World's smallest violin to be played for opportunistic sellers banned from eBay and Amazon for price gouging

Meanwhile other auctions on Ebay are not getting bids. I've won such a beautiful guitar for about half its value. I'm feeling so guily that I've sent the guy an offer of a fairer price way highter than the winning bid.

Don't be selling anything right now.

These goods are not essentials.

Leave the idiots alone.

Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) dispensing a stern warning

did they write a threatening letter? Check. And check again, for themselves, for having taken their ruthless action. Ah, somebody will point out they have no powers, other than drawing large checks. So, what do they actually DO that makes any difference?

A better response ...

Would be to leave the page open block all offers on it and add on every offer by that user the following message: I'm a price gouging asshole who thinks making an excessive profit is much more important than your health'

there is a special place in hell reserved for the individual

wait for the bombs starting to fall. Or look up history books, what individuals of a homo sapiens are capable of, and I'm not talking about extreme examples...

£10 price + £150 postage and packaging

How about supermarkets...

...two moderate chicken breasts - £8

Obvious gouging is obvious

As in any global, or even national, scare, gouging was inevitable and obvious. What else are all the twats with garages full of bog roll going to do with it?

Prices on everything should have been frozen as soon as global spread was noticed, was harsh penalties for anyone profiteering. But no, that's not democratic.

Supermarkets should have imposed strict item limits (say 2 of anything max) as soon as it was clear people were emptying the shelves. But no, that would get in the way of their profits.

Expecting people to behave in troubled times is never going to work. Always profits to be made, and arseholes to make them off the desperation of others.

"filters were in place"

Well, they're working very well, are they ?

At the same time, this is Ebay we're talking about. I think it's a bit unfair to single out the guy who posted an offer at 0.01 and the offer reached 210. It's not the sellers' fault if people are nuts, even if it is rather obvious that he fully intended to take advantage of the nuts.

Shirley

This is the epitome of democratic, free market capitalism?

The moron who bid £210 is also responsible for the absurdity of the situation.

If the past is anything to go by, at various times when there have bee shortages, for every gouger there is a least one twat with more money than sense who will pay an outrageously inflated price because they can and others can't.

I think both parties of such a deal deserve a place in hell because they just make life difficult for everyone else.

Unbridled socialism doesn't work but neither does unbridled capitalism, we need some balance between the extremes.

Hmmm

It's very shitty but the problem is, its capitalism. I don't hear the same bodies shouting at the insurance companies in America that won't give out treatment for Covid for free. When Trump, the idiot, said testing would be free and all treatment, they all rushed to the phones and papers to say "TREATMENT ISN'T FREE".

I don't hear the same bodies berating the likes of Apple for selling their devices at a massive market up. And the American pharma companies putting massive markeups on drugs way before all this kicked off.

Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth said the prime minister “wants to sign up to a US trade deal with Trump which would force the NHS to buy pricier drugs from US pharmaceutical companies putting NHS finances at risk”

Price Gouging: the free market libertarian perspective

I saw an interesting argument to allow price gouging. To me, this argument sounds like a good way to encourage robbery and shopflight, but I'd love to hear more nuanced takes on this theory:

"Anytime you have a sudden huge increase in demand, like for toilet paper or hand sanitizer recently, the price must rise to reflect that. If it doesn’t, there will be shortages and empty shelves. We can whine on social media all we want, but this will ALWAYS happen if prices aren’t allowed to rise. Which they aren’t allowed to, because we have “price gouging” laws and social media scolds which will severely punish retailers who raise prices above some arbitrary metric.

"The reason for the inevitability of hoarding and empty shelves is because the market value of the toilet paper or hand gel is suddenly far higher than what it’s being sold for. Thus, there’s no penalty for hoarding and over supplying, because even if the hoarding isn’t ultimately needed, no one has overpaid for the product, and can just use the toilet paper in the future. So you have a prisoner’s dilemma-type situation. Everyone can scoff at each other for hoarding and say it’s unethical, but the first person who hoards benefits tremendously by buying goods at way under market value. ...

"What “price gouging” does is to raise the cost of the good to the market clearing price, which is critical because it lets everyone know what the actual value of the good is, and sends the proper price signal to consumers and producers. With higher prices, if you hoard you are paying a huge penalty for doing so and taking a huge risk, because if prices drop in the future you’ll be a giant loser. Few will stock up on gallons of hand sanitizer or pallets of TP if it costs them a fortune. Additionally, it sends a signal to conserve those valuable resources and shift behavior if possible.

"The other benefit to price gouging is to give producers a huge incentive to produce more. Ramping up hand sanitizer gel production is now much more lucrative than producing hair gel, for instance. Allowing prices to function allows the market to allocate resources to their most productive use, which is what we want, particularly in dire situations. We want producers to up the supply and drive the price back down. If no price signal is given, there’s little incentive to do so.

"Whining about and prohibiting price gouging does two things; it guarantees shortages and hoarding, and lessens the incentive for producers and retailers to bring more product to the market."

Logitech C920 webcams (normally 80 quid from Amazon) are being soled on Ebay at 20 quid a time at the moment...

Anti Bacterial agents

don't kill viruses. They aren't even as effective as plain old soap.

I wonder if I can sell DEET since it repels mosquitoes, which cause malaria, and we know that not having malaria makes you not have COVID-19.

At least they aren't stockpiling weapons.

Meh.

What ever the market will bear. If the asking price is too high, don't buy it.

Crowd source

Lets play a game (no, not Fatties game)

Spend the hours "working from home" browsing the online retailers looking for these pricing gobsmackers and then grass them up to someone.

