Retail Arbitrage at Walmart [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
The guy is a hustler, I can appreciate that. He works for himself, I can appreciate that.
However if lots of other people try to do the same thing then does all the competition create a situation where lots of people are squabbling over a few crumbs? It looks like its a niche. And its only a matter of time others try to muscle in on his turf.
3 PS3s guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sjhjFOw4Ok
It doesn't say they had to sell at a loss, just that they didn't get the ridiculous markup they hoped for.
The PS3 really was in short supply and prices did remain elevated. The article mentions that.
The last time I checked, your videos can also be de-monitized randomly without notifying you, because they "may not be suitable for advertising". This is done by bots 99% of the time and you'll have to have the video reviewed manually before you can run ads again (Yes, they're actually trying to get bots to recognize offensive content, and it's done with the content itself, not just the video title/desc).
I also once saw someone do a video subtitle/translation and strike the original owner for copyright infringement. Whether this was accidental or not I don't know, but it took days to resolve.
(this post is accurate based on how youtube worked ~6 months ago, it's possible they've changed things but I'm not betting on it)
Why does Western Society have a fixation on only doing things that make sense for the rest of your life?
Who cares how long it will last. Who cares about The rest of your life. Do something that's interesting NOW.
Let him enjoy it for however long he wants. When he doesn't enjoy it, or it doesn't work anymore, he'll find something else to do that he finds interesting. That's great for him! Maybe it's not the life you want, but that's not what we're talking about.
If you have a strong generational support system then I think the focus can shift onto what you want to do now versus what you need to do for later.
No, what's changed is expectation. In the 1830's a lot of people just got old and died, were impoverished and angry about it, but what were they going to do? Now we have widespread literacy and a middle class that doesn't expect poverty until you die as a retirement plan.
Yes, family and religion. I don't think American society was ever as multi-generational as in Asia or Europe. But, yes, AFAIU back then it was much more common for immediate and even distant families to live under the same roof, long-term or temporarily. Grandpa or Uncle Charlie too old to live alone after being widowed? Move him into your guest room. No hand-wringing negotiation required; no serious disruption to lifestyle.
My grandfather rented his basement to his best friend for years until the friend married, and then the two couples were best friends. It wasn't that the friend had fell on hard times or was wanting for anything; it was just because people back then demanded less personal space and were more comfortable living near or with each other. These days moving into your friends basement is practically a moral failing. I guess maybe because as society has become more diverse we have fewer signals to different in-group people from out-group people; we've been reduced to relying on independence and wealth as the most important markers of people's character.
"Man made $2500 doing X once, never to be repeated again" or "Man made $2500 in a year doing X" might be equally true headlines, but a lot less attention grabbing.
Here's another example:
"Man makes $2500 in a day by buying a lottery ticket".
That is a weird sentence, because buying a winning lottery ticket is a discrete, non-reproducible event - so why include "in a day", unless it is to suggest something to the reader?
Or another one:
"Man makes $2500 in a day by winning competition after preparing for months" - you can see where I'm going with this.
You railing against "Western Society" strikes me as off base, like you have an axe to grind. It doesn't matter to me if he does it once or for the rest of his life. That not why people post stuff like this to hacker.
However what does matter is this video was shared on HACKER NEWS, probably because of its entrepreneurial based content. Most of the links posted here have some sort of connection to either technology, science and/or entrepreneurship. It's not the latest javascript library, but he is using eBay + hustle to brick and mortar stores to generate revenue.
The question is it's relevance to this forum. The guy is trying to make a business, and exploiting gap between supply and demand. That part is interesting. The reason why it's relevant is "can anyone use this video to recreate a similar business?"
Is this video demonstration of a potential service a sustainable, repeatable and potentially scalable business model for others to emulate on this forum? My humble take on it is NO IT IS NOT.
> Who cares how long it will last
Literally most of the people who come to hacker news. We're not to watch some guy drive 700 miles to 20 Walmarts to buy 100+ monopoly board games. Most of us are interested to see if this can be a real business idea.
Which is why I conceded certain points about the idea. He's working for himself. He's hustling. I don't know if he does this full time or in addition to his regular job. There is something impressive to what he's doing. Making $2500 over the course of a weekend is pretty impressive. And if you could keep making $2500 per weekend doing this kind of thing that would be of interest to me, even if it isn't my thing.
