What's this about?
Are the bots operated to manipulate the market, by buying up the whole supply to then sell at a higher price?
Are the bots operated to manipulate the market, by buying up the whole supply to then sell at a higher price?
I think a CAPTCHA in the ordering process would make more sense.
But always better to blame scalpers. They can’t defend themselves if they don’t even exist.
Anecdotal, but IMO lots... just depends on the industry.
It's a good situation for someone to come along and buy up some or all of your risk - especially for stuff like ticket sales. Many corporations like Ticketmaster design around this, and bake this part of the supply chain into their pricing/experience.
There was another thread here a while back where someone shared their experience writing sneaker scalping bots. Apparently, CAPTCHA tokens are valid for a minute or so, so this guy would solve heaps of them just before the form went live and cache the validation tokens.
Then, when the form went live, the real humans who didn't have cached CAPTCHA tokens would be slowed down even more.
Net result is that the botters ended up getting an even greater share of the supply than without CAPTCHAs.
I mean there's whole services like 2captcha that give you a 24/7 on-demand API for this, and for some of their offerings/solvers there are specifically real human robots on the other end doing the CAPTCHA.
2captcha works very very well to the point that CAPTCHA is a very much solved problem especially for the popular services like Google's reCAPTCHA.
RPis have, and will continue to be, aimed at education and enrichment, and the makers/retailers will take steps to ensure that as many people as possible can get ahold of them at a low price.
In this case it is a vendor deciding not to sell to a customer who is acting in a way they perceive to be bad faith. This is their right as a vendor.
In this case it happens that the bad faith is at comfortably odds with the objectives of the vendor and product manufacturer.
As high incomes diverge even further from low (and even median) incomes, we're doing to see this happen a lot more.
And I think until this chip shortage is over in particular, we will see a lot more measures like this.
I fully applaud this -- I love my Pi 4 and I want more people to experience what these little things can do, without paying over the odds to cynical manipulative stains.
If a gas station started selling gasoline at half price, it would be instantly overrun with everyone from Harry with his pickup truck full of jerry cans to empty tanker trucks.
Tends to make a lot of money for a few people until the market inevitably crashes which often puts many of the suppliers out of business.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/business/global/25chocola...
Anti-scalping measures are going to be necessary more and more often as the super-rich diverge from the merely rich and the rich diverge from the poor etc.
Scalpers are going to slit their own throats by price gouging Pis. Demand for Pis will dry up if the price stays at $100.
There's no such thing as a "correct price". There is a "highest price" that enough people will still pay such that all inventory is sold, but that's not the same thing as being "correct". It depends on what the seller is optimizing for.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation wants their hardware to be sold at particular price points, and they've worked hard to keep costs down so it can be sold at those price points. They've chosen to forego extra profit, with the goal of getting this hardware into as many hands as possible, especially the hands of people who want to learn and may not be able to afford a higher price.
Sure, this isn't consistent with our profit-at-all-costs capitalist culture, but that doesn't make it wrong. And retailers are free to do their best to ensure that these products get into the hands of actual end-users, rather than parasitic, speculative, profiteering scalpers who provide no added value.
In the case of Adafruit, they would much rather have a bunch of satisfied end customers who are able to buy their products and get use out of them, than a bunch of satisfied scalpers. That's their choice (and frankly, I think much better for their business), and it's their right to impose technical measures to try to deny bots from their platform. (They may not always succeed, but that's another matter.)
> If a gas station started selling gasoline at half price, it would be instantly overrun with everyone from Harry with his pickup truck full of jerry cans to empty tanker trucks.
Just like Adafruit is trying to do with bots, that gas station would be well within its rights to refuse to serve tanker trucks or pickup trucks full of gas cans, if their goal in slashing prices was to sell gasoline cheaply to end customers.
Don't these "bots" all have unique payment details?
If something is merely priced incorrectly, then someone else can also produce that same good and charge more for it. As a reminder, snatching up everything through automation is not "producing a good", it's market interference.
Or is it the 110th?
(The 140th and 144th also seem relevant here.)
0. Adafruit cannot raise prices of rpis due to contract.
1. Adafruit makes the same amount of money regardless of who buys the product.
2. It is in the incentive of Adafruit to increase it's customers good will. It is considered an asset for Adafruit (Companies account for this via 'Good Will').
3. People generally don't like scalpers, "Scalpers bad"
4. By providing means to avoid scalpers, they are capturing some of the profit that scalpers would be making and converting it to a 'Good Will' asset, "Adafruit Good"
5. 'Good Will' + money > money
Thank you for participating in economic analysis.
Companies do not account for this as "good will".
Accounting "goodwill" is the price an acquiring company pays above the accounting value of the business being bought, which is a notional number usually (much) lower than the economic value of a successful business.
Interestingly (at least to a weird human like me), there is something of a relationship between accounting goodwill and goodwill like the value of a brand. The reason why goodwill only shows up on a balance sheet after an acquisition is, I imagine, to follow the accounting principal of conservatism.
Let's spice things up with a hypothetical. I'm going to make up some numbers here so don't go around telling people I revealed some privileged information on HN.
Say you're Mr. McIlhenny, the() owner of a major private company called the McIlhenny Company. The McIlhenny Company's primary endeavor is selling a beloved hot sauce called Tabasco. On the income statement side, McIlhenny has revenues of $200 million and profits of $30 million. On the balance sheet, Tabasco has no liabilities (no long term debt, no payables, etc) and its only asset is cash, of which it has $1 million. Since (equity) = (assets) - (liabilities), this company has a "book value" of $1 million. You might notice that the book value seems absurd - a company that makes tens of millions of dollars a year and has a product with a major following would be a total steal of a purchase at $1 million!
A few purchasers attempt to woo you, and they each make offers for about $100 million. You go with Carl Icahn's offer. Now, the company's book value is $100 million (the balance sheet has $1 million in cash and $99 million in goodwill on it).
Clearly, the day before the acquisition, the company had roughly $99 million in "real" or "intrinsic" goodwill, but that didn't show up in the balance sheet. Why's that? One reason is conservatism. For many intangible assets, there's an art to choosing a number. If you let CEOs put in a goodwill number, many would probably throw in huge numbers as they vastly hype up the value of their brand and reputation. So, instead, we have a market approach to calculating goodwill by using transactions.
However, accounting principals allow companies downwards. So the CEO of Nikola isn't allowed to turn his bogus claims into dollars on the goodwill line item, but he is allowed to reduce goodwill if he buys a battery manufacturer that turns out to be a fraud too.
() It's owned by the McIlhenny family, but no need to complicate things
It is possible that bots are creating artificial scarcity, but that would require either one bot to corner the market or collusion among enough bots to control prices. It seems equally plausible to me that RPIs would be scarce regardless.