He Has 17,700 Bottles of Hand Sanitizer and Nowhere to Sell Them | Hacker News Reader

He Has 17,700 Bottles of Hand Sanitizer and Nowhere to Sell Them

nytimes.com

76 pointsdanso117 comments

On the one hand, I'm a big believer in the market, and that rising costs in times of scarcity prevent individuals from buying more than they need. And if Uber charges 20x for a ride on New Year's Eve, fine -- that's just what happens with supply and demand.

BUT -- it feels like a big problem when a few profiteers are creating that very scarcity in the first place. I don't mind this guy buying a bunch of kits in bulk liquidation... but driving around to empty every store of its shelves? That really rubs me the wrong way. Same as when ticket resellers buy huge chunks of concert tickets to arbitrage, creating the sold-out situation.

But it still confuses me how there is zero hand sanitizer on Amazon right now. Why isn't this guy selling it at least for a non-gouging price? Purell will surely come back in stock in a couple of weeks, no? Now is literally the only time for him recoup his investment... while spending a couple weeks packing, labeling and shipping nonstop.

Why is he sitting still?

There is a much more effective way to prevent people from buying more than they need... limit sales to x items per buyer, or rationing. The only thing rising costs ensure is that people without money don't get anything.

It's not so simple. What do you say to the family with seven kids who also has grandma and grandpa living at home? Do they get only one bottle of sanitizer the same as the college student? For some people, time is more valuable than money; for others, the opposite is true; and in even other cases, other structural issues will make fairness very difficult to achieve. Someone will lose out in all of these scenarios, and therefore it's quite difficult to evaluate which regime is preferable to the others in all cases.

For a store it really is that simple, and they do it all the time with really good sales (esp. loss-leaders).

The "preferable" regime is whichever one is easy to implement, appears fair, and ensures primarily that the store has a reputation for things being in-stock even when on sale.

Which is usually max 1, 2 or 4 per customer. If you really want more, you can usually put them in your car, go back in, get in line again and pay again. If you do this more than two or three times, a manager will probably ask you to stop and prevent any further. But you can always come back tomorrow.

It works pretty well. People who really need double or triple can get it with just a little extra work, but it absolutely prevents people from clearing out the store's stock in a single, quick easy transaction.

This response did not answer the core question of my comment: any allocation scheme will choose winners and losers, so how do you pick which is worse? I see an assertion that rationing via quotas is "simple and fair," but it's not clear at all that it is more fair. What is "fair," and according to whom? Certainly the mother with seven kids and elderly parents in the home, she'd find the "go through the line, go to your car and go back in again" to be totally unacceptable, especially with the exceptionally long lines we've seen (it wouldn't be a "little extra work" but would involve doing nothing but waiting in line for hours).

And the whole point of this article is that it's not normal times where prices can fluctuate.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. In every game you have winners and losers, but you can try to make the game fairer for most people.

>> There is a much more effective way to prevent people from buying more than they need... limit sales to x items per buyer, or rationing. The only thing rising costs ensure is that people without money don't get anything.

> It's not so simple. What do you say to the family with seven kids who also has grandma and grandpa living at home? Do they get only one bottle of sanitizer the same as the college student?

It is that simple. People who legitimately need the item have the time to come back later for more, but price gougers don't have that time and need to clean the store's inventory efficiently in a short time.

If it is that simple, then someone should be able to simply answer the scenario I presented and why non-price rationing with fixed prices is preferable to variable price.

> If it is that simple, then someone should be able to simply answer the scenario I presented and why non-price rationing with fixed prices is preferable to variable price.

Because variable prices simply ration to the people with more money, which isn't always the best rationing scheme.

For instance, for hand sanitizer to do the most good, you want it widely distributed, even to people with little money. Non-price rationing does that decently well in a crisis. The fixed prices keeps the resource affordable, while the rationing discourages hoarding (either due to fear or profiteering schemes). Variable pricing encourages hoarding, as fearful but wealthy are allowed hoard they reasonable need and "entrepreneurs" hoard to flip the resource to the first group at surge prices.

This would have been a much more intelligent question for this NYT reporter to have asked, and it would be a much better indication of whether the guy is a scumbag or just naive.

