8 ms·

I grok capitalism and even like it. But there are times where it is difficult to like it. In this case, people rushed to buy this product for the sole purpose o

I grok capitalism and even like it. But there are times where it is difficult to like it. In this case, people rushed to buy this product for the sole purpose of reselling it for 8x. What's wrong with our society that some people can be so morally bankrupt and bereft of good sense. In the end, I think these scalpers won't sell for 8x because anintendo will just pump out more product. Still, it is sad to see this happen.

crooked-v 10y ago
> bereft of good sense Investing money in something that is nigh-guaranteed to have excellent returns is very good sense for anyone with the time and effort to spend on reselling the product.
- edgarvaldes 10y ago
  And, let's be sincere here, this is not some essential item, like food or shelter.
e40 10y ago
What's wrong with our society that some people can be so morally bankrupt and bereft of good sense. This type of behavior is literally all around us. I recently listened to a podcast about this exact phenomenon. It featured a couple that had a special rug that drove cats crazy. They sold it on amazon for ~$35. A bunch of people bought them up and sold them on ebay for a lot more, using the drop-ship method (the reseller ordered it using their amazon account with the buyers shipping address). When people realized they were being ripped off, they returned it to the original seller, who had to handle the claims due to requirements by amazon. They lost 10's of thousands of $$. The creator called some of the people doing this and they laughed him off, telling him they were doing nothing wrong. It was on planet money's podcast, I think. I can try and find it if you're curious.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  The problem isn't the arbitrage (which is a core component of capitalism and profit [1]) these people are utilizing, its Amazon's draconian policy towards sellers. [1] Hat tip to patio11: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9087930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9087930 > They're likely using one of the world's oldest business models: "Buy things for $1, sell them for $2."
- kbenson 10y ago
  Episode 724: Cat Scam[1] 1: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/09/14/493810206/episode-724-cat-scam http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/09/14/493810206/episo...
  - zizee 10y ago
    As a side note, that episode left me wondering why the original seller didn't open their own eBay store, listing the product at their desired price. I would have thought it would have effectively undercut the resellers and gain a large portion of the sales on eBay. Another note, Planet Money is pretty much my favourite "always on"* podcast. An podcast about economics might sound dull to some, but what a lot (maybe not on HN) people don't realise is "economics" is a really a study of human behaviour at the macro level, and a large part of human behaviour at the micro level. * serial was hugely addictive, but it only has short seasons, and each episode had what seemed like a huge wait between them.
    - kbenson 10y ago
      > As a side note, that episode left me wondering why the original seller didn't open their own eBay store, listing the product at their desired price. I would have thought it would have effectively undercut the resellers and gain a large portion of the sales on eBay. Yeah, as long as they were aggressive in making sure there were on multiple marketplaces, and came up first in searches, that would probably be the best response. The bit gain here isn't really the extra sales on the other marketplaces, it's the reduced returns which eat into their profits. > Another note, Planet Money is pretty much my favourite "always on"* podcast. An podcast about economics might sound dull to some, but what a lot (maybe not on HN) people don't realise is "economics" is a really a study of human behaviour at the macro level, and a large part of human behaviour at the micro level. Also one of my favorites. I also enjoy Freakonomics. For anyone that enjoys well produced podcasts, I highly recommend just about everything Gimlet Media produces. It was founded by one of the original founders of Planet Money (Alex Blumberg), and they've gotten quite few NPR alumni at this point (mostly from