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Retailers Respond To HDD Squeeze By Limiting Purchases, Raising Prices
SKYMTL writes "With Thailand experiencing its worst flooding in generations, component manufacturers have been especially hard hit. The trickle down effect is having a huge impact upon hard drive manufacturers in particular. Retailers have responded by drastic price increases and even limiting hard drive purchases to 1-2 drives per person."
I'm going to pull a few out of some machines I don't need and throw them on E-bay at some inflated prices. Profit!
15%-30% price spikes? The 2TB drives I bought on Tuesday increased 46% in price (from $80 to $117) and not too long before them the had them on sale for $69.99.
For once in my life I bought before the prices went up. :) ;)
I just bought a pair of 2TB drives for storing all my "Legally acquired media files."
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Just picked up my latest hard drive a week ago. So I guess I should resell it now? How exactly is it that commodity speculators think again?
Went to buy a 2TB hard disk today. The price was 50% higher than yesterday. Got a 750GB 2.5" external hard disk instead, which cost the same as before the flood. Damn disaster profiteers.
I had a 2 gig that was on sale in my hand a couple weeks ago, and thought "nah, dont really need it now".
you know, it's not like it's a real shortage of hard drives or its end times for magnetic media. We're only talking about a period of a few months offline, surely theres enough stock to last.
This is opportunistic price gouging, and you should boycott everyone doing it, and identify the most eggregious offenders.
This is a good example of how raising prices works to distribute whatever resources in efficient manner, allowing those, who truly need whatever the resource (HDDs in this case) to come up with the largest bid on it, which means that the resource was most needed for that situation. It definitely beats artificial rationing.
You can't handle the truth.
Jesus titty fucking christ.
From 75 to 100 dollars in one day. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136697
Its like the industry is begging for SSDs to take their market. /begging/
This isn't supply shortage it's price gouging. The industry has consolidated to four players, and one of them only makes laptop drives. Expect more of this shit in the future. Expect an SEC probe too and finding of price fixing, followed by a slap on the wrist a decade later. Fire in a dram factory anyone? Fuck me.
My scheme of buying computer parts to sell them on at a later date finally pays off.
I bought 6 Seagate Savvio 300GB (2.5" SAS 10k spin) drives yesterday. They were $199 (relatively cheap) and now are $267 or higher at most eTailers.
I'm sure most of it's fear mongering but some "analysts" have suggested it may take "several quarters" for the drive mfg's to recover from this. So I figured why chance it and bought what I needed rather than deal with potential inflation for 2 years.
If you were a commodity speculator, you'd have placed an order for way more than one hard drive a month ago for later delivery, and you'd be selling the right to have the billing and shipping information changed. You would never, yourself, actually have the ability to pay for, accept delivery of, or use, those drives.
Geeks and download junkies will now have to pay more for their storage after Mother Nature ups the anti in her latest revenge flooding.
It's not a big step from the invisible hand (hard enough to conceptualize) to the invisible telepathic hand, where markets allocate goods to their highest utility without the price ever changing.
Interesting to watch loss aversion shuttle the pea under the conspiracy shell after a tourettic stir fry in the amygdala.
Over 300 people have died (not huge, I know, but still not small... and the fact that I can say with all honesty that 300 deaths seems small says volumes by itself), homes and lives are ruined, ancient temples are threatened... and what Americans are most worried about is the fact that they have to pay an extra 20-30% for hard drives. Just to put this in perspective. TFA does at least have the decency to issue a "our hearts go out blah blah" at the end.
Just watch, the next story will be something about Occupy Wall Street and people protesting those huge companies and all the cheap goods they make. Really, Americans (and most of the rest of the world) really need to look closely at the consumerism that has overcome our culture to the point people dying seems far less significant than money. I realize this is a tech/ nerd site (so it wouldn't focus on the deaths anyways), but still, this is the second story about this with no mention (as far as I remember) about all the other effects this flooding is having.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
They got sued for collusion and price fixing, and lost. Took a long time, of course, the law doesn't tend to move fast, but it happened. I received notice of the suit and eventually a tiny part of the settlement back in the day.
Don't go claiming "nothing happened" for an incident just because you didn't hear about it. Most things aren't front page news.
SSD's have been gaining on hard drives for some time for a number of reasons, but price has been the primary area where HDD's could compete. With this event causing HDD's to be more expensive, is it finally the tipping point to SSD for most consumer products?
And i needed a couple of new drives.. i guess i will just wait.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Unfortunate their manufacturing is in a place where stuff like that can happen. Oh well.
I just bought a 2 TB Hitachi at the local CompUSA outlet store for $69.99 earlier today. It wasn't listed on their web site at that price, but that's what the shelf tag said. Maybe they just hadn't gotten around to updating the shelf tag yet? It *did* in fact initially ring up for $10 more, but I got it for $69.99 after pointing out the discrepancy to the cashier...
... activate that old and faithful hard disk compressor. (Remember Stacker, SuperStor and DriveSpace?)
I thinking if it's not a good idea pushing on-the-fly data compression on the Linux EXT4 kernel drivers... (apologizes if it's already there, by AFAIK it's a ext2 extension).
I'm happy I already brought a pair of 2TB hard drives not so long ago. I would be really screwed up, as the old 1.5TB pair is not enough for all that PR0N I downloaded.
(Speaking seriously - is this really what we want? Focusing every bit of hardware on one single source? Shit happens everywhere, every time - are we going the right path on this extreme geographical source of goods dependency?)
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Moral of this story? Wait until the prices come down if you can.
Jack of all trades,master of none
You're asking for trouble when you've got factories in a region that is prone to flooding *and* civil conflicts.
