Adafruit isn't "rationing scarce resources", they're trying to provide good service to their customers. Adafruit is an actor in a "free market" acting in their best interest.
i don't disagree, adafruit is probably acting in their best interest, however they perceive what that interest might be, it's not always just "more profit", more often than not, it's a matter of survival that is at stake.
My issue was with the comment somehow suggesting the entire system (Big Bad Market) is somehow less wise than an individual actor.
Yet, the entire system contains much more information, that the individual actor does not, and can never have access to, e.g. value judgements of other market participants he will never meet.
Markets, at the core, are just auctions. It's one way to resolve the question who gets the scarce resource first. At other times, it's medical triage, a system very different from "free markets". It can also be first-come, first-serve, which is what currently being attempted by Adafruit now.
Many such options. Why is "free market" judged to be inappropriate here?
From my experience in markets with severe shortages, first-come/first-serve rationing approach never failed to produce a poor supply, and free floating markets were always oversupplied (to a varying extent, but in general there was a trend).
Sometimes people express a sentiment that the supply/demand curves are more than just tools to evaluate a situation, but instead, are a sacred ideal to always strive towards. But economists also recognize that markets are awful at pricing in externalities, and even worse at respecting morals and ethics.
The base Raspberry Pi model is supposed to cost $35, because the Raspberry Pi Foundation has decided that offering a low cost SBC is important for the world.
Using a bot to buy up all inventory so you can resell it at $50 or $100 or whatever is unethical. You have provided no added value; you are just a parasite scalping others for your own enrichment.
If this is what a "free market" is, as many people here seem to think, then free markets are objectively bad for the commons.
It's not a free market since the manufacturer determines what the stores should sell it for and the result is a middleman extracting the value between set price and market price.
That only bolsters my point. I see a lot of posts here decrying Adafruit's actions as being anti-market, or that these middlemen extracting value are somehow "fixing" something wrong with the market.
But it's not a free market! Adafruit (etc.) are only allowed to sell at particular price points, or the RPi Foundation will stop giving them inventory to sell. You can argue that is a free market, since Adafruit and the Foundation have voluntarily entered into a mutually-beneficial contract.
But then we also have to accept that Adafruit is well within their rights to impose restrictions on how the product is bought, in an effort to ensure the products get into the hands of the people they want it to, at the (lower) price point they want.
All Adafruit is doing is putting up a big "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" sign whenever an ordering bot shows up, which is completely up to them to do if they want.
If you have 5 RPi resellers and they all have to have the same price because the manufacturer tells them so is not a free market. There is no interplay between supply and demand.
I stand by my statement: you need to read it a few more times until you understand it.
The market is credit card sized arm based computers, not raspberry pi. If you narrow things too much then you can make anything not a market. Wal-Mart has a monopoly on apples if you narrow the market to inside their store.
> I stand by my statement: you need to read it a few more times until you understand it.
I understood your comment just fine, I just don't agree. Either way,as I commented earlier it's not the essence here so I see no point in further debating this particular point.
Arguing over what constitutes a "free market" is silly. It's a gradient, not a boolean. Every real-world financial market that exists has non-market forces that apply to it, even if they're just laws against fraud.
The interesting question is: are the resources actually scarce as in "actual users want to buy more of the resource than the supplier can produce", or are scalpers buying up inventory and leaving it unsold simply to drive up the price even more?
There has never been an actual shortage of toilet paper or disinfectant during the pandemic, the production-side supply has always been enough to satisfy the demand - the "shortage" was only because people hoarded up and/or tried to profit by re-selling loo rolls on eBay [1].
