Re:Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights can...
by nradov on Monday October 11, 2021 @10:35AM
(#28828780)
What an ignorant comment. Commercial suppliers are fully aware that there are no price gouging laws. They choose not to boost prices when stock runs low because they don't want to burn relationships with long standing customers.
Also as a practical matter the software they're running simply doesn't have the feature to dynamically change prices based on inventory and lead time. So someone would have to manually update all the parts prices, then lower them again later. Not worth the hassle.
Re:Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights can...
by mywittyname on Monday October 11, 2021 @11:08AM
(#28829183)
Any major business is going to have an army of lawyers to look into any potential business practice. It would be trivial for them to shoot off an email to legal asking, "can we jack up the prices of our parts based on inventory levels?"
The answer might be affirmative, but that doesn't mean that doing so is a good business move. If you were in charge of sourcing at a company, and a supplier pulled that shit on you, you'd be finding a replacement supplier rightquick. If a supply will gouge you for this reason, you can be sure they will be looking for other reasons in the future.
TL;DR: price gouging, even if legal, is bad optics.
Any goods wholesaler I know of goes straight from "in stock, the price is X" to "out of stock, even if you offer a million $ you can't have any". Nobody auto-increases prices as stock runs low.
Perhaps it isn't illegal to do so, but nobody does it, probably because businesses believe it's illegal to do so.