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No Stupid Questions @lemmy.world
Artisian @lemmy.world

What does a federal ban on price gouging look like?

The Harris-Walz campaign has said they want to create a federal ban on corporate price gouging (usually mentioned when folks talk about price hikes in grocery stores). I see economists complaining about variations of this policy being bad, e.g. leading to food desserts. But as far as I can tell there hasn't been anything specific proposed. Could someone explain our best guess at what they are proposing, and if it's been serious analyzed/tested elsewhere?

They cite existing legislation in the states; maybe explaining what that legislation does/how it works would be helpful?

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  • Price cap increases perhaps. No more than 5% increase from the price the product was on January 01 that year.

    • That one seems kinda scary - if inflation was 6% and something wasn't sold at any profit, all stores would stop selling it. (This is true for most food.)

      • If they stop selling it, they stop buying it from suppliers and then the suppliers need to find a way to decrease their costs to make it so stores buy their products again. Otherwise they go out of business, so they will find a way.

        • I think the scary thing is if it takes the suppliers more than 3 days to figure that out. Companies oftentimes can last 3 days without food (and rarely fix things very quickly at any scale).

30 comments