Cheaper Than Dirt, Home of the $99 PMag, has jumped on the bandwagon of businesses that are refusing to deal with those who stomp on gun rights. This is akin to the guy who just let go with the ‘ol one-cheek-sneak looking around and innocently asking “Hey, who farted?”
I have some issues about prices. I don’t believe in ‘price gouging’..I believe in charging what the market will bear. The guy you bought his full-auto Uzi for $400 in 1985 decideds to sell it in 1987 for $4000. Is that price gouging? Well, the law changed and his Uzi bullethose is no longer available except only to LE/Mil/dealers….so I thin we’d argue that since the scarcity of his merchandise went up, so did the price. Heck, thats just good business.
So CTD buys a couple pallets of PMags back in October for about $7 a mag in bulk. Suddenly the market explodes with demand and theres a risk that all those PMags may be all that CTD will ever have. So…they raise prices. Fine.
Here’s where me and the laws od supply-n-demand part ways. There’s the old saying about how you can eat a sheep once but you can shear it a bunch of times. CTD pissed off scads of folks and many of those folks have long memories. I know people who still won’t touch a Ruger product even after Billy Ruger finally hit room temperature.
CTD, realizing that they may have accidentally screwed the pooch, in terms of public relations, is now saying “Hey, we’re just like you guys!” in an attempt to distract from what some might characterize as unreasonably high price increases.
Again, I’m not going to tell anyone what to charge for something. If I dont like a price, I dont buy it. That simple. I’m free to do that. I think price controls are absurd and do nothing beneficial. But…with great power comes great responsibility, as we were told by Stan Lee. You can charge $100 for a nice PMag that everyone knows you were selling for $19.95 two weeks ago, and that’s your decision….but you need to really think about the consequences of that sorta thing. One consequence is that guys like me are gonna make fun of you for quite a while.
On the bright side, as gun control gets pushed further and further down the news cycle it looks like prices (but not availability) are slowly sinking from the stratosphere. Saw a new RRA basic AR carbine for $1150 at the show this weekend, so thats an improvement. And mag prices has stabilized around $20-$30 for AR mags.
Regardless, this is just a good example of why you shoulda stocked up on this stuff years ago.
CTD has had this policy since well before 2009. There old arfcom and calgun threads on LEOs whining that CTD won’t sell them PMAGs in CA or NJ.
C. Zero
I agree 100%. They absolutely took adavantage of the panic buying situation and, as you noted correctly, gouged the living crap out of their customers. I no longer patronize CTD. They come off like they are our prepper/survivalist buddies. This is like saying Obama does not really want to regulate and control our guns, he just wants to make sure the kids are safe.
Sour grapes and splitting hairs, IMHO.
I wonder how many people slamming CTD would gladly charge someone else more than they paid. After all, isn’t that exactly what everyone who is buying silver and gold is doing? We’re buying it now and hoping that the price goes up. CTD did exactly the same thing, and I’m betting there are any number of people reading this who, if given the chance, would have gladly bought a pallet or two of P-Mags in October if they’d had the money or wherewithal to do so and would have gladly offered them for sale at 3x, 5x or more of their cost.
So really, in the end, since every one of us will sell something for more than they paid given the opportunity, the only gripe is how much more. Buy what you want and from whom, absolutely. Voting with your wallet is the strongest form of persuasion short of gunpoint. But dressing it up in “I will never buy from them again” outrage is a fairly tedious. IMHO, they did what any one of us would have done given the chance. I know I bought a whole lot of $0.99 PTR-91 mags and if they suddenly went to $50 each due to a ban or whatever I would not feel one bit of guilt selling them for that price.
Um, nooooo.
Gold or silver doesn’t increase in value, it IS value. Getting ever more worthless pieces of printed paper for it hasn’t increased our wealth, just the size of the wallet necessary to carry the fiat scrip.
We buy gold and silver to preserve the wealth we’ve accumulated, rather than watching it, if held solely in fiat notes, evaporate into fireplace kindling.
We buy guns, primarily, because we can’t shoot gold bars.
If you’re buying them solely as a commodity to speculate upon, it’s legal, but IMHO that would make you one of the dicks mucking it up for everyone. And BTW, they don’t increase in value, they increase in price – in the same constantly inflating fiat currency – and usually at, not wildly above, the value of inflation, over time.
