(08-15-2024, 11:17 PM)mikesez Wrote:

(08-15-2024, 10:35 PM)Jaguarmeister Wrote: There's no such thing as price gouging.  There's market price and price fixing.  Keeping a hotel artificially low because of "fairness" would actually hurt supply.  Instead of a family of 4 making do with 1 room as they might do because of price, if they happen to be "first to the counter" to reserve rooms, they might instead reserve 3 rooms leaving fewer for other needy families.  1 for the husband and wife and 1 each for their adult son and daughter who prefer not to share a room together.  This example is hyperbolic, but it's one of many examples for why a family or other group traveling together might want multiple rooms when 1 would suffice.  Also, higher market prices motivate people from other areas to load up their trucks and bring needed supplies like generators to an affected area.  Without a profit motive, those people aren't bothering and people in affected areas who want generators and are willing to pay over MSRP won't even have the opportunity.

Your example is nonsense.
In an emergency no one's going to magically put more hotel rooms on the market.
They may load up their trucks with supplies and come in after the storm has passed but not during the evacuation. 
Yes generally suppliers should be able to react to scarcity by setting prices higher.  But not in some types of emergencies.

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You could just have said you don't understand the relationship between price and demand or that you weren't comprehending what you were reading.  Who said anything about putting more hotel rooms on the market? If my mom and my family were in dire need of a hotel room, at $70 per night I'm probably getting my mom her own room. At $370 per night, we're probably making do with 1 room for her, myself, my wife and our young kids. This isn't difficult.

However, I will restate my position on there being no such thing as price gouging.  When someone has the ability to manipulate a market to drive prices up artificially on a product they sell, that would be an example of price gouging and that should also result in lengthy prison sentences when proven in court.  Natural disasters driving prices up because of sudden scarcity isn't price gouging though.  It's a swift adjustment of the local market price based on uncontrollable stimuli and, as I stated previously, the profit motive will help get more needed supplies to an area much quicker which is a good thing.  Hoarding is a thing as we saw regarding toilet paper during the pandemic.  I wonder how much TP people would have hoarded had the price gone up temporarily on it as it probably should have.

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