Price gouging in old-time Phoenix


If you're not familiar with the term "price gouging", it simply means charging a very inflated price for something because of a particular circumstance. It does require a particular knowledge of what something should sell for, at a reasonable price, in a given place and time. Of course, everything looks ridiculously cheap when I look at old ads, but at the time those prices had to be reasonable or people wouldn't pay it, and I'm absolutely certain that unscrupulous people took advance of certain circumstances to gouge people - which means to charge way too much for something.

Yesterday a friend of mine who had been trying to find surgical masks asked me if I could order some online, which I'm happy to do for him. He's older than me, but he knows the value of a dollar, and can tell you to the penny the exact price of gas that day. He doesn't trust the internet, but he trusts me, so I went online to find the surgical masks for him. I don't really know what a box of 50 disposable surgical masks should cost, so when I found some I called him to confirm the price of $14.99. Then, to my surprise, as I went to check out the price didn't just double, it went up five times. I had him on the phone, and told him that this was happening, and he simply sighed and asked me to go ahead and place the order. The price gouging was because of the current concern about the coronavirus.

In that ad up there from 1913 I really have no idea if the prices are reasonable for the time and place (Phoenix during beer weather), but I'd imagine they were. Local businesses had reputations to keep, and while customers are happy to pay a fair price for a good product, they deeply resent being over-charged. The Arizona Mercantile Company was a local business in Phoenix, not some faceless internet business that gouged.
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