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Can you buy out their inventory, sell them for $36 online, and help everyone save a dollar, or is this the same old "Retailers treated it as a loss leader"?

Amazon/eBay prices are indeed gospel. You can ship something like this across the country for <$5 so location doesn't matter unless you're talking tariffs

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I'm sure Microcenter is not selling Pi Zeroes at a loss. They're an authorized retailer selling at the part's MSRP. They do sometimes make these available only in store, not online, once they sell out online and I don't think it's a mystery why a retail business would do that.

Why are you so confident? Raspberry Pi's prospectus says "unit gross profit margin of 20 per cent. for us and 10 per cent. for our ARs" and they give an example: "sell it to our ARs for $90, which in turn would sell it to the end user for $100". AR=Approved Resellers and delivery costs are paid by the reseller.

Is 10%/$1.50 enough to pay for the retailer's freight, ~3% fee to accept credit cards, inventory carrying, rent, payroll, shrinkage, support/RMA, and fraud?

https://data.fca.org.uk/artefacts/NSM/Portal/NI-000098822/NI...

Those are both extraordinarily low profit margins. Good on them!

Meh, the real profit margin is in scalping. RPi's retail price requirements ensure that scalpers make a profit while it stays out of stock in official channels

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