Yesterday, police arrested a man in in Brentwood, NY,  Amardeep Singh, who owns a small shoe store, for stocking up on scarce materials like N95 masks and personal protective equipment and then selling them at massive markups. He had a warehouse full of 100,000 face masks, 10,000 surgical gowns, 2,500 full-body isolation suits, and 500,000 disposable gloves, which of course are the very things that the state’s most vulnerable populations need. There are rumors of people meeting in back alleys to exchange masks at super inflated prices. Buyers will pay for it if their parents are at risk. It seems unforgivable, and throughout history it has been a crime to hoard needed goods in times of crisis. You could get 5 years in jail for hoarding meat, gasoline, and building supplies during the Second World War. Of course, the counter argument is that cornering a market, creating scarcity and then profiting from it, this is just the sort of predatory capitalism we take for granted elsewhere. When the media asked Singh’s lawyer about the charges, he responded, “I’ve never heard of this in my whole life, and I don’t think anyone else has, either.”[1] But this behavior definitely wasn’t tolerated two generations ago.

Notes

[1] Emilie Ruscoe, “NY Sneaker Salesman Charged With COVID-19 Price Gouging,” no. Law360 (April 24, 2020), https://www.law360.com/articles/1267289/ny-sneaker-salesman-charged-with-covid-19-price-gouging.