I Know You Mean Well, Trader Joe's...

 

 

...I do. But this is not helping people.

Here's the problem: You are artificially restricting (in a soft way, I know) what people buy. So at least some of them aren't going to be buying the full quantity that they want to. What that means is that you, the vendor, have NO IDEA what their actual demand is. You have shut off that signal.

If people were able to buy as much as they wanted to (or better yet, if prices could rise to reflect the scarcity), then you would know how much more to order, and the producers would know how much to produce, in order to meet the ACTUAL DEMAND of your customers.

But that is not happening now, because you have artificially curtailed how much they can buy, and therefore masked any demand signal you might have gotten from them. THERE IS NO SUPPLY PROBLEM right now - there is simply a sudden surge in demand. A surge that most producers are perfectly capable of handling - IF they have that information. If they know how much is actually being demanded.

There is no supply problem. But YOU have created one. You have imposed a (soft, I know) limit on what your customers can buy at any one time, thereby preventing both yourselves and the producers of these goods, from knowing how much is actually demanded. You have created a problem where there was none.

I hope you guys will re-think this.