5 ms·

I have an entire Costco package of toilet paper that will last me months while some poor bastard near me is probably wiping his ass with his hand (or worse, flu

by aianus 7y ago

I have an entire Costco package of toilet paper that will last me months while some poor bastard near me is probably wiping his ass with his hand (or worse, flushing paper towel and causing thousands of dollars of damage) because there is no effective way for me to resell my excess in a way that is legal and won’t result in crazy social media backlash against me. I similarly have months of supply of hand sanitizer (one big bottle, not hoarding). The drawbacks of these laws don’t feel hypothetical to me right now.

chipotle_coyote 7y ago
Wouldn't you be within the law if you simply sold the rolls at your own cost, or even your cost plus 10%, rather than trying to turn a large profit from them?
- aianus 7y ago
  I might be within the law (although in some places like BC all reselling is straight up illegal) but some busybody would still call the cops on me and online listings would be taken down by the likes of amazon or ebay.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  You could give them to your friend(s) if you have any. Or try freecycle. It's not difficult once you realize that if you actually care about waste, then you don't have to profit.
  - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
    This is absolutely true, of course. I should probably have added "or you can just, you know, give somebody a roll or two of toilet paper." :) I plan to risk technically violating the "shelter at home" guidelines to bring a 6-ounce bottle of hand sanitizer to a friend in a different city next weekend, assuming my order actually arrives. (It's a little crazy that the stuff is virtually currency at this point.)
Fnoord 7y ago
As long as you have soap, you can wash your hands afterwards. Not my preferred method, but there's quite some cultures where they do it this way.
perl4ever 7y ago
You don't seem to be responding to my comment. High prices cannot necessarily increase supply when the timeframe is strictly limited. This is a reality that a lot of people seem to not accept. So the effect of price is just to determine the distribution of a limited supply. That significantly reduces the utility of a market pricing system. Directing production is a fundamental reason why markets are useful in normal times, and in the very short term of a crisis, it's not applicable.
- aianus 7y ago
  High prices encourage people like me who have more than enough to get off their asses and share the excess. There is already plenty of TP in existence in the country for everyone, it’s just poorly distributed because the gov has removed the incentive for the TP-haves to distribute it better towards the TP-have-nots. Or, more to the point of the article, there is no incentive for someone with a useless side project to give up their Azure instance to someone delivering food or medicine.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    But it was the high price of the stuff that made the people who require "incentives" grab it. It's circular, like a stock market bubble. First people panic and buy, then other people buy because the price is going up, it's absurd to say that price represents some fundamental truth. When I went to the grocery store a week ago, there were a lot of things, just not toilet paper. If the laws against price gouging are causing a problem, why is it so selective? Microsoft seems to be doing the same, sensible, thing that grocery stores are doing in some cases - try to ration stuff per customer. People are talking about how this dynamic is playing out on a bigger scale, as states compete for resources in the absence of the federal government coordinating.
    - yspeak 7y ago
      It's the artificially low prices of the big stores that encourage hoarding and aldo middle men to get in the act and buy it up to profit. Raise the prices and people won't hoard and you eliminate the opportunity for price arbitrage when speculators take advantage of the artificially low prices in the store to sell on the open market to the highest bidder. If prices rise across the board the supply will meet demand and there will be no room for price arbitrage which only appears in dysfunctional markets where prices are artificially set and are not allowed to float.

by aianus 7y ago

chipotle_coyote 7y ago

Wouldn't you be within the law if you simply sold the rolls at your own cost, or even your cost plus 10%, rather than trying to turn a large profit from them?

aianus 7y ago
I might be within the law (although in some places like BC all reselling is straight up illegal) but some busybody would still call the cops on me and online listings would be taken down by the likes of amazon or ebay.
perl4ever 7y ago
You could give them to your friend(s) if you have any. Or try freecycle. It's not difficult once you realize that if you actually care about waste, then you don't have to profit.
- chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  This is absolutely true, of course. I should probably have added "or you can just, you know, give somebody a roll or two of toilet paper." :) I plan to risk technically violating the "shelter at home" guidelines to bring a 6-ounce bottle of hand sanitizer to a friend in a different city next weekend, assuming my order actually arrives. (It's a little crazy that the stuff is virtually currency at this point.)

Fnoord 7y ago

As long as you have soap, you can wash your hands afterwards. Not my preferred method, but there's quite some cultures where they do it this way.

perl4ever 7y ago

You don't seem to be responding to my comment. High prices cannot necessarily increase supply when the timeframe is strictly limited. This is a reality that a lot of people seem to not accept. So the effect of price is just to determine the distribution of a limited supply. That significantly reduces the utility of a market pricing system. Directing production is a fundamental reason why markets are useful in normal times, and in the very short term of a crisis, it's not applicable.

aianus 7y ago
High prices encourage people like me who have more than enough to get off their asses and share the excess. There is already plenty of TP in existence in the country for everyone, it’s just poorly distributed because the gov has removed the incentive for the TP-haves to distribute it better towards the TP-have-nots. Or, more to the point of the article, there is no incentive for someone with a useless side project to give up their Azure instance to someone delivering food or medicine.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  But it was the high price of the stuff that made the people who require "incentives" grab it. It's circular, like a stock market bubble. First people panic and buy, then other people buy because the price is going up, it's absurd to say that price represents some fundamental truth. When I went to the grocery store a week ago, there were a lot of things, just not toilet paper. If the laws against price gouging are causing a problem, why is it so selective? Microsoft seems to be doing the same, sensible, thing that grocery stores are doing in some cases - try to ration stuff per customer. People are talking about how this dynamic is playing out on a bigger scale, as states compete for resources in the absence of the federal government coordinating.
  - yspeak 7y ago
    It's the artificially low prices of the big stores that encourage hoarding and aldo middle men to get in the act and buy it up to profit. Raise the prices and people won't hoard and you eliminate the opportunity for price arbitrage when speculators take advantage of the artificially low prices in the store to sell on the open market to the highest bidder. If prices rise across the board the supply will meet demand and there will be no room for price arbitrage which only appears in dysfunctional markets where prices are artificially set and are not allowed to float.