Because Amazon banned all sellers from listing hand sanitizer, wipes, and masks, regardless of the price.

It's mentioned in the article.

Why would Uber be allowed to charge 20x when people really need rides, but individuals (NYC taxi drivers, savvy and/or forward-looking Amazon hand-sanitizer sellers, ...) can't? That way, you're just creating a binary economy of winners and losers. It's like tax avoidance - losers (people like me, the working population without millions in savings) have to pay taxes (and the most productive are taxed the most, way more than capital owners), whereas winners (politicians, Apple, ...) have tax-free accounts in the Caribbean...

The rules should be the same for everyone. Or else don't expect people to comply with being losers.

Those 17,700 bottles of hand sanitizer were better off staying in their respective stores and being sold off in their surrounding communities. Unless the gov steps in, I don't see needed supplies like this, masks, medicines, etc, being distributed fairly to everyone in the market. Rather profiteers will get their access and sell off to hoarders. The comfort of having access to some of these supplies, even if they are not effective, goes a long way.

> being distributed fairly to everyone in the market

Of course. Courts and parents are supposed to be fair, the market isn't. Market dynamics are useless in the face of a pandemic - the virus is not a market participant and has no conception of property rights.

On a sinking ship, bailing water out out of only your cabin is a pretty stupid plan.

“ Current price-gouging laws “are not built for today’s day and age,” Mr. Colvin said. “They’re built for Billy Bob’s gas station doubling the amount he charges for gas during a hurricane.””

That is exactly what he is doing.

Do you happen to know why these laws apply to a few named categories (not including what he wants to sell) rather than everything, and why they apply only when the relevant states declare an emergency?

I don't mean why you think they should do so, or might, but do you know the actual reasoning applied by the legislatures at the time of enactment?

FYI, the World Health Organization has published a guide to the local production of hand sanitizer. [0]. There also numerous other recipes available online. While there are retail shortages of hand sanitizer, bulk quantities of ethanol and isopropyl alcohol are readily available directly from manufacturers and third-party sites like ebay.

[0] https://www.who.int/gpsc/5may/Guide_to_Local_Production.pdf

Several thoughts:

1. The point about them not actually making that much buying for $2 and selling for $20 is 100% valid. Amazon fees are $3, plus another $10 or so for shipping, plus labor, box, label, gas, etc.

2. On top of that, the business is risky, as evidenced by the fact that he's stuck with the products now. If you have a 50% chance of getting stuck with inventory, you need to make double the mark-up (actually more to account for purchase price) to cover that risk.

3. Obviously he was somewhat naive about talking to the NYT. The reporter clearly has a lot more experience spinning and extracting unfavorable quotes than he has with resisting hostile questioning. Disclaimer - I talked to the same reporter (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22575940 I wrote about my own experience here), and I've also talked to and met both Matt and Chris at various conferences over the years.

4. If you look at the pricing charts, everything was basically normal until 1-2 weeks ago. There was a small increase which is reasonable with the increase in demand. At that point, there was nothing wrong with buying from stores or liquidators and reselling. The article says Matt bought this stuff up in February, which is before any states of emergency were announced, before demand blew up, etc. I think there's a distinction to be made between people going to stores and buying now, and people who did that a month ago.

Price gouging (The practice of raising prices on certain types of goods and services to an unfair level, especially during a state of emergency) can be crime during civil emergencies.

If you don't have laws and rules based society, you might be killed for doing that. 100 year ago this guy could easily get a beating or tarring and feathering type punishment.

It's amazing that some person can do that and don't think that they might be doing something really wrong, at least ethically. He want's publicity for his stunt.

In Lithuania, Gov allowed for some Alcoholic drink factories to make Sanitizer. One factory doing 30 tons a day of Sanitizer and starting shipping it asap. Others are smaller, but about 14 factories doing it full time. Within week, the market will be full.

A very interesting out of the box solution to the problem.

Isn't it just straightforward and sensible to use available production capacity?

Of course, but this kind of behavior in terms of utilizing private enterprises for public good like how you describe is pretty much anathema in US and hasn’t been done since WWII. It’s a fantastic idea, but not something the US public seems able to readily accept.

If you could sell it in a way that convinced the CEO’s of these companies that they would get even richer over it, however, it would happen tomorrow.

