The story is worth reviewing because it's a clean illustration of a line that's easy to blur in theory and obvious in practice.

Colvin saw a supply shock coming. He was right. He positioned ahead of it. He was right. He used that position to extract maximum profit from people who were scared and couldn't find what they needed. That's where the analysis ends — not because it's illegal in every jurisdiction (it isn't), and not because the market shouldn't function (it should), but because the social contract on which your ability to use a reserve depends is the same contract you're destroying by running the play.

The distinction:

Holding six months of supplies for your household when the shelves are empty is not hoarding. It's preparation. The supplies aren't for sale. They serve one function: keeping your household operational when the supply chain can't.

Buying 17,700 units of a product specifically to resell it at crisis prices is something different. The intent is not resilience. The intent is extraction. The inventory doesn't serve your household — it withholds supply from people who need it to serve your margin.

These are not morally equivalent, and most people know the difference immediately when they see it.

This matters for serious preparation:

The hand sanitizer story is memorable because it was extreme, public, and ended with a government seizure. But the underlying pattern shows up at smaller scales constantly — people who over-prepare to the point of speculative inventory, or who hold supplies they could immediately deploy to neighbors in exchange for future consideration, or who treat their position as leverage over other people rather than security for their family.

That calculation destroys the one thing a reserve is actually for: the ability to help your household without depending on anyone else.

A reserve you're treating as an asset to be monetized in a crisis is a reserve you're thinking about wrong. It's not an investment. It's insurance. Insurance pays out when you need it. It doesn't generate a return on someone else's misfortune.

The practical version:

The line is straightforward: prepare for your household's needs over the relevant time horizon. If you end up with more than you need after the event, the correct move is to give it away, not to sell it at a premium to your neighbors.

That's not a moral argument. It's a social architecture argument. The community you live in after a disruption is the same community that will determine how navigable the environment is while it's happening. The person who gave away supplies during the crisis has a different neighborhood relationship than the person who sold them at a 400% markup.

You're not a humanitarian organization. You don't have an obligation to give anything to anyone. But you're also not running a distressed-goods arbitrage business. Stay on the right side of that line, not because the law requires it in every case, but because the version of preparation that requires exploiting other people isn't the one worth doing.

Matt Colvin got 17,700 bottles of hand sanitizer seized by the state of Tennessee and a front-page story in The New York Times. He also got something harder to shake: the knowledge that when the moment came, the trade he made was the wrong one.

That distinction — survival leverage versus profit from misfortune — is available to everyone before the situation arrives. Most people make the right call without thinking about it. It's worth thinking about anyway.

StokdUp is for households that want to be positioned, not positioned to profit. Membership is by reservation.