Yesterday some dude posted a video to shame apparently Indian gas station owners charging $10 a gallon around the Hurricane Helene disaster area. The lolberts answered with rebuttals that free market pricing is the best rationing mechanism in a time of scarcity.
People are saying that the gas station could ration gallons per customer and keep the same price, and the lolberts are saying this is communist price control.
I'm not really sure how much merit is held by either position since I've never really thought about this with respect to a disaster area. Clearly the 1973 price controls were a bad idea, but this is a debate over what a private business owner should do after a hurricane. My gut feeling is that gas should be rationed by customer, not by pricing. But maybe the gas station is passing along supply chain pricing to a certain extent?
edit: Texas punished gas price gouging in 2019 after Hurricane Harvey.
This is a discussion after every single literal hurricane that has ever happened of any major merit. Including all the Journohawks and Grifter youtubers hopping in to moralize and treat it like some horrific crime that they cannot believe. Literally, it happens every like 3 years in at least one of the States and has been for as long as I've been alive.
But the majority of people buying gas after a hurricane are trying to power a generator. Generators are not effecient devices, nor are they cheap. Anyone who wants to use one will need a shit ton of gas, meaning the demand has suddenly sky rocketed to levels that cannot be kept up with (and resupply is almost certainly a struggle given the flooding and other damages).
Price raising is in effect rationing it to the customer, because now people will only buy a smaller amount and leave some for the next guy. If kept at normal prices, the first 3 guys in line would just buy out the entire supply to keep their lights on while the entire town is in darkness.
Because the other event that always happens is that gas stations have mile long lines for the gas pumps, which means pre-emptive rationing likely failed for a lot of people who just couldn't afford the time to wait an entire day in line hoping it didn't run out.
And because the resupply trucks are slower, more in demand everywhere, and often cannot even access many gas stations, that means after Day 1 when he gets record profits, the gas station owner is now making 0$ for however many days it takes to get a new supply. Balancing out that dollar gain.
Basically, its a complex issue that has a lot of working factors of which greed is only a portion. And because of that people who don't live in the South should shut the fuck up and stay out of things they don't understand.
Instead the one guy who has money buys it all out instead and the everyday normal people get nothing. Wow, "rationing"!
Most gas stations, if topped off, are holding onto around 30k gallons of gas. Anyone who can buy and store (a very limiting factor as most people won't have a tanker truck to drive it home with) that much isn't living in the South or without a plan to have gas delivered to them directly.
So my numbers weren't smart. Its more like the first 400 guys might buy out the entire supply and leave the rest of the 600 waiting in line for nothing. Either way, its a side effect not a goal I think anyone is actually planning for (I doubt the gas man cares or is smart enough to think of that).
But I also can't feel much sympathy for post-hurricane panic buyers, because they do this with everything and then resell it themselves for 3x what his mega price already was, as you mentioned happening elsewhere in your other comment. And in the case of gas its 90% of the time for luxury use to "return to normalcy" a few days ahead of everyone else. Generators are not efficient devices and, since the roads are usually destroyed or closed and work/school is shutdown, that's almost the entire goal of people buying gas at those times.
Again though, I don't think its fully right for gas stations to do that nor will I actually go to bat for him if he gets angry customers over it. Only that its a much more complex issue than "gas business evil" and that people from outside hurricane country shouldn't try to moralize in their ignorance.
Preemptive rationing would be limiting the number of gallons per customer?
People were unable to ration ahead of time because of the biggest limited resource of all, time. This is especially a problem in areas that don't get hurricanes regularly, because they don't have full storages setup prior and by the time they know to need it, everyone else also does, and then need dozens of different things to survive (gas is the bottom of that list for anyone with a brain).
Every major hurricane has mile long lines at every single gas station for days. Which means you need someone with no job to sit in that line and hope that they get there before it runs out.
If you physically ration it, then you waste a large amount of time arguing with people who will fight and push against it all day which limits the amount of people who get gas. If you price raise it, then people are forced to ration themselves and get out faster, which increases the amount of gas that goes around.
While also maintaining the gas station's profit margin to keep it open. Because they will absolutely be taking huge losses on Day 2 when they have no fucking gas left and nobody is coming by for anything else because they are locked in their house. That big injection gets bled out for days until life returns to normal and the supply chain gets sorted and they make a much smaller profit, if any at all.
Again, its a complex issue with a lot going on that is a lot bigger than "those fucking Indians are screwing us!" and "lolberts."
Gas, unlike food and water and supplies, also has a very short shelf life. Even with stabilizer it's probably going bad after six months and is bad after a year.
This exact thing happened after the Sandy Hook fake ammo shortage. Retired faggot Boomers would camp at Walmart and literally dump the shelf in their cart when it stocked and immediately resell it for 4x the cost.
They introduced zero value to the system. They didn't facilitate distribution, they didn't increase the supply of ammo.
These behaviors made it worse because the perception of a shortage made everybody want to buy more than they normally would because "I might not be able to get some later".
People generally downplay and dismiss the costs of running an enterprise.
I honestly have started to think that many people never really learn that Santa isnt real. They say it's fake but that's like monkey-talk, in their deeper mind they still actually believe in Santa. They think that obedience creates some economic force that rewards them from magic font of mommylovesme.