Charge what the market will bear. Standard issue homo sap. I wonder why that is? Why can't people be happy with a reasonable profit margin? Why does it take more and more and more and more to sate them? Does being greedy feed on itself and that is why is escalates /accelerates?
Like pumpkins says stop testing and the virus will disappear. So if they stop being greedy will gouging disappear?
Well, scarcity pushes prices up but I'd have thought price-gouging would become self-defeating, when shops realise that if they charge just a bit less than their rivals-in-gouging they will sell more. Or people manage with buying less anyway.
But during panics when folks HOARD what's left is worth more and so prices go up because vendors always charge as much as they can get. They can't know that until they test it out. Small local example.
At one point the local WINCO grocery store sold brand name soups for $1.18/can. Then they changed it to $1.98 for a short while then they dropped it back down to about $1.68. NOW the soups are selling for $2.68/can. Clearly they are riding a wave of greed. Contrast that with our local Walmart. Same soups have been $1.68/can for as many months as I can remember and still are. Did not go up one cent! Of course there could well be other things in the store that did only I never buy them. I know food prices exceedingly well and I know when they are testing me and when they are jerking me around. Why WINCO plays games with soups at least I don't know but I can guess. It's because they can. Thank you for your reply Durdle. Has the pandemic affected food prices in your neck of the woods? I'm gonna ask! :)
I think it did happen here, too, though I didn't really notice much difference. That might because I tend to shop little and often and not in just one or two supermarkets. I don't really audit my shopping either so I suppose I should do.
In the first weeks of the pandemic then the lock-down there were shortages and shops restricted quantities you could buy, but in my area at least it's more or less back to normal. Whatever that was.
Shuhak 