This American Life, which is basically a expert podcast production training ground at this point, Planet Money spawned from that as well). My current favorites are: - Startup - Excellent. They've gone through a few seasons now. I recommend starting at the beginning. - Reply All - For the most part excellent. They occasionally to into weird territory, but I laugh during their episodes quite often. The interplay between the hosts is great. Like friends that are kind of assholes to each other because they've been friends for so long, and you get a front row seat. - Science Vs - A new favorite of mine. At first I wasn't sure what to make of the delivery, which is very campy, but now I think it's perfect for what can be fairly dry subject matter. - Heavyweight - If you know who Jonathan Goldstein is, or have listened to This American Life enough to recognize his voice (and if you've heard it before, you probably will), you'll have a good idea of what you're in for. I recommend starting with Episode #2 to see if you like it, because it's amazing in both the names involved and the audacity of the idea. That said, I did tear up at the end of #1, as I have brothers of my own. - Mystery Show - Also excellent, but no longer continuing. Another TIL alumni, Starlee Kine. There's others in there too, which are all fairly good, but these, along with a smattering of others[1] I listen to are more than enough for me to handle. That said, Gimlet does have a triplet of new shows for their "fall lineup"[2], and some of those sound great too. Okay, that's enough about Gimlet, I've just been really happy about the quality of podcasts lately, and they've contributed a lot to that I think. Radiotopia seems to be the other (different) group that's got some quality content. It's kind of amazing that since I only really listen to them when in the car, I sometimes look forward to running errands just so I get a few more minutes in to listen. 1: 99% Invisible, Criminal (I believe Gimlet hired one of the founders of this for one of their new shows), Real Time with Bill Maher, Still Untitled: The Adam Savage Project, The Memory Palace. 2: https://gimletmedia.com/2016/11/01/introducing-gimlets-fall-lineup/ https://gimletmedia.com/2016/11/01/introducing-gimlets-fall-...
- Lawtonfogle 10y ago
  The problem is finding which point was wrong. What behavior was done here that should be discouraged or banned by society? People don't like the outcome, but where should the government intervene?
childifchaos 10y ago
How is this "morally bankrupt"? It's just smart. Every business on earth would do this in there sector if they had the chance. What's wrong with a smart and clever individual buying this to resell at 8x? It's not hurting anyone, it's just a stupid retro console. What's wrong with society? People are struggling and getting screwed over by governments and big business, they badly need income and here is a small opportunity to get a piece of that pie. Ultimately someone that wants the product who is happy to pay the price that it is sold for, because they deem it worth that price, ends up with the product in there life. And someone else manages to profit to, to gain some much needed income so they can purchase something they want in there life. Hardly morally bankrupt. There is no change in the outcome here. There are still the same amount of people with these consoles, enjoying them as before. Nobody is hurt. In fact you could argue that someone doing this is a net gain, because two people gain instead of one. Someone made a profit that wouldn't otherwise and someone got the console they wanted (and obviously didn't care about the price)
- eridius 10y ago
  > It's not hurting anyone, it's just a stupid retro console. It's hurting the people who are forced to pay $600 for a $60 item because they need one (e.g. a must-have gift for someone). It's hurting the people who wanted to buy one for $60 but cannot afford to buy one for $600. So yeah, it's hurting basically everybody who had any interest in buying the product.
  - bunderbunder 10y ago
    If you're being "forced" to pay $600 for a $60 item because you must buy one right now, perhaps you need to stop and question the nature of your relationship with that person. If you are so bothered by having to wait for them to come back onto the market at $60 that it hurts you (as opposed to, say, just being a minor annoyance), perhaps you need to stop and question the nature of your relationship with yourself.
  - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
    This argument is ridiculous. Otherwise there would be no such thing as luxury goods.
r00fus 10y ago
I really don't see why Nintendo didn't produce a bit more on launch - I mean, they're not some kickstarter newbie - don't they have some skills in demand-forecasting?
- jedberg 10y ago
  When you hear about how the latest Nintendo is sold out everywhere, it makes you want one more. They have slow production on purpose. If you could walk into any store and get one, it wouldn't be nearly as big a deal.
  - bunderbunder 10y ago
    Not to mention that having the production capacity to meet initial demand on a popular product would be an huge waste of money. Best case scenario, a week or two after launch, the vast majority of that capacity would be sitting idle after the initial rush is over and the purchase rate tapers off. Worst case scenario, the product isn't as popular as you anticipated and you've got a big ol' writedown to deal with. (Atari anyone? Blackberry tablet?)
  - odbol_ 10y ago
    Plus, you can just go to any garage sale and buy one of the original consoles with 100s of games for like $20
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      I don't seek out garage sales but look for old Nintendos when I end up at one and I never see them, never mind for cheap with a pile of games.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  It spikes demand. Crazy parents run all over the place looking for it. The winners are Nintendo, who gets sales in the 1Q, which is normally death for this kind of product, and the retailers, who get parents visiting daily and buying other crap. My brother spent weeks looking for the "cream pie in the face game" last year. In the process, he picked up a half dozen other board games.
salmonet 10y ago
Nintendo deserves some of the blame. They most likely created this shortage on purpose to create press.
AndrewKemendo 10y ago
This is one way that markets clear prices when demand edges production. There's are many ways to do it, for example auctions. In this case the price sensitivity of the market is lower than the producer set, so the market is willing to pay more for the good than the product is selling it at. When this pricing mismatch happens, there is the ability to close the pricing gap through repricing by a third party otherwise known as arbitrage. This is one of the more important functional requirements for a market and the producer can take advantage of this based on how they price. Nintendo could have priced the system much higher and seen the same output but it may not have made as big if a splash, so really it's Nintendo driving this frenzy because they and all other major companies are good at this. It's not a big it's a feature (really in this case).
metaphor 10y ago
Agreed. It's quite sad that the impetus is on Nintendo to flood the market with product. As of this post, there were 3,800+ posts on eBay[1]; there's at least an entire page-full listing Buy It Now @ $1000 or more. [1] http://www.ebay.com/sch/?_nkw=nes%20classic%20edition http://www.ebay.com/sch/?_nkw=nes%20classic%20edition
savanaly 10y ago
I feel like if you truly groked capitalism, you would be able to point out lots of its flaws, but also to realize that scalping is definitely not one of them. With supply limited like this, the optimal social outcome is for the X units produced to go to the X people in the world who would value them most, in other words the people who would be willing to pay the most (only exception I can think of to this is if someone values it at V dollars and only has a net worth of W dollars where W < V, but for the sums we're talking about with the NES I think almost everyone either has or can scrounge up V). In the final accounting with reselling on amazon, the goods end up where they are most highly valued. Sure, if we held a lottery to see who gets to buy the NESs at the sticker price rather than auctioning them, the people winning the lottery would be more happy than the people who end up winning the auction. But as a whole, society would be impoverished since it's an inefficient distribution (no room to prove it in a HN post, but it's not too hard to work out on paper when tallying up the welfare of nintendo, the scalpers and all the people who get to buy the NES under one scenario or the other).
