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Comment by PicassoCTs | Hacker News Reader

Scalpers hedge on the fragility of just-in-time - they milk the short-term thinkers for all they saved in the good times and are thus a healthy part of the market.

Why do we praise people betting on actors being hurt by bad decisions like (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry) but condemn the same behavior on the smaller scale of physical products?

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Scalpers hurt anyone launching a hardware product who doesn't have the order quantity to buy direct-from-manufacturer.

I, for one, am happy that I can get enough parts for a prototype run even if at 5x the price.

Especially as otherwise, those parts would just get sold to the car manufacturers and would be used to make ethically questionable products.

I don't get how it hurts anyone to have to pay market rate. If your product doesn't work at market prices, then that's your problem - not scalpers.

This kind of perspective where any intervention-free (often equated with 'free market') outcome is ipso facto a socially good outcome is so frustrating because it transcends policy discussions into morality/dogma. Are you opposed to efforts to curtail rent seeking more broadly?

Making honest prices illegal is the most destructive intervention you can do. "Scalpers" aren't rent-seeking, quite the opposite.

I think you'll find most electronics products available to be unprofitable if they had to use these scalpers as suppliers.

Scalpers do hurt innocent consumers, which is why they are so widely hated. Someone trying to buy their spouse a GPU or a PlayStation for Christmas isn't the one responsible for a fragile just-in-time supply chain. Many times, the problem isn't even the supply chain, it's just the fact that demand exceeds the total possible supply, like with concert tickets.

In the consumer space, there are many ways for vendors and retailers to combat scalpers, but their motivation to do so is minimal. They make the same money off a GPU or PlayStation regardless of who buys it.

Well, I guess it would be hard to scalp on of the closest managed inventory processes around. Thing is, only the last steps before FAL are real JIT, everything else is pretty much running on, more or less well amanged, inventory. Also, blaming the chip shortage exclusively on automotive and their mismanaged JIT is quite a theory, and an overly simplistic one.

Would they not harm also reguar manufacturers who just want to make a stock of some part before starting a manufacturing run ?

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