Perhaps closing that First World factory wasn't wise after all.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I wouldn't really say the region is "prone" to flooding since there hasn't been flooding like this in over 50 years. Last time I checked, the US was frequently ravaged by hurricanes, earthquakes, tornados, and flooding.... and union strikes. Besides, Thailand's civil issues haven't effected their manufacturing at all. Those red vs yellow protests are only a few thousand people.
I dislike when people try and pretend that they feel the loss of every human life with the same tragedy. No, you don't. If you did you'd never accomplish anything because when you lose someone close to you it is amazingly tragic, and people die literally every second for all kinds of reasons. You just don't feel the same. The closer someone is to you, the more it matters.
The reason we feel for large tragedies is because of the scale. When hundreds of thousands die, we feel the scale of that, even if we knew none of them. It is that so many die.
As you said, 300 lives lost is nothing. That doesn't mean each individual life didn't have a great deal of value to their communities, it means that on a global scale it is trivial. WE lose more than that every day globally and you don't like about it. Heck we lose more than that to natural causes in short order and you don't think about it.
Don't pretend like the loss of 300 lives matters to you because it doesn't. It matters to the friends, families, neighbors, communities, etc of those people lost.
When an old man in a country I've never been to who I don't know dies, I am not even aware of it. Even if you told me my response would basically be "Oh." When an old actor dies that I know from the movies only I think "That's too bad," but not a whole lot more on it. When a friend's grandpa died that I had met, I was saddened. When my grandpa died, I was quite broken up.
It is all a matter of how close I was to the person, how deeply they touched my life. That is how everyone works, how we must work. As the parent said, we have a limited amount of emotional reserves. We cannot mourn every loss to the core of our being.
Jesus Tits, Jesus Tits, Jesus Tits
That's funny, you heard me say Jesus Tits, and now it's your favorite word.
Spread it bay-bee, Jesus Tits!
Jesus Tits, my 401 K went to a 201 K!
Fast and Furious tried to undermine the 2nd Amendment, Jesus Tits!
BOA is moving $65 Trillion in CDO trash to the American Taxpayer through FDIC, Jesus Tits!
Jesus Tit's what a devil Janet Napolitano.has inside her.
May 21st wasn't the rapture, Jesus Tits.
October 21st wasn't the rapture, Jesus Tits.
Fill in the blank,
AIPAC, PNAC, CFR, UN, and NATO sucks _____ ____!
Electronic Voting sucks _____ ____
Continuity of Government, and the DHS sucks _____ ____
My hard drives are costing 50% more, JESUS TITS.
If we didnt want the devices to be so low in price, they would not need to be manafactured in countries such as Thailand, as the companies would be able to pay for workers in other places, then again, to these companies money is money, so would paying that premium actually make a difference to where they manafactured.
The manufacturers who are not flooded will up production to take advantage of higher prices. Then the Thailand plants (western digital mostly) will come back on line and there will be a surplus of hard drives. Give it about a year, prices will be lower than ever.
Sure thing they are not a replacement for hard disks, but it's just worth mentioning that nowadays they can be mounted as a regular file system and hold up to 1.5TB (not considering hardware compression).
Samsung F4 2TB drives went from $80 to $110 overnight. I'm glad I bought two of them a couple of weeks ago to grow my array.
Let's hope they can get things back up and running soon.
I learned most of my business morals from my Uncle, who ran a very successful store until the day he died. He rightfully looked at JIT inventory practices and scoffed. His business model was to have it. Whatever it was someone wanted, he had it. If there was ever a time someone wanted something he didn't have, he bought 10 of them and put them away in case anyone else ever needed them.
He had one store, and then three or four warehouses in town, each of which dwarfed his store by an order of magnitude in size.
The end result? It got around that if you needed something, no matter how obscure or strange or rare, he had it. It didn't matter if it was a telephone pole, an oddball size nut and bolt, a Zinsko circuit breaker, 7400-series logic, a telescope, or a 2-meter HT, he had it so long as someone ever went to him looking for it before.
His store survives the local Walmart to this day, when every other store in town has closed. That Walmart doesn't even sell paint, tools, or anything he has in his store, because nobody in town goes anywhere else, and it is just wasted space for Walmart.
I run my computer store the same way. I have everything from 14-pin DIP DRAM to 30-pin SIMMs to MFM and RLL hard drives and controllers, to PII CPUs and AMD Thunderbirds and PC100, to at least five of every CPU and motherboard socket series introduced in the last 10 years. I have every connector conceivable, every cable, every nut, bolt, or screw that could be used in a PC, and just about every accessory known to man. Yes, I need and pay for lots of space, but nobody goes anywhere else for computer stuff in my town. They know I have it, and don't need to waste time driving to best buy or even looking online. Am I the cheapest? Probably not, but people know the value of their time, and are willing to pay to save it.
The moral of the story is that these sudden and unexpected supply crises are caused by JIT inventory practices, and wall street bankers who view inventory as a terrible thing to have. Screw them. I have TENS OF THOUSANDS of hard drives in every size from 20MB to 3TB in my warehouse, and will not have any trouble riding this out.
FYI.... At least someone is still running normal pricing. Looks like in-store only though.
Yep... exactly. Or at least spread out the production so you have plants all over the globe in strategic areas.
I was paying $21 per 1meg SIPP one day and three days later, I was buying up 1meg SIPPs at $95 and the following week selling them for $125. To do it, I asked my dad if I could use his credit card. He handed it to me and said "You better pay me back". Then he got a bill for $20,000 and I handed him the cash. I still had a nice chunk for myself.
That was a fire that caused that situation...
So I don't know about the quoted prices on that site...maybe they were the wholesale prices... but the retailers were certainly much higher than that.