- typicalrunt 10y ago
  I do understand capitalism, the point I made was that sometimes I don't have to like it. Scalping included. I don't need to prove my knowledge to you by pointing out lots of capitalism's flaws. Instead of reading my comment carefully, you decided to teach me about how basic supply and demand operate. Jesus, you are a self-absorbed piece of work.
  - savanaly 10y ago
    I'm truly sorry if my comment affected you negatively, it wasn't my intention. I used to be an econ tutor and sometimes my urge to just type my thoughts that way comes out and I regret that it sounds like lecturing. Anyways, why do you think that, given all that, scalping is a bad thing then? Isn't getting the goods to where they're valued most a good thing? Who's getting heartbroken here? The people who can't afford one at the market price of $600? But most of them weren't going to get one anyways because of the limited supply. If there's something to not like it's the scarcity, right?
inimino 10y ago
Why do you think this is morally bankrupt? We aren't talking about wheat, but a superfluous luxury item. Where's the moral argument?
morgante 10y ago
What exactly is "morally bankrupt" about buying a mispriced good and reselling it at a proper price? People get very morally righteous about scalping, but I don't understand why at all. Resellers are correcting a distortion in the market and providing a value-added service.
- pluma 10y ago
  The only value they add is amplifying the scarcity. How it normally works is this: * Some person sells something locally for $x * There is demand outside that location for the same product * Someone buys the product locally for $x and sells it elsewhere for $y > $x * Customers are provided access to a product they would otherwise not be aware of or not have access to, the reseller makes money from the margin, the producer can produce and sell more product, everybody wins How it works in this case: * Some person sells something for price $x at a limited quantity * Someone buys up all the product for $x and resells it for $y > $x * Customers are prevented from accessing the product at the original price, the reseller makes money from the margin, the producer doesn't gain any advantage, only the reseller wins Can you honestly not see how this is different? It's morally bankrupt because it offers no value to anyone and entirely profits from the charity of the producer who sells a product below market value. And in the worst case the reseller ends up with tons of unsold product and is forced to dump it later or even throw it away completely (which depending on the margins may still turn a profit overall).
  - makomk 10y ago
    I think it may even be possible to dump all the risk of the items not selling and storage costs onto the original seller due to quirks of how Amazon works.
z3t4 10y ago
With high margins more entreprenors will enter the market. But in this case nintendo have a monopoly.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
> What's wrong with our society that some people can be so morally bankrupt and bereft of good sense. I don't know, but I shun, punish (by refusing to do business with them) and counter-market such people whenever I can. It's one thing to take a good and resell it for a larger price to a different audience; you're in essence making it more accessible and also take on some distribution headache, and thus deserve to cash in. That's how almost every brick and mortar store works. But it's another thing to buy off someone's stock only to turn around and resell it for more to the same customer base. That's, in my opinion, just plain sliminess.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
matwood 10y ago
> What's wrong with our society that some people can be so morally bankrupt and bereft of good sense. In the end, I think these scalpers won't sell for 8x because anintendo will just pump out more product. Still, it is sad to see this happen. Morally? It's a video game. Scalpers are fine. Blame Nintendo for not making more of them or charging a higher price so the limited supply met demand. Everyone will have their NES Classic in a month or two.
nilved 10y ago
It might not have seemed that way in writing, but in reading your post is contradictory. If the motivation for a person to do this is lost on you, you don't grok capitalism; and if that bothers you, you don't like capitalism.