This is Economics 101.
Your response may resonate with someone in a “business” for the moment out the back of his tailgate in an alley, just for a quick buck. But not with anyone who’s opened an actual shop and expects to have to deal with the same people he screwed over tomorrow.
The “everyone would do it” response may salve one’s conscience any number of ways, such as after acquiring a “free” big screen TV post-Katrina, but in the end, it says more about your moral compass than about CTD’s, or anything else.
If that hits closer to home than you’d like, I suggest you change your address.
Your personal attacks aside, you seem to have missed the point entirely. The point: things increase in value. Something that has value X today, say $10, may have X+N value later, say $15. I’m using “$” just out of convenience…it could be anything, even sacks of beans. Your position seems to be that at that later date, you’re willing to trade that thing you obtained for $10 for less than the $15 it is worth today. Are you? If not, then you are no better than CTD and claiming you are is just hubris.
I am not willing to trade something for less value than it is worth out of some misplaced nobility unless it is for charitable reasons. If something is worth $15 (or 15 sacks of beans) why would I voluntarily take $12 for it?
If you’re willing to give me something worth $15 in return for something I have that’s only worth $10, then I want to trade with you!
I don’t make personal attacks. If you don’t like the description of the attitude, you’re free to change the attitude. People with actual businesses either change such attitudes, or they go out of business. Both options happen on Main Street with predictable regularity.
And again, you’ve confused price with value.
One is a number on the sticker, the other is purely subjective to buyer and seller, unless they’re trading apples to apples, or ounces of gold to ounces of gold. You might note that historically, although the price of gold has risen, it’s never risen to where you can trade an ounce of gold and get two in return. It’s only when you start using paper currency that one can start working out how to fiddle the exchange rate, and penalize the people who slept in math class.
And neither is it always an upward trend. Check out the numbers for stocks in 1930 vs. 1929, or home prices in 2009 vs. 2007, let alone what your car is worth 5 minutes after you drive it off the lot, despite whatever you paid for it 2 miles earlier.
At any rate, a good deal is one where BOTH parties feel like they got what they wanted. So when people not only decline to buy but throw the “gouging” penalty flag, the seller has already failed that simple test.
(And yes, it works the other way too. Ask anyone who sells anything to Wal-Mart how they feel after the meeting to discuss the terms they’re offered for the “privelege” of selling 100K widgets to Wally. Various phrases synonymous with anal rape usually make an appearance.)
Nobody’s suggesting anyone set a price based on charitable urges. But a P-mag today doesn’t possess anything intrinsically better, stronger, faster, or anything-er than it did last Thanksgiving to justify an asking price now at 3x what it was at on Dec. 1, 2012. So setting a price that high, and calling it “the marketplace” is simply trying to camouflage the “everyone is doing it” excuse in economic mufti. It didn’t fly at Nuremberg, and it doesn’t work when the traffic cop pulls you over for speeding. Even if everyone is, in fact, doing it.
As I said, anyone who’d take advantage of panic after President @$$hat opened the ball on gun ban discussions is well within their legal right to be a greedy bastard. And the marketplace backlash will self-correct the douchebaggery in due time. Ask the new S&W execs now if they have any plans to jump on another gun owner sell-out bandwagon in return for getting a pass from the .gov like the old ones did. Or check and see how Jim Zumbo’s gun writing career is going these days.
I only object to anyone like CTD who’d pretend being a greedy bastard was anything else but.
If someone wants to be a douche, they should own up to it with pride. As in most cases, the attempted coverup is seen as more foul than the original crime.
But a P-mag today doesn’t possess anything intrinsically better, stronger, faster, or anything-er than it did last Thanksgiving to justify an asking price now at 3x what it was at on Dec. 1, 2012. So setting a price that high, and calling it “the marketplace” is simply trying to camouflage the “everyone is doing it” excuse in economic mufti.
You’re lecturing people on economic principles and utterly ignoring the concept of “supply and demand”? I’m not sure Econ 97 is remedial enough to correct that sort of deficit.