I saw one of these in the US - I believe they are allowed to produce it, as long as they are just giving it away.

It seems fairly trivial to make (Aloe Vera + alcohol).

In Poland Orlen, state petroleum company, started making it last week. Available at every gas station, $25 per 5 Liter container.

https://www.money.pl/gospodarka/plyn-do-dezynfekcji-rak-orle...

> Mr. Colvin is sitting on 17,700 bottles of the stuff

> Mr. Colvin does not believe he was price gouging. While he charged $20 on Amazon for two bottles of Purell that retail for $1 each

> “If I can make a slight profit, that’s fine,” he said. “But I’m not looking to be in a situation where I make the front page of the news for being that guy who hoarded 20,000 bottles of sanitizer that I’m selling for 20 times what they cost me.”

>> “If I can make a slight profit, that’s fine,” he said. “But I’m not looking to be in a situation where I make the front page of the news for being that guy who hoarded 20,000 bottles of sanitizer that I’m selling for 20 times what they cost me.”

That quote is out of context. He was hoping to make a large profit selling anonymously on Amazon. Now that he's been blocked from doing that, he has to try to break even selling locally (and surprise, surprise, he's much more concerned about his reputation when doing that).

I think this quote from him captures his situation much better:

> “It’s been a huge amount of whiplash,” he said. “From being in a situation where what I’ve got coming and going could potentially put my family in a really good place financially to ‘What the heck am I going to do with all of this?’”

He claims his actions would put him in a really good place financially, and later claims he isn't making much profit. That's some impressive cognitive dissonance.

And this gem at the end:

“But I’m not looking to be in a situation where I make the front page of the news for being that guy who hoarded 20,000 bottles of sanitizer that I’m selling for 20 times what they cost me.”

This kind of behavior was already quite aggravating before the pandemic. Whenever something new comes to the market in potentially limited quantities, "clever" people start buying up stock from the stores just to put it on ebay etc., causing the product to be unavailable for any reasonable customer.

This is annoying enough, when it concerns an item you just would like to be able to buy, but when it concerns items, that people depend on, and be it as simple as toilet paper, I think this should be prosecuted as criminal behavior.

This guy needs to do the following:

1. Sell the hand-sanitizers for a penny each to build goodwill.

2. Set up a Kickstarter to make back his losses.

Otherwise, he is going to get some serious grief from his community and end up like Martin Shkreli.

>end up like Martin Shkreli

fabulously wealthy and with a hot russian girlfriend?

> Shkreli was charged in federal court, then convicted on two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiring to commit securities fraud. In 2018, Shkreli was sentenced to seven years in federal prison and up to $7.4 million in fines.

I don’t mind people selling stuff at high prices if it is in demand. I do mind front-running the population by buying uhaul-sized piles of supplies. I blame the stores he bought from - they should have refused to sell obviously in-demand items to one person in that quantity.

Stores don't have any mechanism to stop people from buying things.

Not to mention, a buyer can just do something like claim to be getting these for the ER 30 miles down the road. So what's a good store to do then?

Many stores will put in place per customer limits for critical (or likely to sell out) items. It's not unreasonable to say 2 bottles of sanitizer max per customer...

Ok, I should have said they have only low-efficiency, purely reactive high-latency mechanisms to prevent people from buying things.

A store needs to experience a run on merchandise and also (through some other information channel) come to understand that this is actually a bad enough thing to override their normal business imperatives to sell the stuff they have.

Blaming stores for sales they make today makes some sense. Blaming stores for sales they made last week does not.

The stores should be allowed to raise prices in the face of increased demand, but the average voter thinks that is some form of theft. So stores can only implement quantity limits.

The videos I see on Reddit about stores allowing a maximum quantity of toilet paper show that it’s possible to stop customers of buying all the things.

And in case someone claims an emergency, it’s not hard to verify such a claim.

The public health authority should just requisition all of the masks and hand sanitizers this irresponsible guy has to make good use of it.

This guy did something that at a minimum will make him a pariah in his community and at worst could get him convicted of crimes in several states, yet he didn’t hesitate to have his name, picture, and complete confession plastered nationwide in one of the country’s premier and most widely read newspapers. Head-scratcher.

What laws does this violate? Illegal resale without a permit or something?

