Apparently, they haven't read my TechCentralStation piece. Here come the dumb stories about "price gouging":

"They are gouging me--$1,600 for a $700 generator," complained Aventura resident Jorge Linkewer, who bought the device despite the price. "My kids have medication that needs to be refrigerated."

Apparently he'd rather have no generator for his kids' medication at $700, than an actual one for $1600. Because that would have been a likely outcome had the price not increased, to discourage someone from buying one who just wanted to run his big-screen television.

Sounds like a "stupid" tax to me. If the winer had purchased a generator before the hurricane, he could have gotten it for $700. It is incredibly irresponsible not to have thought this through given the fact that his child needed to have refridgeration for his meds.

Really, what Fred said.

He lives in florida. Wilma was reported coming days in advance.

If his kids need refrigerated medicine for a few days, buy a cooler and some block ice for, oh, 50 bucks.

Floridians seem to expect FP&L to lose power every time the wind blows, and have it off for quite some time, at times. (Certainly Steve over at Hog On Ice talks about it with a jolly bitterness.)

A good, big cooler will keep cold with block ice for at week, easily, if you keep it out of the sun. Evidently his kids' medicat!on must be very temperature sensitive if he needs a generator to maintain a precise temperature rather than just keep it cold.

Or he's a dumbass. I'm leaning towards dumbass, since if the latter was true, he'd be an idiot for not pre-buying the generator anyway.

(D'you know your spam-blocker thinks medicat-ion is a bad word?)

Here is some interesting research on gas prices:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/21/AR2005102102270.html

"Notice how gas prices shot up virtually overnight after Hurricane Katrina -- but are falling much more slowly now?

We have only ourselves to blame, says an Ohio State University economist who studied how people shop for gasoline. Matthew Lewis found that the typical person hunts for the lowest possible prices when costs are rising -- but gets lazy and doesn't shop around when prices start to come down. As a consequence, gas station owners and other businesses have less incentive to lower prices when their wholesale costs drops.

For the study, Lewis used data on prices charged at about 420 service stations in the San Diego area from January 2000 to December 2001. The data were collected by the San Diego-based Utility Consumers' Action Network, which describes itself as a consumer watchdog group. Data on wholesale gas prices paid by the stations were obtained from the Energy Department, he writes in a working paper available on his Web site.

Ironically, consumer buying patterns put more money in the pockets of gas station owners when prices are falling than when they are rising. Lewis found that profit margins were highest when the wholesale price of gas was dropping and consumers stopped bargain-hunting. That eases the pressure on station owners, which in turn allows them to keep prices high, thereby increasing their profit margins."

According to the story, this person also bought the generator out of a parking lot. No indication whether this was the parking lot of a retailer, or just some entrepreneur that set up shop in a parking lot to sell generators.

Either way, the above points are better than anything I could come up with earlier. Why ANYONE in Florida that needs refrigerated medicat!on doesn't already own a generator is beyond me. I live in Iowa, and I own a snow shovel AND a snow-blower. In fact, I bought the shovel in the summer, when prices were low. For whatever reason, after 26 years in the MidWest, I've been able to figure out that it might snow once in a while.

Seems ungrateful, doesn't it? Either that generator salesman wasn't offering the lowest price in the area, in which case Jorge should have shopped around some more, or the salesman was offering the lowest price, in which case he should be the *last* person in line for Jorge's ire.

For $16,000, I would have been willing to buy a $700 generator and truck it to Florida myself. As far as I know nobody's mad at me for that. But if I were to lower my price by 90%, suddenly I'd be "gouging"? I'm not surprised there are never enough emergency supplies in emergency areas, if the people who bring them there are reviled.

When I was a kid -- this was in the sixties -- everyone expected at least a few tropical storms if not a hurricane or two every summer. It was considered part of the price of living in the tropics. Everyone had shutters for their windows -- we lived in an old twenties "Boomer" house, with huge windows, and we had these big premade wooden shutter things that we stored in the carport and would nail over the windows every time a big blow was on the way. Everyone had sterno or a camp stove and kept a supply of emergency candles, matches, and so on. You expected power to be out for a while, and you had a cooler that was not just for the beach.

But then a long dry weather cycle started. Hurricanes became infrequent. Developments mushroomed, condo canyons went up along beaches, and people started to move to Florida in droves from up north. These people were totally ignorant of what life was like in the tropics and subtropics -- as far as they were concerned a place without snow was a place without bad weather. Builders started to skimp on codes -- such as they were; once people had built homes out of solid concrete as a matter of course, if not coral rock, but you can't throw up quickie homes if you build them with concrete, and coral rock? Forget it. But no one cared -- all they wanted to do was move away from the snow and live in "paradise." In the years before Andrew I had to listen to former Yankee coworkers make idiotic declarations like "a hurricane will never hit Miami again, because all the buildings give out heat, which dries up hurricanes." Then along came Andrew. Not that enough people learned their lesson: stupidity and denial are stronger than hurricanes.

Are prices dropping because Floridians are selling to move to other places?

The benefits and pitfalls of supply and demand aside. It still doesn't make people feel all peachy, cheery, fuzzy inside when they see think like - big oil posting record profits this quarter.

After all a catastrophy strikes and its one thing to ask the customer to make an exception and a sacrifice. But is it too much to also have the supplier tighten their belt a tad as well.

It amazes me when people complain about oil profits. Where was everyone back in the 80's and 90's when oil and natural gas prices were low and people like me were either laid off or moving 900 miles to keep their job? I didn't hear anyone saying let's keep prices up so these people don't lose their jobs. Much of the profit you see today will be plowed back into exploration and equipment, creating GOOD jobs, to meet demand. Energy has always been a cyclical business.