The cost of inventory on the shelves basically doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is the market rate.

If those retailers didn’t increase their prices when the price hike was announced, anyone building servers would have instantly purchased all of the inventory anyway at the lower prices, so there wouldn’t actually have been weeks of low retail RAM prices for everyone.

Every once in a while you can catch a retailer whose pricing person missed the memo and forgot to update the retail price when the announcement came out. They go out of stock very rapidly.

> If those retailers didn’t increase their prices when the price hike was announced, anyone building servers would have instantly purchased all of the inventory anyway at the lower prices

But that retailer would have made a lot of money in a very short time.

In the scenario where they don't raise prices, they sell out immediately. In the scenario where they do raise prices, it's too expensive so you don't buy it. In the scenario where they keep prices low, and do a lottery to see who can buy them, you don't get picked.

No matter what, you are not getting those modules at the old price. There are few things that trip up people harder than this exact scenario, and it happens everywhere. Concert tickets, limited releases, water during crises, hot Christmas gift, pandemic GPUs, etc.

Once understood you can stop getting mad over it like it's some conspiracy. It's fundamental and natural market behavior.