Some states have laws against price gouging.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_gouging

Potentially price gouging laws.

Even if he is not breaking laws, he is doing morally reprehensible thing.

What about the people hoarding hand sanitizer?

Also falls under morally reprehensible thing.

So he hasn't harmed net immorality.

I'd say the good version of this would be buying up hand sanitizer in January, selling it for markup yesterday.

And if somebody is mad that you're making money, tell people a certain percentage of the profits goes to charity.

Of course he has.

Vast majority of hoarders don't hoard nearly that much.

Vast majority of hoarders don't plan on exploiting people.

Well, if he hasn't sold them yet, he has. He needs to find a buyer ASAP. I suppose this article would help.

Still immoral...

Yes.

It's the difference between worry and irrationality and exploiting others in cold blood.

If he sells it to organizations that really need it, he’ll do a net good.

> If he sells it to organizations that really need it, he’ll do a net good.

Organizations that really need it probably aren't going to be buying from a sketchy Amazon marketplace seller.

does it have to be illegal to be bad?

Anti-gouging laws are seldom enforced and are of dubious constitutional basis. I'm entirely for them, but I doubt this guy is going to be convicted of anything.

We had a similar case in Canada where a Vancouver couple talked to a newspaper about their enterprise and it just left me pondering what they thought the outcome would be. People respecting their "hustle" and business savvy?

Wage theft is also seldom enforced. That doesn't make wage theft right. That is, I don't see what that has to do with anything.

Anti-gouging laws are applied (it seems) after every major hurricane. I hear the news talk about how to report gouging incidents, for example.

Prosecutions occur often enough that I'm surprised to hear you say they don't have a constitutional basis. Surely that would have been tested by now (and from what I can tell, it has, and not found to be unconstitutional).

Yes, there are limits on what the state can do with regards to interstate trade. But most anti-gouging laws are state laws, and not really subject to direct US Federal Constitution limits.

So, could you explain more about how they are dubious?

"Wage theft is also seldom enforced."

I responded to someone who claimed that what he is doing "could get him convicted of crimes in several states". While he could potentially face sanction, he isn't going to be convicted of anything.

"But most anti-gouging laws are state laws, and not really subject to direct US Federal Constitution limits."

Are you seriously arguing that state laws aren't subject to the constitution? What a wild discussion.

The number of actual convictions from these laws are absolutely minuscule, targeted only at major players, and a number of them fell on a constitutional challenge.

"Prosecutions occur often enough"

No, no they don't. You could count them on one hand. Don't confuse the big show about such laws with actual enforcement of them -- most such laws aren't even written to be enforceable (South Carolina, for instance, bans "unconscionable" pricing, which is legally meaningless). They are a showy discouragement and public placation.

Let me go back to your first paragraph-

"That doesn't make wage theft right." [arguing by association that I'm somehow saying that price gouging is right]

Apologies for the (necessary) wording, but fuck that disingenuous, obnoxious strawman. Nowhere did I say it was right. It is heinous. It is socially reprehensible. It is obnoxious behavior, and hopefully as supplies equalize this asshole and everyone like him are caught with a garage full of these things. But if people depend upon the law to discourage people this they're going to be disappointed.

I can't help but think you seriously misinterpreted what I wrote. At the very least, I am unable to interpret your response.

I will pick two specific things:

"Are you seriously arguing that state laws aren't subject to the constitution?"

My question, restated, is what part of the US constitution do you think prohibits anti-gouging laws?

Is it the commerce clause? Is it a civil rights violation?

As a concrete example, Maryland's price gouging law concerning generic drug pricing was found unconstitutional in 2018, because of its effect on interstate commerce - http://www.fdalawblog.net/2018/04/fourth-circuit-finds-maryl... .

However, the anti-gouging laws discussed here are not interstate commerce. So, what is non-constitutional argument you refer to?

"You could count [prosecutions] on one hand."

Really? What is the basis for your statement?

DDG quickly helped me find the following 6 links, including one mentioning 15 lawsuits in Florida and another how '78 gas stations and other businesses gouged customers' in Georgia and had to pay fines.

