ludux ( 6308946 )
      You're full of shit. Enact rationing. Problem solved without price gouging and profiteering off tragedy.
  • This type of activity is called capitalism.

    You can be sure a pharmaceutical company will be in play to capitalize on the pandemic with a shiny new vaccine. They may appear to not be price gouging only because govt paying the price will have negotiated something, perhaps secretly, and so nobody will really notice the multiples, or question too much.

    The kicker is we all will get to become activists against new legislation making knee jerk reactionary vaccines mandatory.

    And when the time legislation passes be

  • I support "price gouging." If stores had raised prices in response to panic buying, stockpilers would have bought a lot less, and I would still be able to get toilet paper. Sure, the price would be higher, but it would be available. That's how supply and demand works.
    • by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

      I support "price gouging." If stores had raised prices in response to panic buying, stockpilers would have bought a lot less, and I would still be able to get toilet paper. Sure, the price would be higher, but it would be available. That's how supply and demand works.

      No. It just means that people with more money would have bought everything up, leaving people with less money to go without. All the toilet paper would still be gone.

  • Look, there is a difference between borrowing your friends' car without permission and taking a strangers.

    Similarly, there is a difference between buying up in demand toys before christmas (and doubling the price) and in demand medical supplies during a pandemic (and selling at 10x the price).

    Moron thinks entirely about his own actions rather than the current situation and does not understand that one is fine, while the other is fucking crime against humanity.

  • I don't have much sympathy for this guy.

    Even so, Amazon and Ebay becoming the moral capitalism enforcers really looks to me like the owner of the town's biggest bordello leaning on the housewife making a little cash on the side.

"I got everybody to pay up front...then I blew up their planet." "Now why didn't I think of that?" -- Post Bros. Comics

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