To reply to your statement, the “-er” which that P-mag is today that makes it more valuable than it was last Thanksgiving is “rarer”. Which, by the way, is why gold and silver are traditionally valued so high as well; They require lots and lots of effort to pull out of the ground, and compared to other things that are mined, they don’t show up as often either. If gold were as common as copper, it’s main “value” would be in the fact that it’s a better conductor and doesn’t oxidize as easily. And if it were twice as common as copper, even with those properties it would cost less than copper, much like aluminum does.
If someone wants to be a douche, they should own up to it with pride.
Well? Go ahead, we’re waiting…
…Just a quick sidebar: can you *eat* gold or silver? Is it any good for making a fire? Can you shoot it?
While gold (etc.) is a stable store of value, especially over the very long term, it presupposes a culture far enough ahead of mere survival to have the leisure to indulge in tokens rather than direct barter.
“Gold will not always get you good soldiers, but good soldiers can always get you gold.” I put precious metals at the bottom of my list of survival supplies. In pinch, a (full) Pmag and an AR-15 beats a big bag of gold.
Did CTD overchage? Depends. Did people buy those Pmags at a hunnert bucks a pop? Then the price must not have been too high.
Gold or silver doesn’t increase in value, it IS value.
Still more no.
From Economics 97 (the remedial course): Value only exists because of people. There has to be a valuer for something to have value. Yes, traditionally gold and silver have been much better stores of wealth than fiat currency, but given that they follow the laws of supply and demand just like everything else (as evidenced by the fact that if nothing else, the price of silver and gold–in silver and gold–change versus one another over time) it is demonstrated that silver and gold (and copper and platinum or any other commodity you wish to name) have no intrinsic value.
Likewise, you cannot say that “guns don’t increase in value, only price” when their price–again, as denominated in gold or silver–increases, while at the same time claiming that only gold and silver have value not price.
Price and value are inextricably linked because they are both purely artificial manifestations of something which is inherently immaterial: the state of individual human desires. I work, I get paid (for the sake of argument) $100 an hour in FiatBux. An ounce of gold costs $2000 FiatBux, but an AR-15 is $1500 FiatBux. Yet it may well be the case, due to whatever factor, that I personally value the AR higher than the ounce of gold, perhaps because I expect the AR to get outlawed. That makes the AR a much better deal, costing me only 15 hours of my life, rather than 20, for something I desire more highly. So I buy two of them. The Congress passes a law banning them and civil war erupts. My buddy down the street suddenly finds that he needs a rifle, and now. AR-15s can’t be found, anywhere, no one has them for sale. Does an increased price of $3000 not represent a shift in my friend’s valuation of a rifle? Of course it does.
Before being a snarky jerk, you might want to at least make sure you’re actually correct.
Wow, the amount of butt-hurt that spreads from one company taking the most blatant advantage of government threatening to violate supply and demand is mind-boggling. Do you work for CTD, or what?
Apparently you think McDonald’s should charge more for a Big Mac to somebody who’s really hungry than to someone who’s just killing time with a friend. And Exxon should charge double the price per gallon to a guy who’s trying to get home, work, or maybe take a sick family member to the hospital, than to somebody just tooling around on their day off. Fill me in, because I must have missed that lecture on How The Fortune 500 Are Screwing Up.
FYI, there are countries that work like that every day, and most of them look like Mexico and Somalia.
Or Bartertown, from Mad Max:Beyond Thunderdome, which pinnacle of capitalism seems to be what some people aspire to re-create. If youo haven’t got better legs than Tina Turner, you might want to re-think that business plan.
People who think they know economics backwards and forwards invariably forget that the key phrase that should govern people’s actions is “ENLIGHTENED self-interest”, instead mentally substituting it with raw selfish interest. This is usually the difference between someone who deals or has dealt with customers for their actual livelihood, and someone who just thinks they could. CTD’s actions were either therefore unenlightened, or they pondered the market backlash of ass-raping their customers beforehand, and judged the short term profit outweighed the potential of getting run out of business by the bad PR.
Either way, they deserve what they get.
But scratching the dirt and pissing and moaning that the inevitable customer backlash is anti-capitalistic when it IS how the market is supposed to work is the height of unintended irony.
And when you devolve to playground insults to people who disagree with you as if that accomplished your mission, you pretty much concede the other person’s points. But if that’s all you’ve got to work with, have at it.