1. "John Shepperson was one of the "gougers" authorities arrested" - https://abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=1954352&page=1

2. "The Sonoma County District Attorney's Office has filed three misdemeanor price gouging complaints against six landlords who allegedly raised home rental prices more than 10 percent after a declaration of emergency during the North Bay wildfires in October." - https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/six-santa-rosa-landlor...

3. "One man was even arrested for charging an elderly woman $18,000 to remove two fallen trees — the equivalent of nearly $29,000 today — according to a 1996 News & Observer article." - https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/articl...

4. "So far, the Governor’s Office of Consumer Affairs has probed 197 of those complaints and determined that 78 gas stations and other businesses gouged customers. Those businesses agreed to pay Georgia tens of thousands of dollars in fines and offer refunds to victims for overcharges." - https://www.ajc.com/news/local/refunds-promised-for-gas-goug...

5. "NC attorney general files lawsuit against tree company over alleged price gouging in Wilmington" - https://www.wral.com/attorney-general-josh-stein-filed-a-law...

6. "Since Attorney General Charlie Crist took office in 2002, the state has launched 72 formal investigations of alleged gouging and filed 15 lawsuits. “In 2004 and 2005, with each successive storm we saw fewer and fewer complaints about price gouging,” said Crist spokeswoman JoAnn Carrin. The law, she said, is having a deterrent effect." - http://www.nbcnews.com/id/12498071/ns/politics-tom_curry/t/w...

"My question, restated, is what part of the US constitution do you think prohibits anti-gouging laws?"

You specifically claimed that these were state laws and thus were not subject to federal constitutional limits, which is absurdly wrong. Why you would even inject that, and then strangely start spinning in a different direction, is left for one to wonder.

Then again, you also grotesquely misrepresented my post, so I understand your comment has zero sincerity and instead you're just stomping your feet and saying "gouging bad!" despite agreement by all parties.

As to your "I did a Google search" --

Again, convictions. John Shepperson was not convicted. No one is EVER convicted. Anyone who contests the fines see them dissolved. It's a feel good for stupid people.

This appears to still be a disagreement on details where you are not reading what I wrote. All I want to know is why anti-gouging laws are "of dubious constitutional basis."

You write that I wrote "and thus were not subject to federal constitutional limits"

I was more nuanced. I said "not really subject to direct US Federal Constitution limits".

There is no direct Federal Constitution limit on anti-gouging laws. (By comparison, see the direct prohibition on slavery (except as punishment for a criminal conviction)).

Therefore, if something isn't constitutional it must derive from some other principle, like the commerce clause, or perhaps interpretation.

Which is it?

Now, I am a programmer, with no legal training or political science training past high school classes. It's entirely possible that I have the terminology wrong. But I don't see how it's so wrong as to rate your response.

You constructed a quote from me: "I did a Google search"

As I wrote, I used DuckDuckGo. I realize "Google search" has taken on the generic meaning of "web search", but point it out as part of what seems to be your pattern of re-interpreting what I wrote in a way which I thought I was clear to not say.

"Again, convictions"

I think you have misread the thread.

The OP wrote "This guy did something that at a minimum will make him a pariah in his community and at worst could get him convicted of crimes in several states"

You rejected "convicted".

Sure. I'm fine with that. Because that wasn't my point. I wrote "Prosecutions occur often enough that I'm surprised to hear you say they don't have a constitutional basis." I even showed how one anti-gouging law was found invalid because of its conflict with the commerce clause. But that finding was specific to the details of that law.

You then followed up with "No, no they don't. You could count them on one hand." The "they" in this case was "prosectutions", because your text directly quoted what I wrote on prosecutions. It was not about convictions.

So no, I did not bring up John Shepperson as an example of being jailed. I brought him up as an example of being prosecuted. Which was exactly the issue you said happened fewer than 6 times.

You write "Anyone who contests the fines see them dissolved".

I did point out that "78 gas stations and other businesses" in GA were fined. I suppose you'll say they weren't contested and dissolved because it was cheaper to pay the fine than to contest.

But honestly, I don't care. I want to know how anti-gouging laws are "of dubious constitutional basis", not how they are of dubious effectiveness.

You have yet to address that issue.

Compress your responses. A giant wall is not conducive of anything.

Unconstitutional because there is no such thing as a "fair" cost for things, and when the state intrudes on commerce in a capricious, arbitrary manner it is unconstitutional, as has been shown countless times in countless cases.

