Companies do this shit all the time, covid or not. Actually this poses a really important question for people who figure we can make capitalism humane with reforms while still maintaining the market: What do you do about this situation? https://twitter.com/ShaunGalNews/status/1245829203385143296

Easy answer would be making this sort of practice illegal. Let's forego the discussion of how fucking hard it'd be to craft a law with enough teeth to actually make companies do anything but take the fine when they're caught, the meat of this problem is that they NEED to do this.

Scarcity HAS to be manufactured to make it profitable to run a company that sells, say, milk. If companies can't do things that artificially create that scarcity they won't be able to sustain a milk business and we're still capitalist so that's how we get milk!

So what will companies do? Maybe they'll stop selling milk, or maybe they'll start obscenely under-producing it to ensure that scarcity is maintained, leading to milk becoming unaffordable for many people, at least when they're wasting milk on purpose they can control scarcity.

That's the thing about trying to regulate the problems of capitalism away, businesses literally only exist to generate profit and they WILL FIND WAYS TO EXTRACT PROFIT no matter how fucking ridiculous they have to get. You're signing up for an endless game of cat and mouse.