One the things that struck me in the article “What’s the Right to Do?” by Michael Sandel is how wrong price gouging is. I think it is a horrible practice that people do. There should be severe consequences for doing it. I could not believe that during the Florida Hurricane in 2004 that people were forced to pay $10 for a bag of ice that was normally $2. People either had to pay the price or not have food to keep in coolers. Charging somebody $23,000 for a roof is also a bad thing to do. Upon reading about motels and hotels and how they more than doubled room prices is horrible.
Price gouging is something that happens quite frequently all over the country. For instance, I had a friend who wanted to go to Cleveland, Ohio in July of this past year. When I asked him how his hotel hunting was going, he was frustrated. Most of the rooms were at $250 per night. I even helped him look and could not understand why there was such a huge upped price. Then, I realized that it was the Republican National Convention. Rooms were about double the price of what they should have been. I felt bad for my friend and bad for anyone else trying to get a room. Unfortunately, that is not the only time I heard of price gouging in real life.
I have some family and friends in the Buffalo, New York area. In 2014, when massive amounts of snow fell in November in the city and people’s roofs were caving in from snow, businesses started to price gouge a lot of people. I know that some people had to pay double to get their roofs cleared and for snow plow service. Attorney General Eric Schneiderman forced companies to pay a fine of $150 on all customers that it price gouged. I think they should have been punished more than that .
I hope that price gouging is punished more in the future, so people are not ripped off.
- 2015. “Contractor settles over Snowvember price gouging.” WKBW.com website . March 17. Accessed September 27, 2016. http://www.wkbw.com/news/state-news/contractor-settles-over-snowvember-price-gouging.
- Sandel, Michael J. 2007. What’s the Right Thing to Do? New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
