> Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe another seller buys the item and sends it to another prep center. The preppers are constantly getting packages from Amazon, which they unbox and repackage and send back to Amazon.
Ah, the efficiency of capitalism.
More seriously, this is a weirdly organic process. Just as anything edible will be infested with life within a short time, a huge algal bloom of businesses develops to feed off this arbitrage. It shouldn't make sense to do all this, but the endless search for ever-tinier market inefficiencies to live off somehow calls it in to being.
I'm reminded of https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scheme-Full-Employment-reissued/dp/... , a novel in which vans endlessly circulate among a series of depots carrying parts for other vans, until someone discovers that the whole thing has no underlying purpose and the scheme collapses.