As someone who buys in bulk when I can, I know that stores limit purchases on many items that are temporarily a good buy.
Our neighborhood store knows that we rich hoarders would clean out the shelf if we could, so they make limit rules to have the goods reach a larger number of their customers and get wider dispersal.
Which is great. I don’t have a problem with that, even right before a disaster. It’s the argument others are putting forth that jacking the price way up acts as a limiter that I’m pointing out as false. Folks who come in to buy all the water they can carry will so long as they can afford it, jacking up the price just changes who buys all the water they can carry from the people there first to the people there with fatter wallets, in the end there will still be a bunch of people who don’t get any. If an owner wants to spread their stock among more people the limit is the way to do it, they don’t take advantage of people in a bad situation AND they accomplish what the gouging defenders say gouging will do but it actually doesn’t.