When there is huge demand for a product prices go up. Then the people who really need it will still be able to buy it. This is a good feature of markets.
I have been unable to purchase them from Home Depot or Lowes.
The most recent price I have seen is $5 per mask in a twenty pack.
The highest I have seen so far this year, was $18 per mask.
If after all these months you're still seeing a shortage in face masks then I regret to inform you that your market is not free, nor is your economy operating accordig to basic capitalism principles.
For N95 respirators you need meltblown, a material that most countries do not produce, and the equipment to make it has lead time of a year in mormal times.
Masks that are now filling shelves are, for the most park, just BS. They are not actual respirators.
IDK about the US, but in Europe the supply of masks and respirators is now sufficient (and has been for months). From what I've seen, the countries that did limit the prices ended up having worse shortages than the ones who didn't, big surprise... /s
If you suspect that a retailer is selling masks or respirators that aren't compliant with the relevant regulation, perhaps you should report that somewhere.
You misunderstand - the medical staff must be supplied with proper equipment. The general public just has to wear a mask, there is no requirements that it performs to any particular standard, and the retailers are not claiming they do. The masks worn by the the public contain no meltblown, they are just random cloth fabric and they perform nothing like the proper respirator does.
The point I was making is that you can't point at the random masks that appeared on the shelves as evidence that supply of respirators has been fixed - there are still not enough respirators to supply every Tom, Dick and Harry.
There are actual respirators available through retail and online channels and they do contain meltblown, e.g. 3M 6200 with 3M 2135 filters. Most people won't need single use PPE, and most people won't need respirators, which is why they are available.
Regular masks are not BS, they are source control. Considering that significant number of transmissions occurs before symptom onset, everyone should wear one when interacting with strangers. It's one of the cheapest pandemic control measures available.
So the hospital staff should just do without PPE for weeks until production catches up?
Ironically, this might make things less likely to get to the point where the market price was 5x normal.
[1] https://www.startribune.com/3m-s-complicated-road-to-enough-...
When an emergency is endless with all hope for resolution being a complete lie due to not having a plan, needing to placate the population longer and not having data to create a plan all while the scope of the emergency is expanding, a market has to continue functioning as normal with its primary feature being to signal to people - yes, even middlemen - that their ability to source and/or create supply is worth their time and energy as opposed to doing literally anything else
Thats what happened
Some jurisdictions created novel more holistic solutions by shielding the consumers from price shocks by the government absorbing/subsidizing the price over a floor. It was foolish of representatives to try to use their existing tools of short term price controls as if a storm just hit a small area of their state, as this just caused confusion and made the market more opaque.
I'm still unconvinced that price gouging during an emergency is beneficial overall.
Regardless, it was already illegal in California.
The legal reality was more nuanced than the governor, legislature and DA ever imagined because prior emergencies were never larger than an isolated area. This market distortion covered the entire state indefinitely and crossed state lines, their power was much more limited than they imagined.
They thought the federal government was going to solve this for the states and were wrong and this cost the states months, especially California due to its size and population, which is still realigning and adjusting to self-autonomy and procurement while being ahead of many other states.
This is what free markets enable, in times of pandemic this is unacceptable.
That is what the free markets enable, and that is why they are even more important during pandemics and other crises.
Sure, but that does take time, during which hospital stuff and immunocompromised people don't have masks.
People couldn't sit on stock for very long because other people were flooding the market as fast as they could.
There was simply scarcity and that's it. State's had their procurement and price enforcement procedures all wrong while they sat idly for the Federal Government to procure for them, it never happened and that is what cost the most time.
The better version of events was that states assumed this level of autonomy at the very beginning and ramped up their own domestic production back in January. They created credits for this kind of production in the private sector, while also subsidizing a retail cost above a certain price, creating a ceiling for consumers. None of this happened and this affected the medical workers and immunocompromised greater than any entrepreneur hoarder could.
The "hoarders" were taking just as big of a risk as the people that took the risk to create and sell.
You are missing the point that the necessary stock did not exist. Pointing the finger at people hoarding supplies merely deflects the incompetence to a phantom boogeyman.
High prices during the pandemic slows hoarding, and is a signal to producers that there is high demand. When production ramps up to meet demand, prices will lower. This is the situation now.
Price-gouging laws encourage hoarding: the first person in line gets to buy everything at artificially low prices. Now they have to make other laws to limit purchases. Now people who need to buy for a large family or community can't buy enough. Now the needs to be another law allowing exceptions....
Say by tying purchases to your ID, so each individual pays a fair price but only gets to purchase n items per t time.
If you aren't sufficiently incentivized to increase production by knowing you're now guaranteed that every piece you produce will sell at the everyday price, as quickly as you can ship it, then it doesn't seem like your everyday price was rational to begin with. In such circumstances, I don't think it's safe to assume that adding steep price gouging will produce any marginal increase in the likelihood of a producer increasing production, on top of whatever production increases are already going to happen just as a result of instantly selling out of all existing stock.
But all that is assuming the gouging happens at the production end of the supply chain. If the gouging is happening at the penultimate step of the supply chain and the profits mostly don't make it back to the manufacturer, then price gouging can't do much to incentivize higher production.
And that was, in fact, the problem with price gouging of PPEs in this pandemic. The manufacturers didn't raise prices, the stores didn't rise prices - it's the middle-men who swooped in, bought all the stock at retailers and wholesalers, and resold at inflated prices. None of the pricing signal made it back to manufacturers.
The price signal helps cover those costs and risks, not just telling you to make more, but by making it plainly economical to spend the money to do so. Otherwise, “screw it; I’ll keep making at the tuned level rather than doing all this extra effort to make less margin-% and maybe less free cash flow.”
That was very obviously not going to be a risk with this pandemic.
With prices going up, people are incentivized to buy diesel generators in Maine, load 'em up in their flat bed trucks, and just drive 'em down to texas to sell there. The extra price just needs to cover gas and some time.
In the case of PPE, the extra price might be enough to pay for totally disrupting base material pipelines away from other products and into the PPE pipeline.
There might be production limits that cannot respond quickly. But there are many limits that still can. Over-hours, material acquisition, moving stock around long distance. Normally, these things are un-economical and also bad ideas. In the case of an emergency, these things become good ideas. It makes sense to also make them economical then. Or at the very least, if people are willing to do these things, don't force them to make hugely un-economical decisions out of the goodness of their hearts.
This comparison is about as accurate.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
I do think that comparing emergency pandemic responce with Soviet Union as a whole is very poor taste and logically flawed.
I also wanted to point out that a lot of things happened in Soviet Union, including race mixing, so perhaps one should be careful when drawing conclusions.
* people who don't have ID?
* people who genuinely need more supplies?
* who decides "fair price"?
* who stops a producer from deciding the price isn't worth their time?
* prevent corruption, the ID administrator getting more for their friends & family for instance?
Otherwise they might have missed it, it's not like they have sales fogures and know about the gloval pandemic.
You do not even demonstrate that price gouging is superior to demand-limiting and price controls, which is the entire point of your last paragraph. On what basis or by what metric?
"You do not even demonstrate that price gouging is superior to demand-limiting and price controls"
I'm not even trying to demonstrate anything. I'm sharing information. If you have better information, make your case!