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."

Comments

Re:Price discovery make distribution efficient

[roman_mir]

This isn't efficient distribution, this is gouging. There are other factories in the world, the dealers are simply taking advantage of a natural disaster to arbitrarily hike prices.

- is that what they taught you in your classes?

In this story the stores also decided to try and limit purchases by creating artificial rationing (which never works, by the way, just walk out and walk in again, or ask somebody to get another portion for you). So the stores truly were trying to solve a problem (as any price hikes based on more scarcity of resources are) - how do you sell at the optimal price? And this is the only real way to find the best efficiency in the market. There is always a price at which somebody is still willing to buy and then there is a price at which most are not willing to buy, so you have to find the price, that is the most efficient, which means people are still paying for it, but only those who REALLY need it.

Otherwise, if you sell UNDER priced, all you do is create another MARKET, where somebody buys from you and then resells on the corner at a higher price.

Do you ever think beyond your brainwashed state of absurd economic ignorance? You are exactly the person who DOES NOT NEED the hard drives bad enough to pay a higher price, and this is GOOD, because SOMEBODY NEEDS THOSE DRIVES MORE THAN YOU DO.

Somebody truly needs the drives much more than you do, and the raising of the prices allowed to cut you off and make sure that somebody who really needs the drives to get them before you do, because clearly - YOU CAN WAIT.

Somebody can't wait, and they will pay the premium. But if the prices didn't go up, then you would have bought your drives and there wouldn't be enough drives for somebody who REALLY NEEDS THEM, because you'd get your drives for your little project, but there is real actual SCARCITY here, because the plants are not producing enough supply to satisfy the demand at the previous low prices.

So you are giving an example in your very comment why the market works and you are calling it 'gouging', while you are 'gouged' alright. You are blind to the fact that the market did its job and the efficiency was achieved.