I note that you don’t attempt to demonstrate where anything I said about economics, “price”, and “value” was actually incorrect.
And I’m pretty sure “snarky jerk” isn’t a playground insult, unless perhaps one is referring to the polo field at some Ivy League.
Then by all means allow me to remedy the oversight.
Contrary to what you stated, gold and silver have phenomenal intrinsic value. Apple is currently backordered on i-gadgets because of silver shortages, and one of the biggest uses of gold is for industrial purposes. So much for assertion #1.
Second, the prices of guns aren’t “denominated in gold” – unless you’re shopping at the Sultanate of Brunei’s custom gunmaker. So any price increase requires translation to fiat currency. You can’t sling “price” “value” and “wealth” around as though the words are precisely interchangeable unless you’re the Walrus in a Lewis Carroll poem.
Price and value are linked because prices *ought* to reflect value. When price goes up 300% and nothing has changed but the greed of the seller, the value hasn’t increased, but there is a demonstrable shortage of common sense.
And I’m pretty sure that both “douche” and “jerk” directed at another poster qualify as playground insults in all 57 states, despite the frivolous claim that adding the adverb “snarky” to one of them has somehow elevated your level of discourse, or strengthened your arguments.
But trying to defend the behavior goes a long way to explaining why you think so highly of CTD’s recent actions.
Your point that you can sheer a sheep many times but only eat it once is valid. In my AO most of the shops have played it pretty fair. Their costs have risen and if they can sell less of certain stuff they need to make a bit more to pay the bills and as you mentioned these opportunities are rare. However they have not lost their minds because as one shop owner said “These people were my customers before this mess and will be my customers after it. Not looking after them would be foolish and ruin my business.”
The $50 used USGI mags, ‘like new’ $1,800 M&P Sportsters and $700 Glocks were all on the private market.
Apparently, when they said, “Cheaper Than Dirt,” … we didn’t realize they were talking about the frou-frou “Dr. Earth” dirt they sell at the Yuppie garden stores for $20 a bag.
I sold A very used SKS for $500 dont feel the lease bit guilty.
CTD gouged egregiously. That was a business decision.
Now they are about to find out what happened to Smith & Wesson stock after they sold out gun owners for a quick buck. That’s the *result* of a business decision. Some mistakes, you don’t get to make twice in one lifetime.
Jackassical Leap Off The Cliff, meet Gravity.
Mind the pointy rocks at the bottom.
Mayhap those who have to sell to customers *after* tomorrow might consider the long-term effects of squirting your bowels all over those same custiomers’ heads toda, and avoid such short-sightedness.
I does feel good to be able to “sit this one out”. I got caught short handed before, not this time.
Kudos to my local Sportsman’s Warehouse, they still sell Pmags at $18, however you still need to be there right when the cart comes out on the floor. I will continue to be a loyal customer because of this.
I am also of that crowd that is reluctant to buy a Ruger.
I never thought of CTD as a gaurenteed lowest cost provider. So I ambivalent about the whole affair.
I fail to see how CTD raising prices into the stratosphere consititutes price gouging…if the market will sustain those prices then how is it gouging? If the market will not support those prices then it does not matter if you charge $1000 per magazine. That is the whole concept of supply and demand and free market economics. Obiously their demand increased by a factor of 10, so it would seem that a corresponding increase in price would be in order.
Please define how $99 a PMag is gouging? I just dont see it…(I aint buying any at that price either way as I have plenty from the days of $14.95)
I dont think its gouging either, but I do think that it’s going to come back to haunt them.
I think you guys are overlooking what really pissed off people about CTD.
The first thing they posted on their website was that “CTD no longer sells firearms”. That was their response to the school shooting.
After the gun world shitstorm hit them, they started backpedaling. I wasn’t really paying close attention to them, but it seems they kept changing their tune, from what I was hearing. Multiple different stories about what they were doing, and why, etc. Then they doubled down by jacking mag prices higher than anyone else. IIRC, p-mags instantly went to $60. It was sort of a perfect storm of business idiocy.
You would think people would remember Ruger, S&W, and Zumbo, and try real hard not to follow their attempts at gun culture hari-kari.
Their latest(?) first(?) attempt to fix their PR image was to donate $100,000 to the Second Amendment Foundation. This was a day or two ago.
