Toilet paper whores
Mass hysteria had hit Finland when the paper union began strikes last week. The word on the street is that Finland will be wiping its ass with dry leaves by the end of the month, so Finns have raided the stores of every toilet paper roll available. Now my local stores are all completely wiped out of toilet paper – it’s funny to see the mountain of 12-packs of beer at your disposal next to the empty shelves, I guess they figure you won’t need any toilet paper if you’re on an all-liquid diet.
So it got me wondering, what if the stores were allowed to bump the prices of toilet paper up by 10 fold for instance? I’m not sure how legal that would be in Finland (does anyone know?) but in the U.S. it would be illegal for stores to do this in times of crisis. When hurricane Something hit Florida last year, residents were forbidden to travel to Southern Florida and sell much needed equipment for higher-than-usual prices. So people went with out essential supplies.
So what if stores like Prisma were allowed to sell a 6-pack of toilet paper for like 20 euros instead of 3 – would it prevent people from hoarding all the TP, leaving nothing for the rest of us? Would people instead purchase only what they needed? Would stores rush toilet paper imports into Finland knowing they’d get alot a nice profit for it, but in doing so, would the mass amounts of imported toilet paper lower the prices? Assuming there are laws that restrict this in Finland, should they be laxed and allow stores to have the freedom to adjust the prices as they wish?
Finnish stores are wiped out of a toilet paper, shelves are empty. Picture taken by some crazy German guy named Andreas
