“part of setting the price for something very high...”
What is “very high”? There’s the market price, which no one ever really knows. Then there’s above and below the market, which out themselves through surpluses and shortages (ceteris paribus). While a price might be “very high” relative to yesterday, if supply and demand changed since then it might be just right.
“...is pricing some people out of the market.”
Good. Some people should be priced out. Ideally the supply should go to those who value it most highly.
“When you have a captive audience you always get to artificially inflate prices”
There’s nothing “artificial” about it. Like I said, they didn’t kidnap the customers. The customers aren’t legally mandated to buy from them. This is a “natural disaster,” and therefore the prices are naturally inflated.
Why is it that people have terms like “captive audience” or “monopoly” do their thinking for them? As if once you’ve established normal market operations are out of whack, bam! No economic laws apply whatsoever, and we can tell sellers to do whatever we want them to do. But even if one man controls the world’s supply of oxygen, for whatever reason, rules would still apply. He’d still want to make the most of it.
“The problem with that in a disaster area is the audience is captive because of the disaster”
So? I’ve got news fir you, customers are never in a store solely because the seller is so damnable inarguably good that he attracted them with hus efforts alone. Nevertheless, just because extraordinary conditions gave a boon to the seller outside of anything he did to deserve it aside from being in the path if the storm does not mean profit should be redistributed from him to tgr customers. And it certainly doesn’t mean the laws of supply and demand aren’t in effect in his store.
“The shelves are going to be empty one way or another”
Yeah, no one ever heard of distributing goods more or less efficiently. Gone is gone. “Rationing”? What’s that?
“The question is did you inflate prices to take advantage of the people that are trying to survive the disaster or not”
If you did, good for you. You did the community a kindness.
By the way, I love the “take advantage” part. Would you say they took advantage however they set prices before? No, that was when economics applied. Now is a free-for-all.
What you’re actually advocating is some customers taking advantage of the seller, whether or not you realize it. That’s what anti-gouging amounts to, aside from causing shortages and depriving needy people of what they want.
As for the rest if your “punishing people” nonsense, it reminds me of how Marx used to refer to “wage slavery.” Which is simply condemning things as they aren’t by redefining words. Okay, they were paid beyond subsistence level and could quit if they felt line it, but they’re “slaves.” The idea was that competition for work and employers’ desire to buy laborious as cheaply as possible depressed wages sufficiently to make it little different than slavery. Also, enclosure laws and the crushing mass of the proletariat made it impossible to light out for the territories, so you were stuck begging for pay.
In that situation it wad not so much the employers that were enslaving you, or even the economic system as a whole. It was the population explosion of the 19th century, the demographic revolution, and the lag time in capital formation to provide a better living.
Same with disaster zones: it is not the greed of sellers or the free market to blame for high prices, it’s the disaster. Granted, the seller will benefit from it without any particular personal virtue. But that’s his the market works. It does not reward on any basis other than fulfilling market needs. You can dream up all sorts of more morally righteous systems of allocating scarce resources but not ones more efficient.
Just because the seller is rewarded a.orally does not mean he us immoral. Pretending he’s punishing customers because he happens to benefit from the storm’s punishment is as wrongheaded as Marx’s “wage slavery.” But of course to understand that you have to understand the economic system as a whole. And if you dud that you couldn’t pretend the rules don’t apply in an emergency.
Captive audience pricing IS artificial pricing. Normally pricing has to deal with competition, part of having a captive audience is a lack of competition, thus an artificial situation, and artificial pricing. When you run a theme park (the usual model for a captive audience) you can charge prices for drinks that in a normal market would result in 0 sales, but because you’re in an artificial market you can make tons of sales. Disasters are theme parks without the voluntary attendance and fun. The people might not be legally required to buy from them, but they do tend to be PHYSICALLY required to. A lot of people can’t leave a disaster area, a good chunk of the people that can’t leave have first responder jobs, should we really be charging these people more because they’re here to save lives? Really?
The big thing you’re deliberately missing is that disasters are a time to pull together. You want them to be a profit opportunity, business as almost usual. But it’s not business as almost usual. It’s a disaster, people are dieing out there, people are trapped in the area, the food in your store might be the only food in the area for days or weeks. This is why you have a captive audience, but treating that way, deciding now you can do Disney Land pricing, is just plain wrong.
I love profit when it’s business as usual. Under business as usual everybody should charge every penny they can get away with. But this ain’t business as usual, and anybody thinks this is a time to price like a theme park is just plain a scumbag.