My favorite part of this is that it implies grifters are failing to offload their stock. They bought it all hoping to profit off of shortages, and then not only did Amazon and Ebay clamp down on reselling, there isn't actually a shortage. Justice.
I'm almost grateful for it; we're hitting peak America, peak capitalism, peak Westernism...
Stop the attention economy and you stop this nonsense.
But also, put these pressures on stores and supply chains and they'll learn to be more elastic which is _necessary_. If demand for a good skyrockets and everybody wants a good inventory at home, it shouldn't be a social evil to go stock up on a month or two of TP, on surgical masks for personal safety, on whatever.
We should have all been able to buy as many surgical masks as we wanted whenever we wanted, we would all be safer if that had been possible.
Shorten lead times and have faster ability to adjust capacity and _you make more money_.
The only peak I hope we're hitting is peak idiocy, where a large portion of people (actually the vast majority of people) choose to elect leaders based on emotional appeal to a chosen sect instead of using reason and valuing real competence.
The peaks I fear we're hitting are peak personal freedom, peak democracy, and peak privacy.
There is a cost, in lives, in not being able to do what China has done to limit and nearly stop the outbreak (once they decided it couldn't be blustered away). I hope we're able, willing, and eager to pay that cost and figure out when it is worth it and when it is not.
The word you're looking for is arbitrageur. Or scalper. Grifter implies some thing dishonest. Arbitrageurs are very up-front with what they're doing, and you get exactly why you're paying for.
By buying in bulk to arbitrage you're acting against the interests of Costco and their customers, and hoping you fly under the radar.
That's debatable. Plenty of small businesses buy Costco stuff to resell, or for business use. They even have business memberships! Unless they have explicit no resell notices (although even then it's unclear what legal force they have), I wouldn't say it's dishonest.
It was poorly worded, but if corporate had a button they could press to stop new entrants buying a bunch in hopes of selling online at high markup, I believe they would.
Trouble is, there's no way to filter them out, and any attempt may in itself signal a lack of faith in the system and result in more panic buying.
Except that the other market administratively blocked them from selling. Then the first market wouldn't reverse the purchase, leaving the would-be arbitrageurs holding the bag.
The others who carried inventory for a nontrivial period of time were market makers, and carried market maker risk. Market maker risk is the bid-ask moving against you when you are carrying inventory. These guys were basically carrying unhedged physical long positions in toilet paper thinking they had a free option to unwind at par, but Costco changed the game on them.
Not all of these guys were arbing.
National emergency price-gouger
I can’t think of a worse product to do this with. The daily newspaper, maybe.
If this really is scammers getting burned, they’re not getting my sympathy (the budget of sympathy-for-the-undeserving is mostly pledged anyway, for the people who insisted on going to Church this Sunday)
Search "17000 bottles of hand sanitizer". First article that came up for me that wasn't paywalled,
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/03/16/new-yo...