This isn't difficult. Though again you accuse me of misreading the thread. LOL.

"giant wall" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr...

What part of the constitution are you referencing? Which court cases? I've looked for a couple of hours, but failed to find anything.

Without something concrete, I will conclude your original statement about dubiousness is unsupported.

Why are all anti-gouging laws necessarily capricious and arbitrary? Certainly some may be, but some are no less capricious and arbitrary than saying that 21 is the legal drinking age or that the speed limit on a given highway is 65 mph.

Eg, "During a declared emergency, selling goods and services at a price that is at least 10% higher than it was immediately preceding the declaration." - https://consumer.findlaw.com/consumer-transactions/price-gou...

Anti-gouging laws are a subset of price controls. The US has had price controls before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_controls#United_States .

If what you say is true, then how are price controls constitutional but anti-gouging laws are not?

We (the guy in the article and myself) live in a nation where insurance companies would rather see you die than pay out, insulin is $350/bottle when it's $7 to produce, and politicians that we elect are entirely for it all. We have ourselves to blame for setting the moral standard.

"Yes Officer, we were breaking the speed limit because, let's not kid ourselves, everybody breaks the speed limit."

Other people are bad so it's OK for you to be bad?

The basic moral standard is don't be an asshole, especially not when people are desperate. You're failing that.

If it's $7 to produce why there are no new companies that sell it for $100? They'd make quite some profit.

Intense regulatory barriers.

For a longer comment from a healthcare worker of note, see section 2 here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/30/buspirone-shortage-in-...

What do we understand from this?

Probably that if someone wants to make cheap lifesaving medicine they should have an easy way to do that instead of a Kafkaesque hellscape to navigate, but I'm not sure that insight generalizes beyond "make good things easy".

We understand that currently it costs a lot more than $7 to produce insulin.

This is stupid on two levels. The first is that obviously this guy is a crook, profiteering from a crisis.

The second is that hand sanitizer isn't even necessary, soap and water is better, and people paying $7 for a bottle of hand sanitizer are ignorant when they could just buy a bar of soap.

Hand sanitizer is really useful in office's and when you're out and about at the moment though.

You basically can't get out of an office bathroom without realistically touching several surfaces of questionable cleanliness for a contagious pathogen, for example.

Takes 4 minutes of hand sanitizer to remove viruses.

"Takes 4 minutes of hand sanitizer to remove viruses."

No it doesn't. The study you refer to was one specific virus (influenza-A) that simulated essentially coughing directly onto your hands. Where the virus was encased in large volume of mucus.

That isn't how people use sanitizer. It's for dry contact displacement, and there it is incredibly effective. You should still wash your hands when you can, of course, but these misleading claims aren't helping anything.

Most sources [1] say that alcohol-based hand sanitizer can deactivate targetable viruses within 30s. The CDC recommendations for coronavirus are to apply a suitable amount and take at least 20s to spread it over your hands completely.

Coronavirus's are a class of viruses well known to be susceptible to deactivation by alcohol exposure [2].

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019567011...

2. https://www.livescience.com/how-long-coronavirus-last-surfac...

You take a new paper towel and use it to open the door.

soap and water is better

Sanitizer is useful in situations where you can't wash your hands. Like when you get out of the subway system.

The virus can not pass through skin. Wear a mask, even a cheap fabric one if nothing else is available, to prevent yourself touching your face. Then wash your hands when you get to a bathroom.

I've tested this on myself. I keep touching my face to adjust the mask, so that wouldn't work for me.

On the other hand, putting gloves helps me avoid touching my face, so I'd go for that.

For home sure, but when you’re out hand sanitizer is very convenient.

A fool and his money...

A true capitalist, banning him outright is detrimental, just limit his markup and get done with it.

> soap and water is better

How about when you get off the subway and need to grab a quick lunch at small establishment that doesn't have bathrooms?

In NYC, many lunch places have only maybe 4-10 seats at a window or something. The law says they don't need to provide a bathroom, and they usually don't (no space).

Or even if you go to McDonald's or something, there's often a line of like 5 people each taking 10 minutes inside the single bathroom. (Welcome to New York.)