crooked-v 10y ago

> bereft of good sense Investing money in something that is nigh-guaranteed to have excellent returns is very good sense for anyone with the time and effort to spend on reselling the product.

edgarvaldes 10y ago
And, let's be sincere here, this is not some essential item, like food or shelter.

e40 10y ago

What's wrong with our society that some people can be so morally bankrupt and bereft of good sense. This type of behavior is literally all around us. I recently listened to a podcast about this exact phenomenon. It featured a couple that had a special rug that drove cats crazy. They sold it on amazon for ~$35. A bunch of people bought them up and sold them on ebay for a lot more, using the drop-ship method (the reseller ordered it using their amazon account with the buyers shipping address). When people realized they were being ripped off, they returned it to the original seller, who had to handle the claims due to requirements by amazon. They lost 10's of thousands of $$. The creator called some of the people doing this and they laughed him off, telling him they were doing nothing wrong. It was on planet money's podcast, I think. I can try and find it if you're curious.

toomuchtodo 10y ago
The problem isn't the arbitrage (which is a core component of capitalism and profit [1]) these people are utilizing, its Amazon's draconian policy towards sellers. [1] Hat tip to patio11: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9087930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9087930 > They're likely using one of the world's oldest business models: "Buy things for $1, sell them for $2."
kbenson 10y ago
Episode 724: Cat Scam[1] 1: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/09/14/493810206/episode-724-cat-scam http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/09/14/493810206/episo...
- zizee 10y ago
  As a side note, that episode left me wondering why the original seller didn't open their own eBay store, listing the product at their desired price. I would have thought it would have effectively undercut the resellers and gain a large portion of the sales on eBay. Another note, Planet Money is pretty much my favourite "always on"* podcast. An podcast about economics might sound dull to some, but what a lot (maybe not on HN) people don't realise is "economics" is a really a study of human behaviour at the macro level, and a large part of human behaviour at the micro level. * serial was hugely addictive, but it only has short seasons, and each episode had what seemed like a huge wait between them.
  - kbenson 10y ago
    > As a side note, that episode left me wondering why the original seller didn't open their own eBay store, listing the product at their desired price. I would have thought it would have effectively undercut the resellers and gain a large portion of the sales on eBay. Yeah, as long as they were aggressive in making sure there were on multiple marketplaces, and came up first in searches, that would probably be the best response. The bit gain here isn't really the extra sales on the other marketplaces, it's the reduced returns which eat into their profits. > Another note, Planet Money is pretty much my favourite "always on"* podcast. An podcast about economics might sound dull to some, but what a lot (maybe not on HN) people don't realise is "economics" is a really a study of human behaviour at the macro level, and a large part of human behaviour at the micro level. Also one of my favorites. I also enjoy Freakonomics. For anyone that enjoys well produced podcasts, I highly recommend just about everything Gimlet Media produces. It was founded by one of the original founders of Planet Money (Alex Blumberg), and they've gotten quite few NPR alumni at this point (mostly from This American Life, which is basically a expert podcast production training ground at this point, Planet Money spawned from that as well). My current favorites are: - Startup - Excellent. They've gone through a few seasons now. I recommend starting at the beginning. - Reply All - For the most part excellent. They occasionally to into weird territory, but I laugh during their episodes quite often. The interplay between the hosts is great. Like friends that are kind of assholes to each other because they've been friends for so long, and you get a front row seat. - Science Vs - A new favorite of mine. At first I wasn't sure what to make of the delivery, which is very campy, but now I think it's perfect for what can be fairly dry subject matter. - Heavyweight - If you know who Jonathan Goldstein is, or have listened to This American Life enough to recognize his voice (and if you've heard it before, you probably will), you'll have a good idea of what you're in for. I recommend starting with Episode #2 to see if you like it, because it's amazing in both the names involved and the audacity of the idea. That said, I did tear up at the end of #1, as I have brothers of my own. - Mystery Show - Also excellent, but no longer continuing. Another TIL alumni, Starlee Kine. There's others in there too, which are all fairly good, but these, along with a smattering of others[1] I listen to are more than enough for me to handle. That said, Gimlet does have a triplet of new shows for their "fall lineup"[2], and some of those sound great too. Okay, that's enough about Gimlet, I've just been really happy about the quality of podcasts lately, and they've contributed a lot to that I think. Radiotopia seems to be the other (different) group that's got some quality content. It's kind of amazing that since I only really listen to them when in the car, I sometimes look forward to running errands just so I get a few more minutes in to listen. 1: 99% Invisible, Criminal (I believe Gimlet hired one of the founders of this for one of their new shows), Real Time with Bill Maher, Still Untitled: The Adam Savage Project, The Memory Palace. 2: https://gimletmedia.com/2016/11/01/introducing-gimlets-fall-lineup/ https://gimletmedia.com/2016/11/01/introducing-gimlets-fall-...
Lawtonfogle 10y ago
The problem is finding which point was wrong. What behavior was done here that should be discouraged or banned by society? People don't like the outcome, but where should the government intervene?

childifchaos 10y ago

How is this "morally bankrupt"? It's just smart. Every business on earth would do this in there sector if they had the chance. What's wrong with a smart and clever individual buying this to resell at 8x? It's not hurting anyone, it's just a stupid retro console. What's wrong with society? People are struggling and getting screwed over by governments and big business, they badly need income and here is a small opportunity to get a piece of that pie. Ultimately someone that wants the product who is happy to pay the price that it is sold for, because they deem it worth that price, ends up with the product in there life. And someone else manages to profit to, to gain some much needed income so they can purchase something they want in there life. Hardly morally bankrupt. There is no change in the outcome here. There are still the same amount of people with these consoles, enjoying them as before. Nobody is hurt. In fact you could argue that someone doing this is a net gain, because two people gain instead of one. Someone made a profit that wouldn't otherwise and someone got the console they wanted (and obviously didn't care about the price)

