[pdeuchler]

The recent spate of people worried about "empty shelves" is kind of funny to me, it's essentially admitting to the world that you have no idea how the world works and the smallest disruption to your daily bubble is rocking your world.

The shelves are getting fully restocked every single morning. Go to your local Target/Walmart/Grocery store when they open if you don't believe me. Stores, suppliers, and producers have already begun rationing and metering out goods onto shelves explicitly because of people hoarding. The shelves being empty are a result of idiots running around trying to buy up everything they can, and stores reacting properly. The "free market" is already acting in response to those hoarders, they're discouraging it, and preventing it on a grand scale pretty effectively.

Your complaint about "not allowing the price to float" is a complete non sequitur even if you're still the type to swallow free market ideology hook, line, sinker, because people buying in surplus isn't demand. It's just, well, hoarding. Coronavirus isn't going to cause people to be thirstier, hungrier, or need to wipe their ass more. People are just buying in advance. Without people fearing for a worldwide pandemic nobody would be willing to pay increased prices for these goods. So it's not actually about demand, it's about artificial scarcity driven by a global pandemic. Thus, price gouging tickets.

But even if you don't buy any of that, the vast majority of our supply lines are JIT, so "empty shelves" aren't really a thing... what we'd really see is a dwindling of supply over a period of time. Which isn't happening.

[gwright]

> people buying in surplus isn't demand. It's just, well, hoarding

Of course it is demand. You may also call it "hoarding" those aren't mutually exclusive concepts.

[pdeuchler]

Will their consumption of toilet paper increase? This isn't hard.