Hand sanitizer is literally the only way many times not to get the virus from your hands into your mouth when eating.

I may be mistaken but I think the state of emergency declarations actually made price gouging universally illegal, which he probably should have expected even if eBay, Amazon and that AG hadn't acted on their own.

the sense of self entitled heroism near the end is truly amazing

These are clearly the good guys, and it's because you hate them.

Stores refuse to raise prices because customers will dislike them and it will harm them in the long run. People like this take the reputation hit (and are financially rewarded) for keeping the market liquid, which is a good thing!

Anti-gouging laws are the problem here, and there's no doubt about it. There's not a "real" shortage, non of the usual arguments even apply, it's mostly a short-term run which would be easily stopped if prices could just.

Wow that's a borderline religious faith in the market. People are humans and some are not able to drop $80 in a bottle of freaking Purrel, which they need to protect themselves as much as to prevent spreading their germs.

This is a public health issue, counting on market liquidity and total inflation to fix it probably isn't the right approach.

I guess the other scenario here is that manufacturers of soaps, sanatizers, and masks/gloves are drasticly ramping up production to meet this demand. In hopefully short time, the market will be flooded, guys like this are washed out, and if corona is the new normal for the next 6, 12, or 24 months, then the public will be in much better shape to combat the threat and return to semi normal.

Er, good? Will serve as a warning to the next one.

Ethical considerations aside, why not just set up a website and sell it himself? Have we become that dependent on the big platforms?

Almost no one would find his web site, and if they did, they probably would not give him their credit card details (probably a good idea, too).

People have loss all sense of hustle. As far as exposure, there are FaceBook and Google ads.

You can do credit cards through PayPal or even use the Web Payments API that let you do secure payments on the web via a company like Stripe and that will work with Apple and Google Pay.

It's not really about sense of hustle. The problem is on the demand side, not the supply side. The vast majority of people would not trust a fly-by-night website selling hand sanitisers at elevated price.

As opposed to trusting fly by night third party sellers on Amazon who have not been vetted.

It’s not like Amazon has a sterling reputation for selling legitimate goods.

Amazon has a bad reputation but in almost all cases issues are resolved quickly. Nobody is going to write about their good experience with Amazon.

Resolving an issue is only helpful if you know that you have a fake good. For instance it was widely reported that companies were selling defective helmets and that people didn’t know until after their loved ones were in a fatal accident.

If you do know the goods are fake and you pay with a credit card, you dispute it with your credit card company.

Okay, so how is this a problem that exists with Amazon and not the hypothetical website that this man should have set up? We're starting to go off on a bit of a tangent here.

The problem exists either way. Amazon vs third party website doesn’t give you any more or less assurances.

You think the lesson here is about hustle? Heh.

The lesson is that if your idea of a successful business plan is depending on competing on a commodity platform without any differentiator, it’s more than likely to fail.

That’s not only about Amazon and Ebay, but also depending on SEO on Google, the app stores, etc.

Are we supposed to have sympathy for a war profiteer

This guy should deploy a "Pay what you want when you want" model.

>> Society helped. >> Eventual HUGE profits.

Good people c.q people able and willing to pay outnumber "bad" people or people who can't afford it by a huge margin. Can't go wrong!

I guess he never thought of hiring a developer to put up a shopping site for his items? This could be done in a few days using something like Woocommerce or Magento. Can't say I feel sorry for the guy though.

har har serves them right

they didn't create anything (except shortages where these things are needed), they don't deserve anything (except profitering charges)

All I can say is, "OOOOOF!"

First, thks guy desperately needs PR - his hero self-image makes him look even worse than Shkreli. In this case, all they'd need to say is that Mr Corvin is interested in moving products in areas with low demand, such as rural Tennessee and Kentucky, to people in desperate need in areas with high demand like the big coastal cities or for example those with certain immune disorders. That's all they should say.

Second, let's try to separate feelings for the person (Corvin) from the activity (price gouging). When there's a shortage between quantity demanded and the quantity supplied, there has to be some form of quantity restriction, whether that involves price increases, queueing, quotas or even lotteries. The alternatives are not a person buying sanitizer for $10/bottle on Amazon versus $1/bottle at Safeway, but between $10/bottle on Amazon versus either not getting it, waiting in a long queue at a store (which is counterproductive to social distancing), having some sort of quantity restriction (which is really lousy for people buying for more than just themselves). It's not clear to me at first glance which is worse.

