Depleting scarce resources to make a dishonest buck

This post is being written in the midst of the SARS CoV-2 aka "Coronavirus" emergency in the United States.

Today I risked journeying to the nearest town with a grocery store (30 miles, no known cases of SARS CoV-2 yet) because I was down to about 3-4 days' worth of food.

I have a medical need for distilled water.  I don't use a ton of it; one gallon will last me for more than a week, but it MUST be distilled.  I have a neighbor with the same need, and heard him mention that he needed some today too.

The first store I went to (there are three in that town; all are medium-sized, not supermarkets) was out.  So I went to the next one.

I walked back to the correct aisle to find plenty of gallons of spring water and purified (i.e., filtered) water, but no distilled.  A nearby stocker suggested that I inquire at the back of the store.

I arrived at the door to the stock area to find an older couple with CASES of distilled water in their cart!  We are in emergency times.  Everyone should take only what s/he needs.  NO ONE goes through that much distilled water!  They said that they needed it "for our business."  OK, I didn't ask.

They seemed surprised that I only needed one gallon (I later decided to get two because that's what I normally keep on hand).  And I was starting to wonder...  just what the Hell kind of business 1) needs such large quantities of distilled water, that 2) they aren't getting from a wholesale supplier?

Then they voluntarily spilled the beans:  "We make colloidal silver."

Colloidal Silver.  Jesus Tittyfucking Christ.  I tried not to roll my eyes.

Colloidal silver is Quack Medicine.  It doesn't cure anything.  But its promoters, in the finest tradition of the snake-oil salesmen, patent medicine peddlers, and Medicine Show quacks of the 1880s, will claim that it cures anything and everything.  You can find websites out there, lots of them, that even claim that it cures cancer.

So, of course, it also kills the Coronavirus!  And these people were preparing to make some serious money.  Shaking my head...

So in a time when there are shortages of all kinds of critically needed goods, here was a couple depleting one town's supply of a critically needed good, TO MANUFACTURE QUACK MEDICINE.

This is why we can't have nice things.

I got home to find that my neighbor's daughter, who'd been tasked with finding his distilled water (in the same town) for him, was coming up empty-handed.  I told him which store had it, and he texted her.  When she arrived, she reported that that store had started limiting people to only ONE jug of distilled water each.  So she got two.  You know the drill: she got one, hubby got one, they went through the checkout lines separately.

Meanwhile, somewhere in that town is a couple running electricity through dozens of gallons of precious, hard-to-find water, making a quack nostrum which they will sell for ridiculous amounts of money -- that doesn't cure a damn thing.

Beam me up, Scotty, there's no intelligent life on this planet.

Here is the Quackwatch article on Colloidal Silver:

https://quackwatch.org/related/PhonyAds/silverad/