[Illegal to sell] fuel, food, medicine or another necessity
at an exorbitant or excessive price
The only thing that might be worse than leaving the standard so open-ended is actually specifying hard numbers.[1]
I wonder what the caselaw looks like, and what are some actual price multipliers involved in successful and failed prosecutions.
[1] Sometimes vague standards like that are deliberately designed to incentive conservative behavior while permitting equitable treatment (give defendant benefit of a doubt) in actual disputes. Being scared you could easily run afoul of the law is partly the point. That works better when designed for enforcement by private plaintiffs where quantifiable harm must plausibly have occurred. It's prone to abuse when enforced by regulators preemptively as there's no limiting factor of manifest harm. If everybody was happy to pay $50, no harm no foul. If somebody's grandmother passed out from dehydration because she couldn't afford a bottle even though the shelves were full, then not only do we have harm but we have a concrete context to gauge "excessive". Preemptive enforcement lacks these contextualizing facts.
I wonder what the caselaw looks like, and what are some actual price multipliers involved in successful and failed prosecutions.
[1] Sometimes vague standards like that are deliberately designed to incentive conservative behavior while permitting equitable treatment (give defendant benefit of a doubt) in actual disputes. Being scared you could easily run afoul of the law is partly the point. That works better when designed for enforcement by private plaintiffs where quantifiable harm must plausibly have occurred. It's prone to abuse when enforced by regulators preemptively as there's no limiting factor of manifest harm. If everybody was happy to pay $50, no harm no foul. If somebody's grandmother passed out from dehydration because she couldn't afford a bottle even though the shelves were full, then not only do we have harm but we have a concrete context to gauge "excessive". Preemptive enforcement lacks these contextualizing facts.