I would assume because he isn’t doing something sustainable or long term so he takes any criticism of that personally?
And I agree with him. Not everything needs to be sustainable. Not everything needs to be profitable over the long haul. Sometimes getting set up to take advantage of a one-time event (e.g., "Snowcopalypse" T-Shirts) with a short horizon is worth doing and worth studying for future opportunities.
My personal take on what he's saying is "adapt or die."
I've been moving around Africa for 2.5 years now, and often things from "Western Society" strike me as quite odd or strange. The longer I stay here the more obvious it is how severely broken "our" society really is.
Often I see "Western people" promoting things that don't generate happiness, and attacking things that do generate happiness, and I feel inclined to question that, because that doesn't seem like the right thing to do.
It's not western society, it's the ethos of the upper-middle class of western society, which emphasizes not only career stability but intergenerational success. And of course it's also concerned with differentiating itself from lower classes, thus the skepticism/condescension.
Poor and working-class Americans don't talk like that because their time horizons are as equally short as Chinese and Russian hustlers/go-getters.
Is being a waiter, or a checkout clerk, or a fast food employee, or a Chili's line cook?
https://jalopnik.com/illegal-exporter-ordered-to-pay-dealers...
The price of the illegally imported equivalents will be substantially lower than those legally imported by the manufacturer.
This will have the effect of driving down the FMV of the vehicle in the region.
But if the manufacturer can't afford to match that FMV because of legal trade and transport overheads, the effect will be reduced sales of the vehicle in the region overall, because the illegal channels obviously can't operate on a large enough scale to 100% replace the legal channel from the manufacturer's perspective.
The illegal channel doesn't have to (and won't) operate at legal-replacement scales to impact the region's perception of the vehicle's FMV.
Also consider what effect it may have on potential buyers interested in buying legally, but exposed to news of the imported brand being so overpriced and so desirable that there's a substantial illicit market emerging to fulfill that demand. The honest consumer might be completely turned off by this, thinking their new car may be a theft target because it's this desirable import brand people are committing risky trade crimes just to sell as new in the country.
The situation seems likely to harm the overall sales volume for the region.
So Widgets Ltd. is selling widgets for $100 in China, but $30 in the US. Lots of money to be made in the gap.
They spent collectively north of over $20,000 USD on Levi's, iStuff, Nikes, etc.
Packed it all up into 10-15 suitcases for transit back to their home towns.
It's more comparable to the unlicensed Pirate Joe's of Canada stockpiling goods by driving across the border and buying them manually in Trader Joe's stores and selling for a premium.
With things like breadboards, wires, common sensors and microcontrollers, LEDs, etc, there's often a 3-10x difference in price between what you'd pay on ebay and what you'd pay on taobao. Amazon charges maybe $3 to tack prime shipping onto an item and handle the whole customer service/returns headache, so it seems like easy money.
Sure, the provenance is dubious, but if you are buying something from a third-party seller called "elegoo" at bottom-barrel prices, you are presumably expecting that no expense has been attempted.
But if anything, the tariffs have made those bulk-import goods more expensive and less competitive with higher-quality alternatives.
right, so, i guess i'm wondering more about physically compact, relatively expensive products that an individual might buy in China and bring back and sell at a lower price than it's officially available for from tariff paying retailers. i'm sure this is going on a lot now, but i wonder if it might increase in the near future.
(e.g. replacement parts like iPhone screens (which are so often intercepted by Apple and US customs), except that that's a special case involving a huge powerful corporation. )
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/07/26/539552579/epis...
This is a very deliberately sensational way of looking at it. One of the big reasons the one price law works is because there are people who do arbitrage. The first comers to an arbitrage opportunity make a lot of money. Other people come in and try to undercut the first comers and so they make less money and so on. In the long term basically the arbitrage profit tends towards zero.
Next up: English major at NPR discovers the economic secret to free lunch.
She does it because it's fun and she's bored but so far she's really damn good at it.
I find it funny that someone with an advanced degree in finance spends her spare time doing that but it's a hobby and she makes more than I do playing Chess (which is zero) so I can't laugh.
