Amazon sellers marking products as collectible to get around price gouging rules

Re:Amazon sellers marking products as collectible to get aro... by gowld on Friday May 29, 2020 @02:39PM (#23353856)

This is true in theory. In practice, as has been seen with Covid PPE, the price "gouging" threshold is sometimes set below the cost of production (due to fixed startup capital costs), preventing production. This paradox is severe for products with low marginal cost but high fixed cost, which is most things nowadays thanks to modern economy of scale.

Price laws are per unit, but peoduction costs are amortized across a whole production lifetime, and the difference between "X units per month for 10 years" is quite different from "10X units per month for 1 month" is substantial.

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Re:Amazon sellers marking products as collectible to get aro... by naravara on Friday May 29, 2020 @04:51PM (#23355378)

>n practice, as has been seen with Covid PPE, the price "gouging" threshold is sometimes set below the cost of production (due to fixed startup capital costs), preventing production.

If it was actually socially important you could just. . . pay for it out of the public funds as a form of emergency assistance or social insurance. Why enable retailers to gouge and exploit the most vulnerable people when you could just have everyone pitch in to fill the gap?

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Re:Amazon sellers marking products as collectible to get aro... by pgwhalen on Friday May 29, 2020 @04:51PM (#23355387)

Any source on that happening with Covid PPE? I’d love to read about it.

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