Who goes to Best Buy to buy water? Anyone who can't get anywhere else that has water for sale.cyphertext wrote:I believe them when they say they just took the price of a bottle in the cooler at the front of the store and multiplied it by the number of bottles in the case... I don't see any "gouging" here... Besides, who goes to Best Buy to purchase water?
Shortages mean there will be rationing of resources. Left alone, that rationing will happen through prices. In this case, people would buy as much bottled water as they needed, but they would also have a natural disincentive to buy way more than they could possibly need due to high prices. I have close to 100 gallons of good, drinkable, tap water in a bathtub, but I also have as much bottled water as I could get my hands on because the bottled water was cheap and it tastes better. But if that bottled water had been extremely expensive, I would have just relied on the tap water (it is sitting in a water bob, FWIW).
But we limit the price that folks can charge by banning "price gouging", so the rationing occurs in other ways. Some stores like HEB limited purchases of water to 2 cases per customer on Friday (they have been out since then). Absent price or quantity controls, the rationed water will go to the first people in line.
The bottom line is that until we bring more drinking water into the affected areas, some will go without. Government and private actions only change who that "some" are. I applaud those who take the initiative to bring needed resources here with no profit motive. They are truly wonderful human beings. But the fact is that if we allowed a profit motive, then other, less wonderful, people would do the same, and the net result is that we would have more needed resources in the area sooner.