Ultimately, the shortage problem can only be mitigated by additional production or a return to pre-crisis demand. There are probably quite a few producers who could temporarily retool in order to produce sanitizer or other supplies that are in high demand, but this would be costly and risky and disrupt their supply chains and distribution. They could only justify the move with significantly higher prices than the pre-crisis market price. Any such firms would be crazy to do this, given the legal proscription and moral outrage incumbent with price increases during a crisis. There might be a few firms that try to enter as a PR move, and maybe in some places, the government will subsidize production of demanded goods at a low price, but these are not sustainable options. By having a very absolutist stance against price gouging, we are preventing the potentially ameliorating effects of additional production albeit at a higher price.

Third, I am a little disgusted with the NYT for publishing this story. While they can't be blamed for Corvin's diarrhea of the mouth, they did find the person to profile who is maximally unsympathetic person to the NYT's audience: ex-military, lives in the South (and judging by his yard, a hillbilly), not well-educated and has a job (Amazon reseller) that is low status. It may be newsworthy that someone in rural Tennessee has 17k bottles of sanitizer, but I can easily imagine the sort of entrapping questions that the reporter used with this guy, and it makes me, well, irritated. (Anyone who has had experience with a hostile reporter and went in unprepared knows what I'm talking about.) The NYT is taking advantage of this crisis to drive outrage clicks, just as much as this guy is taking advantage to profiteer. In the process, they're making this guy the public face of "price gouging" during COVID-19, despite him being very much a private person unprepared for the scorn about to be unleashed on him and his family.

I think the best way out of this is for someone with charitable intent and the monetary means to buy up his supply close to at-cost (I'd guess $40-50k), and then distribute them to particularly vulnerable people at low prices or even gratis. Corvin himself could maybe do that. If he did have a change of heart, I somehow doubt the NYT would cover it so prominently, if at all. For the sake of all parties, I hope I'm wrong.

I talked to this reporter, although my quote didn't make it into the article. About halfway through, he asked me my thoughts on the morality of selling face masks when the government was recommending against hoarding, and I realized it was a gotcha question, which I dodged.

Afterwards, I sent him this message:

>I thought a bit more about your morality question re governments asking people not to buy masks, and on second thought I'd answer as follows:

>The government's interests are not necessarily the same as individuals. Clearly the masks have some utility or the government wouldn't want them for their own healthcare workers. Is it moral for the government to ask me to go without a mask and expose myself to some additional risk to further the government's interests? Is it immoral for someone to refuse such a request? Clearly people are willing to pay for masks, and if they value the masks more than the government does (which they do if they're willing to pay more than the government is paying), then why is it more moral for those masks to go to the government?

>The government can easily corner the market on masks if they choose to do so. Declare publicly they'll pay $X/mask, buy up all masks, and give them out at their own convenience. If they choose not to do so, I don't think it's immoral for private businesses to help private individuals obtain the masks they want, even if the government would prefer to get their hands on more.

>I believe I saw a figure of 3.5 billion masks that the US is trying to acquire over the next year or so. Do the math. If they want to get 350 million in the next month, they can offer $5-10/mask and would easily corner the market.

>I do happen to think it's flagrantly immoral for the government to restrict testing capacity, as your paper recently documented

>In light of that and other incompetence from the US government, it's hardly unreasonable for people to be skeptical of guidance saying that people shouldn't wear masks.

>And even if it's true that wearing masks has little utility now, it can still be rational to buy masks now for use in the near future. If this spreads further and the shortage gets worse, which is possible, buying masks now will seem brilliant in retrospect.

Paywall.

NY Times is giving free access to articles re: Coronavirus. You just have to sign up -- even via Social sign-in, it's two clicks.

"free access" you just have to "sign up"

you pay with data, that is not free

They keep your private data, so that's only free if you think your data has no value.

Hah

"Even via Social sign-in" ...

Really?! How generous of them.

Not even worth a bugmenot attempt.

Firefox reader mode worked for me (in Norway).

Awww poor price gouging end stage capitalist. Not.

Social scourge. Capitalism at its highest.

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