Yesterday I went looking to buy hand soap—not hand sanitizer, but regular old hand soap—in 7.5 ounce pump dispensers. As you can see from the photo below, I found the shelves at my local Winn-Dixie supermarket completely bare. In lieu of the soap, I encountered a large sign that read, in part: “Please BE KIND to one another and limit yourself only to what you really need at this time.” Alas, the sign did not work and never really had a chance. For it was in direct conflict with the more powerful smaller signs advertising the prices of the different brands of hand soap for $1.29 and $1.99 per dispenser. These signs did work—to encourage people to buy and hoard large quantities of the item. Had the smaller signs displayed much higher prices, say $10.29 and $10.99 or tenfold the actual prices, there would have been enough soap on the shelves to permit me and anyone else to purchase hand soap to our heart’s content. Of course at those prices I would have been content with one or two bottles rather than the fifteen or twenty I was planning to buy and hoard. Furthermore, not only would higher prices have spared me the time and energy of going elsewhere in my search for soap, but it would also have spared me the irritation of reading that absurd sign.