“Price gouging: v.t. 1) the act of retailers raising prices when no alternative is available.” – Business Dictionary online ed.
Look, if CTD were the only one doing it, and peole could buy P-Mags for $30 elsewhere, it wouldn’t be gouging; it’d be idiotic.
If *their* price had gone up because they’d had to pay more in the first place, and they just passed it along, that’d be standard business practice of cost + standard profit margin markup = retail price.
But when you’re sitting on a pallet of X, and circumstances suddenly give you the opportunity to bend everyone over a barrel, and you do so – just because you can – you’re gouging. No one normally retails weapon mags on basis of cost x 300%.
And the only alternatives are to do without, fire a weapon as single shot, or use it as a club. Or learn how to bend sheet metal and roll your own.
I don’t care if someone is jacking the price of bottled water during a hurricane, or the price of semi-auto mags during a storm of controversy, doing it, while absolutely legal in this instance, still makes the person or entity doing it a dick of cosmic magnitude.
Doing it when the entire world can instantly see you doing it on the worldwide web just makes them STUPID dicks of cosmic magnitude.
I hope karma is a bitch for them. I’ve already run into people who’ve called CTD up and told them to stop sending their catalogs, because after this they’ll never spend another dime with them. It definitely doesn’t add any luster to the reputation of Texas manners, and they probably abuse housepets too.
Well…it looks like you can buy PMags for ~$30 on Gunbroker:
http://www.gunbroker.com/Auction/ViewItem.aspx?Item=330095143
Again…I am taken aback at the level of price-control-socialism attitude that people are displaying. Everywhere ANYBODY has tried to keep prices at near pre-panic level – they have the same label on thier page “Currently Out of Stock”. It is the dynamic pricing in ANY market that insures availability in any free market. There are other suppliers around (gunbroker) where people can find the true market value of a product – that is why I love the “bid” sites!
Another example I just had last night…I have been looking for 10 round mags for my Savage 93 17HMR and there seems to be none to be found. I found one (blue) on Gunbroker that I am going to pay almost $40 for delivered and then I got a wild hair to check the savage website and lo and behold there were SS 10 round mags for $30 each. I bought 2 and was tempted to by 10 so I could resell them for a 50% profit on Gunbroker, but I decided to let someone else get some…went to the website this morning: “SOLD OUT” The people who bought them are probably going to list them on Gunbroker for $40-50 and they will get it. That is how the free market works.
Geez! I just spent 10 minutes posting a rant about free market economics and hit the “post” button to have it disappear into the cyber-netherlands!
Gunbroker is a good place to get a sense of the market…you can get $30-35 Pmags there. If CTD wants to price them at $100, great…they will be available if someone wants one or ten bad enough. That is the dynamic of a free market system.
I just experienced this last night on the Savage website as I have been looking for 10 round mags for my model 93 17HMR – none to be found! I bought one (blue) on Gunbroker for $40 delivered and then I checked the Savage page and lo and behold I found SS 10 round mags for $30+$5 shipping. I bought 2 and was tempted to buy 10 for resell, but decided to let others have a shot…looked this morning: “SOLD OUT”
They will most likely be resold on Gunbroker for $40-50 and they will get it for SS mags. That is the free market.
I have to wonder how all the Imaginary Free Market Capitalists would view jacking the prices on insulin, bottled water, canned food, and gasoline 300% after a hurricane. What’s wrong with that kind of free-market capitalism on your street? Surely they can’t be criticized with raising prices like a rocket when scarcity totally beyond their control makes those items more valuable, can they?
Or how about if the local hospital put a meter and a credit card slot on your family member’s oxygen tube and IV pump…would that be cool too? And of course, in a drought, why not allow the .gov to raise water rates 300%?
Maybe have the fire department show up with ATM access on the side of the rig, and set rates for putting out your house fire based on how much you could pay?
Fair is fair, right?
As if.
Most people want to live in Bedford Falls, but there’s always a couple of clowns that do who’d be happy to bulldoze it and build Potterville.
“I have to wonder how all the Imaginary Free Market Capitalists would view jacking the prices on insulin, bottled water, canned food, and gasoline 300% after a hurricane. ”
Wonder no more: I’m perfectly happy with it. Jacking up the price keeps it available for the guy who really, really needs it, while his neighbor who’s got plenty on ice or in his gas tank and was just “topping up” will wait.
