what is law 1? jump on the bandwagon of law 4 and rip people off?
Well, there is the obvious profiteering by retailers who can vastly increase their profits if they time their price bumps correctly but since the UK market is pretty competitive, the price hikes don't usually last for long.
That's on one hand. On the other hand the 1st rule of that law can be better described by an example.
As a retailer you expect to sell say 800 SSDs in a month. You order around that amount + 5% since you still have some backstock from the previous month. For some reason the only real alternative to traditional HDDs become SSDs. The demand for SSDs increases by 50%, that is in addition to ever increasing demand due to lower costs from your suppliers and lower prices. Now you have a stock of say 1000 SSDs but you now expect to sell at least 1200. So what do you do?
You either let the stock run out and sell no SSDs until the next supply of SSDs in which case your competitors take your market share or you up the prices in small increments until you can get more stock in. In the latter case you always have some stock in, your profit margins are higher for the time being and you can allocate more stock at a cheaper price at a later date.
Of course all these numbers, stock supply frequency, etc. will vary depending on how large of a retailer you are and other factors unknown to me but it serves as an example.
And then you have the whole thing with manufacturers that can operate on different modules, either producing a fixed number of items a month with small adjustments to meet their targets or in variable amount cycles that depend on the demand at any given time. In any case you will need a couple of weeks window to adjust your production when you include all the other factors into account.
Suppliers usually do fine, shifting stock on 2-4 weeks basis they are able to deal with the high demand in a matter of weeks.
My price was just for one that I got from here when I built my system last month.