Price goug...
Posted on 09/06/2017 9:47:50 AM PDT by Responsibility2nd
On Monday evening, John Lyons, a 53-year-old father from West Hartford, Connecticut, purchased a one-way American Airlines ticket from Miami to Hartford for $159.20 for his daughter to get out of Hurricane Irma’s path as the storm churns through the Caribbean.
On Tuesday, he was shocked at the spike in airfare prices.
“I logged in and expected to see $160, and frankly if I had seen $260 I wouldn’t have reacted. And I logged in and saw, $1,020, and I about had a heart attack,” Lyons told Yahoo Finance in a phone interview on Tuesday afternoon.
Lyons, who describes himself as an “amateur meteorologist,” likes to post weather reports on West Hartford’s Facebook page. Although Hurricane Irma poses no direct threat to where he lives, he has been following the storm’s developments.
“I’m seeing the direct hit on Florida. My daughter is down at the University of Miami, so I called her and said, ‘I’m going to bring you home. If worst comes to worst, we waste money, and you don’t come home, and this thing misses you, and everything is fine.’ I logged in last night and saw $159.20 to be exact. I said you know what; this ticket is so cheap, I’m just going to buy it.”
The next day, he went back to look for a ticket for his daughter’s roommate, who is also a close family friend’s daughter. Shocked at the price increase, he said he even made sure that he didn’t click first class by accident and he also verified that the flight had pretty much the same number of seats available compared to when he checked last night.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
As the demand goes up so do prices.
You believe that businesses should price their goods and services at or below cost during an emergency?
Yep.
If they don’t like the prices they can drive. What are they doing flying out of Florida anyway? If it were me I would be driving my vehicles out of there so they don’t get flood damage. I would also leave today at latest. My daughter is driving out of Florida today. Traffic will be rough but such is life.
It’s not just the airlines whose CEOs and CFOs are having orgasms all over their bottom lines.
A store in Houston was caught charging $42 for a case of bottled water. They only came off of it after pictures went viral on social media. Just think about how many got away with it and are getting away with it.
So what where they supposed to do John? Reroute every single plane to Miami so that prices would stay low? Or hold a lottery for all the people who wanted to fly so that getting a flight wasn’t based on paying a higher ticket price? And then what if your daughter wasn’t one of the ones who won the lottery?
Airline prices are based on computer algorithms that have nothing to do with gouging and everything to do with demand. I bet airline employees have nothing to do with setting prices.
Careful. Some knuckledragger here of FR called me an outright communist last week when I suggest raising prices during a crisis made strong economic sense.
Yea, I didn’t really get it either how a free market solution could be construed with central planning, but whatever.
Maybe his daughter should get her self out of the way of the hurricane? What ever happened to critical thinking and self-reliance?
What does reality say?
You're in line waiting for bottled water expecting the store owner to sell it for $2.50/per case, well you're going to be waiting a long time because nobody is going to sell something at a loss.
I GUESS it is the ole Supply over Demand equals the price.
Jacking the price of water wayyyyyy up in a time of crisis is unethical. yes, the laws of supply and demand are in effect still, and your demand is about to way outstrip your supply, so why not raise prices, right? Not only do you make more of a profit off of your limited supply but you also help assure that people don’t buy too much and resell it on the street, or horde it away from others. However, water is essential to survival, so you really just need to enact a limit on the number sold to each customer. You can’t gouge.
However, airline flights are a luxury!
...and yes, demand is about to go way up.
But you can’t limit the number of flights to a customer. They can basically only get one per customer anyway, unless they fly right back in.
This is completely different. The airlines should be permitted to raise prices commensurate with demand.
Demand goes up, supply remains constant, the prices go up. Basic macroeconomics.
Price goug...
Government should be out of the “business” of regulating businesses and the more government interferes with the free market the worse things become for the consumer. Let competition determine best business practices. If Delta for example decides to price gouge and you are upset then the next time fly a different airline. Even write them a sternly worded letter if you want, but having the government interfere with free market principles only gives you Venezuela eventually.
I work in a hotel and had some Harvey evacuees with their pets and I guess the dogs peed and crapped in the room and they were charged the clean up fee and the guests blamed Harvey and that they shouldn’t have been charged.
My favorite though is the guest who put a plastic ice bag over the smoke detector and was mad that he was charged $250 for smoking in the room. He adamantly stressed that he did not smoke in the room, while there was a pile of butts in the trash can.
Not excusing it, but that store selling water for $42 wasn’t price gouging. They usually sell water for $1.75 a bottle in the store so an employee just did the math and put a sign up for the cost to purchase 24 bottles in a case.
I am not going to assume this is price gouging - at least not more than any other time of the year. I fly a fair amount and I always try to buy my tickets in advance, the few times I was force to either buy or change a ticket at the last minute the price had often gone up by 3-5X what it would have been had I bought earlier.
Of course lots of folks are going to think because its an ‘emergency’, they should be entitled to free stuff, i.e. someone else should pay for it.
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