After a natural disaster, the supply chain is broken. There isn’t any more bottled water, gasoline, insulin or Hershey bars coming to replenish the stores just then and there won’t be for awhile. I guess you could be “fair” and dole out identical units to each person who can prove need — or in the case of necessary meds, fill ‘scripts until there isn’t any more…and Joe Neighbor, covered in mud, staggers in to get insulin for his grade-school daughter, a “brittle” diabetic, and you have to say NO. Or you could play God: old Granny Jones in her wheelchair, she’s just a burden, but her son Ted is a good, strong worker. He gets insulin; she doesn’t.
There ya go, Aesop. There’s your world. Enjoy! Me, I’m goin’ over the pharmacy in Pottersville with a big stack of hundred dollar bills to buy some insulin and canned bacon. I sure can’t eat those Franklins and thanks to Sears and the Farmer’s Almanac, I don’t need ‘em for bumwipe.
This is true. Price controls invariably lead to shortages. ‘Price gouging’ at least forces the consumer to buy only the minimum that they need, leaving more on the shelf for others.
Nobody’s arguing for mandatory price controls.
Just a little bit more character, and a little less avarice.
Failing that, if a business wants to act like a pig, seeing them slaughtered and rendered to hams and bacon has a salutary effect on the marketplace as well.
How does jacking the price up work to “keep it available for the person who really, really needs it” when that person doesn’t have the magical ability to pull 300% more money out of his wallet?
Oh, wait, it doesn’t work.
So to be fair, you could, for for a wild example, charge the same price as before, but limit hoarding by restricting quantities sold per customer.
Y’know, pretty much like everyone rational nationwide already does, whether we’re talking after a disaster, or at the ammo counter at the local China Mart when a case of .223 comes in.
And in a disaster, the bridge to Potterville will be out. Might want to reconsider that trip.
But thanks for a flawless textbook example of the Marie Antoinette Philosophy when told the French peasants were out of bread to eat:
“Let them eat cake!”
For some reason that seems to have upset the citizenry just a tad.
Fail to plan, plan to fail.
You need something to live, better lay in a supply for times when your supply is disrupted. Could be hurricanes, could be tornados, could be race riots.
You know who doesn’t get gouged on water and generators after a hurricane? The people who thought ahead and bought BEFORE the crisis hit.
So no sympathy to the grasshoppers.
There is a difference between what happens in a natural disaster and what is happening now…you cant eat a PMag and you dont need it to survive. What I have been getting at all along is that this is market conditions in the face of a non-emergency “anomaly”. Gouging only occurs for basic necessities during a state of emergeny where peoples well being is directly dependent on them. I rode out hurricane Katrina on the MS Gulf Coast and know what gouging is…$100 PMags is NOT gouging. You can buy them readily elsewhere or find a suitable substitute. It is purely a market driven decison by CTD to charge $99. They have not raised prices except on those items that have skyrocketed in demand.
Did you know that hospitals charge over 1000% markup on items that are readily available to the average Joe at Wallyworld and yet I dont hear anyone squealing about it like they are about CTD. We have become a nation of socialists without even realizing it happend. 17 Years ago I was self-employed and had to pay my own way when we had a child at the local private hospital. I asked for an itemized bill and was horrified to see charges of $75 for 2 tylenol pills! I could buy a 500 count bottle at the “warehouse” club for about $3. A pair of latex gloves was $50 and I got charged about 20 times for them. When I asked how they got that number they said it was an average they used! They did not know what the actual use was and I got charged $1000 for what a $5 package would cost. We are getting raped by the Insurance companies who pay this crap but spread the pain out on the bigger pool of people…that is the road to socialism. We shop around for home, car, life insurance yet we are not allowed to have a free market for health care…where is the outrage?
Unfortunately, your definition of gouging, while pretty self-serving for your position, doesn’t square with the editors of the Business Dictionary.
As for Katrina, when gangs are kicking in doors, what say we give one guy a loaf of bread and a salami, and the other a couple of P-mags, and see which commodity is more helpful, shall we?