eridius 10y ago
> It's not hurting anyone, it's just a stupid retro console. It's hurting the people who are forced to pay $600 for a $60 item because they need one (e.g. a must-have gift for someone). It's hurting the people who wanted to buy one for $60 but cannot afford to buy one for $600. So yeah, it's hurting basically everybody who had any interest in buying the product.
- bunderbunder 10y ago
  If you're being "forced" to pay $600 for a $60 item because you must buy one right now, perhaps you need to stop and question the nature of your relationship with that person. If you are so bothered by having to wait for them to come back onto the market at $60 that it hurts you (as opposed to, say, just being a minor annoyance), perhaps you need to stop and question the nature of your relationship with yourself.
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  This argument is ridiculous. Otherwise there would be no such thing as luxury goods.

r00fus 10y ago

I really don't see why Nintendo didn't produce a bit more on launch - I mean, they're not some kickstarter newbie - don't they have some skills in demand-forecasting?

jedberg 10y ago
When you hear about how the latest Nintendo is sold out everywhere, it makes you want one more. They have slow production on purpose. If you could walk into any store and get one, it wouldn't be nearly as big a deal.
- bunderbunder 10y ago
  Not to mention that having the production capacity to meet initial demand on a popular product would be an huge waste of money. Best case scenario, a week or two after launch, the vast majority of that capacity would be sitting idle after the initial rush is over and the purchase rate tapers off. Worst case scenario, the product isn't as popular as you anticipated and you've got a big ol' writedown to deal with. (Atari anyone? Blackberry tablet?)
- odbol_ 10y ago
  Plus, you can just go to any garage sale and buy one of the original consoles with 100s of games for like $20
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    I don't seek out garage sales but look for old Nintendos when I end up at one and I never see them, never mind for cheap with a pile of games.
Spooky23 10y ago
It spikes demand. Crazy parents run all over the place looking for it. The winners are Nintendo, who gets sales in the 1Q, which is normally death for this kind of product, and the retailers, who get parents visiting daily and buying other crap. My brother spent weeks looking for the "cream pie in the face game" last year. In the process, he picked up a half dozen other board games.

salmonet 10y ago

Nintendo deserves some of the blame. They most likely created this shortage on purpose to create press.

AndrewKemendo 10y ago

This is one way that markets clear prices when demand edges production. There's are many ways to do it, for example auctions. In this case the price sensitivity of the market is lower than the producer set, so the market is willing to pay more for the good than the product is selling it at. When this pricing mismatch happens, there is the ability to close the pricing gap through repricing by a third party otherwise known as arbitrage. This is one of the more important functional requirements for a market and the producer can take advantage of this based on how they price. Nintendo could have priced the system much higher and seen the same output but it may not have made as big if a splash, so really it's Nintendo driving this frenzy because they and all other major companies are good at this. It's not a big it's a feature (really in this case).

metaphor 10y ago

Agreed. It's quite sad that the impetus is on Nintendo to flood the market with product. As of this post, there were 3,800+ posts on eBay[1]; there's at least an entire page-full listing Buy It Now @ $1000 or more. [1] http://www.ebay.com/sch/?_nkw=nes%20classic%20edition http://www.ebay.com/sch/?_nkw=nes%20classic%20edition

savanaly 10y ago

I feel like if you truly groked capitalism, you would be able to point out lots of its flaws, but also to realize that scalping is definitely not one of them. With supply limited like this, the optimal social outcome is for the X units produced to go to the X people in the world who would value them most, in other words the people who would be willing to pay the most (only exception I can think of to this is if someone values it at V dollars and only has a net worth of W dollars where W < V, but for the sums we're talking about with the NES I think almost everyone either has or can scrounge up V). In the final accounting with reselling on amazon, the goods end up where they are most highly valued. Sure, if we held a lottery to see who gets to buy the NESs at the sticker price rather than auctioning them, the people winning the lottery would be more happy than the people who end up winning the auction. But as a whole, society would be impoverished since it's an inefficient distribution (no room to prove it in a HN post, but it's not too hard to work out on paper when tallying up the welfare of nintendo, the scalpers and all the people who get to buy the NES under one scenario or the other).

