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.
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.