Retailers Respond To HDD Squeeze By Limiting Purchases, Raising Prices 282
SKYMTL writes "With Thailand experiencing its worst flooding in generations, component manufacturers have been especially hard hit. The trickle down effect is having a huge impact upon hard drive manufacturers in particular. Retailers have responded by drastic price increases and even limiting hard drive purchases to 1-2 drives per person."
Price Spikes (Score:2, Interesting)
15%-30% price spikes? The 2TB drives I bought on Tuesday increased 46% in price (from $80 to $117) and not too long before them the had them on sale for $69.99.
Re:Also, people are dying (Score:5, Interesting)
The Occupy protests are centered around the fact that the wealth distribution in the United States is ranked about the same as Uguanda; Half the wealth in this country is controlled by approximately 1% of the population, which is the reason for the slogan "We are the 99%". Occupiers have been protesting financial institutions, especially banks.
Now if you hadn't had gone and shot your mouth off about something you clearly don't know anything about, I might have had a bit more sympathy for the rest of your argument. However, I'm going to have to mercilessly gut it now because I am the 99%, and I also have a healthy respect for capitalism -- within limits.
300 lives is nothing. About 120 die every day in auto accidents. Americans are more worried about gas prices there too. Is that because they're heartless? No, it's because those 300, or 120, or a hundred million lives are abstract people. I've never met them. You haven't met them. Nobody who reads this is very likely to have met them. They lived in total obscurity and then some natural disaster came along and went squish, and that was that. They have had little to no bearing on my life, or yours, or anyone's here. But the price of those goods -- that is something tangible, noticable, and therefore real.
You're bitching about human nature here, man. You're like Bono from U2. Nobody gives a damn about them and they shouldn't. They can't. We all got only a limited amount of time on this earth, and a limited amount of resources, emotional or otherwise. And the overwhelming majority of people are going to invest their emotions in things that are real, tangible, and close to them.
Now next time you feel like trying to go and take the moral high ground, don't piss on someone else's back and then say it's raining, mmkays?
Re:Price Spikes (Score:5, Interesting)
If the industry is managed in such a way that they can't buffer a few weeks of supply lag
Pretty much the entire world works this way now. It's called just in time manufacturing, and it is one of the many efficiencies that enabled Toyota and Honda to ride roughshod over Detroit in the 70s and 80s. It's central to Wal-Mart's profitability. You save money by not having large stocks on hand - you don't have to pay to warehouse them, and you're not stuck with a large stock of unsellable items when you change the underlying product.