Luckily here at Fahrenheit Towers, our son Laughing Boy is long past needing special infant formula baby milk. However there are tens of thousands of other parents whose children are much younger than ours and they do need special baby milk formula as not every woman is able to breast feed or is able to produce milk in a sufficient amount for their newborns.
The job of being a new parent is a really difficult one. I’ve compared it in the past to both ‘wondrous turbulence’ and ‘like being slapped around the face hard with a whole frozen salmon’. Unfortunately, many new parents in the UK are having an already challenging time made worse and much more stressful by the greed of others.
Panic buyers and profiteers have been buying up large stocks of infant baby milk powder either because they fear that there will be a shortage or they want to charge exhorbitant amounts for a product that is a necessity for some mums. These greedy bastards have been taking the ‘I’m all right Jack’ view and not caring about other parents, other babies or the wider society.
Sky News has been reporting that a tub of infant formula that normally retails for about £11 – £12 is being listed on online auction sites at £300. There is of course no genuine shortage of babymilk, it’s just that deliveries are being interrupted and there is an excessive demand.
Whilst nobody who believes in the free market should see anything wrong in making a profit, there is something exceptionally shitty and morally wrong in taking a product which is suffering a temporary delivery disruption, because of the greedy panic buyers, and gouging it. It’s one thing to buy this babymilk at £8 wholesale and sell it at £11 retail, that’s a reasonable and not too excessive markup, but £300. That’s not only wrong morally but is damaging to society during the current emergency.
I was wondering just what sort of a person thinks that it is morally acceptable to buy an £11 tub of babyfood and sell it on not just with a pound or two mark up on it, but try to list it for £300? The answer is that the sort of person who does this is a shitty, greedy and selfish individual who fully deserves to be shunned by the rest of us when this emergency subsides. We will remember with gratitude and respect those who do their bit to help others get through this, but we will remember with contempt those spivs who are profiting greatly and unfairly on the fears of new parents and shun them like we would shun a nonce.
I see lots of tweets about ‘remembering the individuals/stores/companies that do this when it’s all over’ but I very much doubt people will indeed keep that promise, sadly.
I disagree to a certain extent. I think that people will remember the gougers and I base my view on previous behaviour. My late grandmother’s generation grew up with spivs profiting off of shortages during WWII. I can recall how she still remembered who the spivs were long after the war ended and would say ‘he was a spiv he was’ with a tone of utter contempt. I’ve a feeling that when this crisis is over people will remember the exploiters and our generation and those below us will treat these new spivs with a similar level of opprobrium.
Although this sickness has killed 235 people so far (although much less than the 750 a year that Polio took prior to the invention of a vaccine https://vk.ovg.ox.ac.uk/vk/polio ) It’s also killed or is going to kill a number of damaging political movements and currents. Chief among those is the open borders / refugees welcome movement. After all this is over who in their right mind is going to going to support a movement that wants to bring in potentially diseased as well as disruptive and burdensome fake refugees? The irony I’ve discovered recently is that some of those who have been pushing ‘refugees welcome’ are now discovering the value of borders and controlled spaces by self isolating.