I suspect for 90% of the working from home workforce its only the grassing up bit which would make a change from their normal working from home regime.

You have to laugh

at the idiots buying antibacterial stuff. DUH, it's a virus.

And as for the bogroll buyers why did they not buy one of these…

https://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2020/03/panasonic-has-a-portable-arse-cleaner/

Snowflakes who are stupid enough to panic buy and pay stupid prices let them be. They will think different when their credit card statement arrives.

In the meantime it seems that the FRENCH of all people have got this panic buying thing right. They are stripping shelves bare of wine and condoms.

Cheers… Ishy

Costco's doing it right

Initially people swarmed and some bought way more than they needed of TP, cleaners, rice, formula, etc.

Wiped out all the shelves so people wanting to make normal purchases couldn't.

Later as stocks started coming in, many of the stores restricted people to 1 per.

Now that shelves are filling up, some people want to return what they hoarded.

Costco and other stores are saying, "Nope, don't want it back." And good for them.

I don't care if you were buying for a school, church, your friends and family, or because you thought you could make a buck while people were in need.

If you bought too much either because you panicked or because you're greedy, no one wants you returning your potentially virus infected stuff.

You bought it, it's your problem now.

Not the right people getting the grief

My wife is a community Pharamacist running a small shop serving the local rural communities. She is always very fair in her pricing for the people who have little opportunity to go elsewhere for their over the counter supplies, surgical fittings, smoking cessation, prescriptions and all the 101 other services that Pharmacists are expected to do these days. (For the past 2.5 years her average is over 1 person a month having a heart-attack in her store, as access to 'normal' NHS services are so restricted.)

However, she has received a lot of abuse from people who want to buy Paracetamol, or Calpol, because she cannot buy it - not even for those who have large doses under prescription. Or because the stock of other items that she has on the shelves has doubled in price, to reflect the huge increases in prices charged by the wholesalers (she is still taking the same monetary sliver off the top to cover costs, not a percentage!)

And then you have all the ill people coming in who cannot get an appointment to see a doctor. This is always around 30% of people coming in just asking for advice from anyone, even after my wife reminds them that she is not medically trained - see note above about heart-attacks! But now it is running at over 60% as almost everyone wants to talk about some illness, even if they are actually buying something (40%). Quite a lot of these people have believed the government bluster about Covid-19 tests and are expecting the Pharmacy to stock it - NHS staff are not even getting protective equipment, let alone the test themselves!

As she works largely on her own (except for the independent prescription checking) she now has to lock the door and only let one person into the shop at a time.

She shouldn't have to spend at least an hour a day (nominally her lunch break) chasing non-existent supplies. She shouldn't have to receive so much abuse, being the only face of the NHS the great unwashed public can meet. She shouldn't have to perform time consuming crowd control to enforce social-isolating and stop the thieving of the shelves. She shouldn't have to do most of the prescription tasks after the shop closes, including the supplies for a number of nursing homes and 2 retirement villages.

70+ hour weeks, abuse from customers, lack of stock and price gouging by the wholesalers, lack of any protection from the great unwashed, the only face of the NHS that people can see. All this will weaken her for when someone in the shop does give her Covid-19, and given her mechanical heart valve, my daughters and I will have to bury her.

I've had the covid symptoms for over a week now, online shopping sites, when not crashing, failed to deliver some essential items to me, so a 10 or 12 days to wait with expected and planned for supplies NOT arriving, so i asked on a community site if anyone could help, two local entities previously posting pics of 'pack of supplies for a tenner' and happily posting links to stuff like dog beds, sale never replied fter a full day of dog bed ads.

So think about this you smug, selfish hoarders, two ladies did offer, and one whose offer i took up, turned out to be an off duty Nurse.

Let that sink in, hoarders. I hope You don't get sick whilst these kind angels are making right another of your wrongs. Bless the NHS.

Hacking

This is where the nice maker folks can help out.

Its not hard to make an accurate non contact thermometer and IR chips from old defunct security scanners can be used.

The method I found is to use a drone or phone vibrate motor, take off the weight by crushing and solder a pair of wires to the connector.

Simple beam interrupt is all you need here and a single high gain bipolar transistor such as 2SD965 as the preamplifier.

Connect output of the preamp to a very basic readout such as a battery meter, run motor at about 1V and there you have it!

Add lens to fit, using the good old fashioned cylindrical casing from dead till roll method.

Calibration isn't too hard if you happen to have a kettle (100C) and ice (0C) along with a piece of flat black plastic as the

reference or pyrolytic graphite if you wanted to go all high tech.

I have a modifed calibrated IRT here which now has a yellow LED backlight instead of the red dot as needed it for other projects.

Re. Gloves and masks

I did the right thing and donated my spare stock to nearby neighbours who can actually use them.

Irony: had a few boxes of latex unused due to allergies so bagging them up is feasible if the health authorities

really do start to run out having gone through the cafes, vets and dentists.

The bigger problem is lack of basic equipment that unfortunately didn't get ordered due to

entirely avoidable politics so they are having to go without in many cases.

Incidentally if you have a few pairs of nitrile its worth saving them and soaking them for 30 minutes in HOT water

in a dedicated container with a mechanical oscillation above the maximum temperature which is IIRC 62C then dry out and reuse.

Better than nothing IMHO and they can be checked and saved for tasks actually requiring a germproof barrier using light method

then disposed of safely.

https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/docserver/fulltext/jgv/56/2/JV0560020235.pdf?expires=1585321283&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=3F8A0B0237E0926896A3B4A8D0A36A1A