The First Sale doctrine is fine, hoarding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoarding_(economics)) and price gouging not so much. Rights come with responsibilities. Maybe I can buy up a pallet of toilet paper in the middle of a pandemic, but people would be right to think I was a total piece of shit if I did.
Society's tolerance for parasites who do that kind of thing has a breaking point and when the people being negatively impacted get fed up enough to take action I'll have no sympathy for anyone who seeks to make others miserable just so that they can profit off of their suffering.
That’s the sophomoric take. The only reason you had the opportunity to buy a pallet during a shortage in the first place is due to idiotic “price gouging” laws.
During the pandemic the price of toilet paper should have been increased by an order of magnitude at the store level. This would prevent hoarding and it would make sure people who desperately wanted it could get it. Additionally, it would have incentivized producers and sellers to fill demand.
Price controls are the equivalent of rations. They don’t solve anything because they remove all of the incentives.
> and it would make sure people who desperately wanted it could get it.
I fail to see how making toilet paper cost hundreds or thousands of dollars per roll would ensure that everyone who needed it would be able to get it, since many of those who desperately wanted to wipe their ass were unable to work and going into record amounts of debt just to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads.
Producers and sellers were already fully incentivized to sell their goods, as they always have been. They know people want their product and will pay them enough that they can turn a profit. There's no reason to turn toilet paper into an luxury item which only the wealthiest people can afford leaving the majority priced out.
Price controls and rations have their place. Like all tools, the key to is make sure that they are used correctly.
None of what you said makes any sense. Who would pay thousands per roll? Why would the price be that high?
Also, you’re incorrect about producers having the right incentives. They are incentivized by money, not a higher calling to wipe ass.
Price controls have no place at all other than appealing to people’s emotions. They cannot fix or hide supply problems. They can just shift the price signal to lucky intermediaries (scalpers) rather than to suppliers.
You said: "the price of toilet paper should have been increased by an order of magnitude at the store level. This would prevent hoarding". How high do you think the price per roll would have to be to ensure that no one (not even rich people or a small group of rich people working together) could afford to buy up a pallet of toilet paper to try to resell at a higher price? It'd have to be pretty damn expensive. Expensive enough to price out most people since a millionaire can afford to pay so much more than someone making below minimum wage
> Also, you’re incorrect about producers having the right incentives. They are incentivized by money, not a higher calling to wipe ass.
Read my comment again, I never said anything about a "higher calling". I explicitly said that their incentive was profit.
An order of magnitude literally means 10. Not 100,000. Usually it costs like $1-2 a roll, so it should have gone to $10-20 a roll as soon as shelves emptied the first time. That would have meant that people would have bought only what they need (they would not have seriously spent $1000 on TP), but nearly all people could have afforded say $40-50 to get a 4-pack to get them by a week until more were delivered. That minimizes consumers’ excess hoarded inventory— which is where all the TP was.
Instead, IRL, anyone who could find them were buying up several massive packages because it was only the normal ≈$20 for 20 rolls situation, so “heck, buy 60, 80, maybe 100 rolls! Who knows when I’ll get this lucky as to find it again?” Meaning suddenly everyone was buying and warehousing way more TP than they needed in 6 months. Not adjusting prices literally caused the shortage.
It’s incredible how dumb the jump is from “the price shouldn’t be kept at what the pre-pandemic levels were” to “the poors don’t deserve to afford toilet paper”.
Were you alive and shopping for toilet paper during covid? The wealthy could already purchase it whenever from scalpers (a.k.a Amazon resellers). Normal people had to drive from store to store hoping their ration came in and they timed it right.
The hyperbolic interpretation of price controls is, “the poors don’t deserve toilet paper at all unless they win a lottery”.
Most economists believe that price gouging is completely fine. Anti-price gouging laws lead to a misallocation of resources and lower supply where it's needed.
It shouldn't surprise us that people who want to be able to exploit others for profit, or who advocate for those who do, would claim that exploiting others is somehow a virtuous act.
The concert is the product. A ticket is one approach for artists to control access to the limited experienc, typically while maintaining substantial equity and equality of access.
Of course profit maximization is not the only (or even primary) goal, that's what makes this such a hard problem. If it were, ticket sales would be trivially solved - just auction each seat to the highest bider, close biding near the concert date and prevent any transfers. Of course that's a terrible idea.
OK but the tickets are going to different people. In most cases (music, sports) you want your tickets going to your best fans because the energy of the crowd improves the performance. We’re not selling wheat futures here. If the tickets instead go to rich people who may or may not show up, it could harm the event.
You're right, the future looks grim. Who knows how many layers of the reseller parfait you have to go through just to get a ticket? At some point it becomes prohibitively expensive and there won't be enough people that can afford to attend events.
I wonder how much of this could be alleviated by selling a certain percentage of tickets at the box office only? I worked in operations for a pretty large concert venue several years ago, and the Jonas Brothers were going to play there (this was at their peak). I remember a good chunk of tickets were only sold at the box office and there was a limit per person (maybe 5 or 6)? I know it's annoying to drive somewhere and wait in line for hours, but I'm sure there are folks out there that would prefer to do that instead of paying a 500% markup on the original ticket price.
It’s the correct move economically, why the hell should scalpers earn that $800 for being parasites, but people are very economically-illiterate so they’ll always see that move as greed.
Very true, but very annoying for the person that wants to attend the concert. You can pretty much flush your chances of getting tickets directly from Ticketmaster right down the toilet.