My understanding is that people (like this guy) who are good at this pretty rapidly graduate to doing drop shipping and more online speciality work.
The guys that make a living in retail arbitrage usually end up buying direct from manufacturer in large quantities. At that point, they still call themselves a retail arbitrage startup because "distributor" is much less sexy.
I'm sure Amazon and other sites do penalize for cancelling orders, so one has to do a cost-benefit analysis if they make a mistake in pricing. E.g. the source increased prices recently but do you want to risk your reputation of your online store?
The risk you're taking on is that you can fulfill the order more cheaply than what the customer bought it for.
I'm not a dropshipper, btw. Just someone who's been in charge of a book store's online sales (including on Amazon) for a while. Dropshippers actually drive me crazy because they're usually really bad customers. Many of them make lots of demands of the seller like emailing the tracking number separately (even though Amazon emails it automatically), and removing any pricing info from packing slips, or removing my store's name from packing slips. One drop shipper even asked that I put their store's name onto our packing slip and remove my store's name. All these demands that dropshippers have really slow down our order processing, since almost every single other order we get has no special demands.
Additionally, since they're not the end recipient of the shipments, if the end recipient has a question or issue they have to pass it along to us, and they often do so very poorly. They're often rude, frequently muddle the question, and sometimes make additional, outlandish demands, like "my customer thinks it's taking too long. send another book via overnight shipping or I'll leave a negative review!" I try to report as many of the worst offenders as possible to Amazon, but that takes time out of what I should be working on instead, and often Amazon doesn't care because Amazon Support can be almost as bad.
They don't care whether you actually have the item in hand as long as you ship it in a timely fashion.
Similarly there is /r/churning where you use credit cards and line of credit to extract profit by strategically exploiting promotional offers.
I worked out of Toronto for about 2 years as a food safety inspector, which meant driving around all day. It was horrible. Traffic is so draining to your moral.
It was going for 50-100$ on eBay. The only way to get it was to get a subscription to Nintendo Power during the promotion so... yeah.... I was getting a few dozen Nintendo Power magazines in the mail every month for a year and pocketing 20-70$ per subscription after the sub price and eBay/PayPal fees.
Funny thing was, if people messaged me and just asked how I got the copies I flat out told them "just go get a Nintendo Power subscription".
In any case, I found it endlessly amusing when I would go to Gamestop and see used copies of the Collector's Edition marked for sale at $50 or so. Particularly with the giant "NOT FOR RESALE" text on the cover:
http://static4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110103022630/zelda/i...
https://zelda.gamepedia.com/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Collector%2...
>In the United Kingdom, the Collector's Edition was available to GameCube owners who mailed Nintendo proof of purchase of one of several selected GameCube games, including The Wind Waker, F-Zero GX, Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, 1080° Avalanche, Mario Party 5, and Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. Consumers could also send proof of purchase of two titles from the Player's Choice range to receive the game
I used to invite local users out to Grocery Outlet in Portland (bargain grocery store), give them all $50 and see who found the best/most profitable stuff.
Once when testing the app at a Goodwill down the street from the office I found a book we ended up selling for around $100 (paid $3 for it).
[0] https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/standard-mileage-rates
what he did was visit 17 Walmart's in 22 hours and drove 700 miles.
he paid $19.82 for each game and shipping averaged $9 per.
I'd be really interested in knowing real profit on this. I'm sure it's positive, but when you factor all these costs, the per hour pay isn't "$2500 in one day!!!"
Maybe he didn't and it is just luck, classic survivor bias.
Maybe what you see is just the highlight of what is essentially a full time job. I have a friend who exploited arbitrage opportunities, and made a few thousands like this. While it is easy to see the surface, there is a lot going on behind the scenes. He sometimes spent the entire day packaging stuff, most of his travels included visits to potentially interesting shops, he has to deal with shipping problems and dishonest customers, and he had a very good knowledge of the market. And while big wins sometimes happened, most of the money were made through a large number of smaller gains. He enjoyed it when he did that, a bit less now, and he makes more through his day job (nurse), so he stopped doing it.
Or maybe he gets the sales data (or brochures), and looks up the big discount items on amazon. Eventually you get a feel for what is a good deal. I have done this in the past with 3g/4g modems, you know how much they sell for, you know when a sale will get you a good deal.