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

Price discovery make distribution efficient

[roman_mir]

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.

Re:Price discovery make distribution efficient

[Bacon Bits]

What you have here in your comment, is basic misunderstanding of economics and politics.

Welcome to Slashdot!

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I just "bought" a pair of 2TB drives for storing all my legally acquired media files.

Can you say gouge?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Price Spikes

[Xemu]

Classic PR tick to fake scarcity to make a bad deal appear better than it is. 99% of customers would only buy 1 anyway.
It means that they've changed from hi-tech marketing to commodity marketing like your grocery store always uses.

Finally

[woodhouse]

My scheme of buying computer parts to sell them on at a later date finally pays off.

Also, people are dying

[Baloroth]

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.

Re:Also, people are dying

[girlintraining]

The Occupy protests are centered around the fact that the wealth distribution in the United States is ranked about the same as Uguanda; Half the wealth in this country is controlled by approximately 1% of the population, which is the reason for the slogan "We are the 99%". Occupiers have been protesting financial institutions, especially banks.

Now if you hadn't had gone and shot your mouth off about something you clearly don't know anything about, I might have had a bit more sympathy for the rest of your argument. However, I'm going to have to mercilessly gut it now because I am the 99%, and I also have a healthy respect for capitalism -- within limits.

300 lives is nothing. About 120 die every day in auto accidents. Americans are more worried about gas prices there too. Is that because they're heartless? No, it's because those 300, or 120, or a hundred million lives are abstract people. I've never met them. You haven't met them. Nobody who reads this is very likely to have met them. They lived in total obscurity and then some natural disaster came along and went squish, and that was that. They have had little to no bearing on my life, or yours, or anyone's here. But the price of those goods -- that is something tangible, noticable, and therefore real.

You're bitching about human nature here, man. You're like Bono from U2. Nobody gives a damn about them and they shouldn't. They can't. We all got only a limited amount of time on this earth, and a limited amount of resources, emotional or otherwise. And the overwhelming majority of people are going to invest their emotions in things that are real, tangible, and close to them.

Now next time you feel like trying to go and take the moral high ground, don't piss on someone else's back and then say it's raining, mmkays?

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

And "I" just bought a pair of 2TB drives for storing all my legally acquired media files.

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I just bought a pair of "2TB drives" for storing all my "legally" acquired "media files".

~ Papa Lazarou.

Re:Price Spikes

[optimism]

...since they already bought the drives they are selling now, the price hikes are gouging...

No, they're simply anticipating and spreading out the damage. This is microeconomics 101, supply & demand.

Let's say you're a big retailer who sells 10,000 drives per month, buying them for $70 each and selling for $100 each. You make $300,000 a month selling those drives. That revenue pays the salary and benefits for a couple of dozen employees.

Then the manufacturer tells you that, due to factory damage, they can only supply you with 2000 drives per month for the next few months. If all prices remained the same (which they probably won't; the manufacturer will raise your wholesale price if they can), you would lose $240,000 of your monthly revenue.

Now, your market research tells you that there is sufficient demand to sell 2000 drives/month at $200 each. You will still lose $180,000 of your revenue every month, due to lower volume, but the volume is now constrained by your supplier, not the market. Bumping the price saves you $240,000.

So you mark up the price on all of your existing stock now. And you still lose heaps of revenue until the manufacturer gets back up to speed. Might even have to fire a few employees to cut costs.

Re:Price Spikes

[demonlapin]

If the industry is managed in such a way that they can't buffer a few weeks of supply lag

Pretty much the entire world works this way now. It's called just in time manufacturing, and it is one of the many efficiencies that enabled Toyota and Honda to ride roughshod over Detroit in the 70s and 80s. It's central to Wal-Mart's profitability. You save money by not having large stocks on hand - you don't have to pay to warehouse them, and you're not stuck with a large stock of unsellable items when you change the underlying product.

Re:Price Spikes

[Z34107]

Mirroring is the easiest form of backup.

*giggles*

Re:Price Spikes

[kylemonger]

Using disks for backups is fine, using RAID is not. It's not a very durable backup if an errant delete command / virus / lightning strike would wipe both copies your data at the same time.