Hospital prices are irrelevant for any number of reasons: >the items are available elsewhere, exactly as noted
>you (in 99.9993% of cases) aren’t the one paying for the items
>the government (who IS paying 60% of the time) reimburses 2% of billed cost. So your $75 Tylenol gets paid out at maybe $1.50, which is more than it costs at Wal-Mart, but less than at the QuickieMart & Gas. As neither of those places helpfully provides either a doctor or nurse, the hospital price becomes quite a bargain. So now you know why hospitals bill the way they do.
(BTW, I do this for a living.)
And the “temporary anomaly” is one specifically as a result of the 800 lb. gorilla of Big Government doing jumping jacks on the scale. That’s pretty much the textbook definition of Not A Free Market.
In a free market, when Some Bureaucratic Dick says “Let’s ban _______”, he wakes up swinging from a lamppost, and the crowd cheers the New Regime. That’s a reasonable response.
When the response to Bureaucratic Dick is instead “How can I make a buck off this Non-Free Market at everyone else’s expense?”, it identifies that entity as a Dick as well.
You can’t take brazen advantage of an Unfree Market, and then yap about the pushback being anti-capitalism. (Okay, you can, but either because your SAT scores were into single digits, or because we’re talking about someone who’d kill their parents, and then plead for mercy from the court because they were orphans.)
So let’s neither subsidize nor rush to defend the behavior of a couple of Dicks.
If they’re charging $99 for a PMag, it’s probably because they can get that price for it.
Which means that’s what its value is, at that point in time.
Raising the price high means that there will be more in stock, for the rest of us to buy, rather than having the first couple of buyers getting them all, in time of perceived crisis. This is actually, economically speaking, a form of rationing.
You’re disgusted with them for profit-taking.
But it’s free enterprise. You essentially want the owners to leave money on the table, and if they don’t do so, they’re baddies.
I disagree.
No, they’re leveraging the government’s threats of action in an Unfree Market to find a means to further pick their customers’ pockets.
Clearly, they were making a profit when P-Mags were 1/3 as high.
So if someone else bought all the P-Mags at the old price, that would be a form of rationing too, under your rather elastic theory of markets. And CTD would still have made a handsome profit without gouging.
Thus their recent actions are both completely legal, and absolutely reprehensible.
Doing what’s legally permitted to the maximum extremes is akin to driving your car scraping along the center guardrail, or with the tires hanging on the edge of the cliff. You can do it, it’s just that it’s hard on the paint, potentially ctastrophic, and rather stupid.
And I’m fairly certain a respectable number of their former customers are tired of getting taken for that particular ride, since it’s their customers’ goodwill that’s the vehicle CTD is currently abusing.
You, of course, are free to disagree, and I only hope your encouragement of such retail douchebaggery extends to continued patronage of CTD, so that you inevitably get treated in a manner befitting of someone who sits under the flocks of the pigeons they feed. It’s a free country.
But if you really believed that business should never “leave money on the table”, you’d be perfectly happy to have the store manager at every checkout register you visit jack you up for every last cent you’d put up with, never mind the stickers, because that’s how business ought to work, right?
At least in the bazaar, people who pull what CTD did face the option of being chased away with stones by the marketgoers, and it’s a sight to see, I’ll tell you.
Aesop – your statement about hospitals is INSANE!
Hospital prices are irrelevant for any number of reasons: >the items are available elsewhere, exactly as noted
>you (in 99.9993% of cases) aren’t the one paying for the items
>the government (who IS paying 60% of the time) reimburses 2% of billed cost. So your $75 Tylenol gets paid out at maybe $1.50, which is more than it costs at Wal-Mart, but less than at the QuickieMart & Gas. As neither of those places helpfully provides either a doctor or nurse, the hospital price becomes quite a bargain. So now you know why hospitals bill the way they do.
(BTW, I do this for a living.)
When my wife is lying there in pain and needs medication and I HAVE NO ALTERNATIVE CHOICE except what the hospital gives and they charge me 1000 times what I could pay on the outside and you say that is irrelevant!?! I’m already paying for the doctor and nurses with seperate charges. This was my real world experience of a 3 day stay to have a baby with no complications and paid $10,000 out of my own pocket…you call that a bargain and squeal at $99 PMags?
NOW I KNOW why the medical industry is sooooo screwed up!