I had to buy a monitor and webcam during covid. I had camelcamelcamel price watching them for months waiting for sales.
I have my alerts at $99 for the webcam and $750 for the monitor. Their typical prices are $130 and $1150.
The prices of those right now are $199 and $1999 respectively if they're in stock anywhere. People are hoarding these and selling them on Ebay now for 50% markups.
I've even had to take to Ebay to buy Xbox controllers from Best Buy themselves.
There is also just a lot more people who need those things for working from home, which would explain why their are shortages. It isn't just hoarders, there is an actual increase in demand.
Toilet paper shortages are caused by hoarders, since demand hasn't actually increased.
In case of TP, I'd lean strongly towards the problem being caused by the supply chain being bifurcated between consumer and business markets. From what I anecdotally hear, there's plenty of TP available for cheap in the US, just all of it is in absurdly-sized rolls you would struggle to fit in your bathroom.
I can compare that to Poland, where we didn't really have much of a TP shortage. Here, from my observation, most businesses buy the same type/size of TP as regular consumers do, so I suspect our market isn't as strongly bifurcated, and so there was no problem shifting supply from businesses to the stores.
I have my alerts at $99 for the webcam and $750 for the monitor. Their typical prices are $130 and $1150.
The prices of those right now are $199 and $1999 respectively if they're in stock anywhere. People are hoarding these and selling them on Ebay now for 50% markups.
I've even had to take to Ebay to buy Xbox controllers from Best Buy themselves.