Thousands were fleeing Harvey. This Texas hotel started nearly tripling room prices
When they checked rates online as Hurricane Harvey was strengthening and about to make landfall in Texas, a room with two queen beds was between $120 and $149 a night.
But when a KXAN TV crew from Austin showed up on Saturday to get a room at that same hotel—a Robstown, Texas Best Western Plus, 20 miles from Corpus Christi—the clerk at the front desk quoted a price nearly triple what the crew had seen online: a staggering $321.89 a night, according to KXAN.
Hotels aren’t the only ones guilty of price gouging as Houston grapples with continued rainfall and flooding from Hurricane Harvey, the most powerful storm to hit Texas in more than 50 years. Over the weekend, more than 500 complaints of price gouging were lodged with the Texas attorney general’s office, according to CNBC—including $99 cases of bottled water, gas at $10 a gallon and hotels tripled or quadrupled in price.
Price gouging sucks, especially in an emergency but there's a reason people charge ridiculous prices and that's because someone is willing to pay that price.
I don't like it and people should be publicly complaining about businesses that price gouge but I don't think we need a law against it and here's some reasons why it's a bad idea to have price controls during these events.
First, it give people a false sense of security to not prepare for disasters. If gasoline cost 10 or 20 bucks a gallon during every hurricane or natural disaster people would want to stockpile a bit of gas to last them a week or two. It's not hard to buy a couple 5 gallon gas cans and keep them full in your garage and once a year put the old gas in your vehicle and fill up the cans with new gas. That way you don't have to worry about price gouging during an emergency.
The same logic can be applied to food and water. You can buy cheap plastic water container that sit in you bath tub full of water and you fill it up before the hurricane hits or you can buy all sorts of different hand held water filters that filter out the dirtiest flood water. Once you have a good water filter you can buy a couple weeks of storable food that has 20+ years of shelve life.
Also, higher prices mean people aren't going to buy more than they actually need. We saw this during the ammo shortage in 2012 & 2013. Walmart was selling ammo at regular prices when everyone else was a lot higher and look what happened there. They average Joe still couldn't buy ammo at Walmart because people were going in there at 7am lining up to buy what ever they had stocked over night and they were buying more than they needed and with some of those folks selling it online about double or triple what they bought it for.
Price gouging is part of the free market, I know it sucks when your caught of guard and you feel like you're getting ripped off when you have to pay higher the normal price but it's a good lesson to be prepared and not get caught off guard next time. If people prepared more there would be less price gouging to begin with.
Source: http://www.star-telegram.com/news/nation-world/national/article169921137.html
It seems unfair but you make some good points. I thought there was already a law against price-gouging.
There are laws against price gouging but people are still going to do it anyways because the government is to busy dealing with the crisis to go around investigating every price gouging claims.
People do need to speak out because we need to know who does and who doesn't take advantage of people in times of crisis.
Price gouging sucks. I think one of the more reassuring things about this disaster that I've seen are the amount of volunteer efforts to rescue and take care of people. Obviously, those kinds of things have existed before Harvey, but I think social media (and platforms like AirBnB) have made it much easier to coordinate those efforts so that people aren't at the complete mercy of businesses that do choose to price gouge.
Right, you can probably due more damage to these companies through social media than a government fine.
Reminds me of scalpers, yet people always buy them!
When a big snow storm or Hurricane Sandy are likely to hit the Jersey Shore, me and my wife make sure the gas tanks are full and the larder is stocked, well before the panic buying starts.
Most people don't even know that catastrophe is knocking at their door. At this point, I find it almost amusing. A few years ago, I mentioned to a neighbor how a coming snow storm would be crippling to the community and he said "I guess I better get to the store" had zero clue that three feet of snow was about to drop.
Let Darwin's logic shine thru.
This is the free market at work. No need for laws. Let the market fix the price.
This is best buy in texas by the way.
You're free to choose between buying or not buying.