typicalrunt 10y ago
I do understand capitalism, the point I made was that sometimes I don't have to like it. Scalping included. I don't need to prove my knowledge to you by pointing out lots of capitalism's flaws. Instead of reading my comment carefully, you decided to teach me about how basic supply and demand operate. Jesus, you are a self-absorbed piece of work.
- savanaly 10y ago
  I'm truly sorry if my comment affected you negatively, it wasn't my intention. I used to be an econ tutor and sometimes my urge to just type my thoughts that way comes out and I regret that it sounds like lecturing. Anyways, why do you think that, given all that, scalping is a bad thing then? Isn't getting the goods to where they're valued most a good thing? Who's getting heartbroken here? The people who can't afford one at the market price of $600? But most of them weren't going to get one anyways because of the limited supply. If there's something to not like it's the scarcity, right?

inimino 10y ago

Why do you think this is morally bankrupt? We aren't talking about wheat, but a superfluous luxury item. Where's the moral argument?

morgante 10y ago

What exactly is "morally bankrupt" about buying a mispriced good and reselling it at a proper price? People get very morally righteous about scalping, but I don't understand why at all. Resellers are correcting a distortion in the market and providing a value-added service.

pluma 10y ago
The only value they add is amplifying the scarcity. How it normally works is this: * Some person sells something locally for $x * There is demand outside that location for the same product * Someone buys the product locally for $x and sells it elsewhere for $y > $x * Customers are provided access to a product they would otherwise not be aware of or not have access to, the reseller makes money from the margin, the producer can produce and sell more product, everybody wins How it works in this case: * Some person sells something for price $x at a limited quantity * Someone buys up all the product for $x and resells it for $y > $x * Customers are prevented from accessing the product at the original price, the reseller makes money from the margin, the producer doesn't gain any advantage, only the reseller wins Can you honestly not see how this is different? It's morally bankrupt because it offers no value to anyone and entirely profits from the charity of the producer who sells a product below market value. And in the worst case the reseller ends up with tons of unsold product and is forced to dump it later or even throw it away completely (which depending on the margins may still turn a profit overall).
- makomk 10y ago
  I think it may even be possible to dump all the risk of the items not selling and storage costs onto the original seller due to quirks of how Amazon works.

z3t4 10y ago

With high margins more entreprenors will enter the market. But in this case nintendo have a monopoly.

TeMPOraL 10y ago

> What's wrong with our society that some people can be so morally bankrupt and bereft of good sense. I don't know, but I shun, punish (by refusing to do business with them) and counter-market such people whenever I can. It's one thing to take a good and resell it for a larger price to a different audience; you're in essence making it more accessible and also take on some distribution headache, and thus deserve to cash in. That's how almost every brick and mortar store works. But it's another thing to buy off someone's stock only to turn around and resell it for more to the same customer base. That's, in my opinion, just plain sliminess.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

matwood 10y ago

> What's wrong with our society that some people can be so morally bankrupt and bereft of good sense. In the end, I think these scalpers won't sell for 8x because anintendo will just pump out more product. Still, it is sad to see this happen. Morally? It's a video game. Scalpers are fine. Blame Nintendo for not making more of them or charging a higher price so the limited supply met demand. Everyone will have their NES Classic in a month or two.

nilved 10y ago

It might not have seemed that way in writing, but in reading your post is contradictory. If the motivation for a person to do this is lost on you, you don't grok capitalism; and if that bothers you, you don't like capitalism.