[TeMPOraL]

A problem I see is that the reseller is getting money for creating an artificial scarcity (buying off the stock of the original seller). It doesn't feel to me like an ethical behaviour. You portray it as making an unsolicited offering to the Gods of the Market on behalf of the original seller, but I don't think many people find a positive value in that. On the other hand, compare an example situations without scalping, and with 5x scalping:

  NO SCALPING
  Original seller gets: 1x price
  Customer pays: 1x price
  
  5x SCALPING
  Original seller gets: 1x price
  Reseller gets: 4x price
  Customer pays: 5x price

This is simple leeching. Customers pay 5x the price they could have, the seller gets still just the original amount of money. I think the situation is strictly worse than without scalping.

There are other arguments for and against to be made, but I think this one is enough to see why many people - myself included - find this practice distasteful and antisocial.

[savanaly]

Ok, put in that light I understand why there's a gut reaction of negativity. But when evaluating economic welfare of society, it is nearly an iron-clad rule to view all humans equally, and the scalpers are no exception. So we should try to push back against our gut reaction and look at it rationally.

Once we accept that the welfare of resellers matters just as much as customers, it's clear that the situation is not strictly worse with scalping.

As you helpfully tallied up there, the gains and losses of everyone involved is the same in terms of money changing hand in either case, but in the latter case of scalping, the world is richer, because in addition to the money you paid or lost, people in the world who have an NES celebrate it to the degree they like the NES. And that has to be higher for the people who won it via auction rather than blind luck.

I can see an objection coming, and that's that in the real world it's not blind luck, since often the people in a no scalping world camp out for days to try and be the winners of the lottery. But this is not a good outcome, because while this does mean that the people who value the NES most will tend to get it, it also leads to ruinous competition in terms of who is willing to spend the most time in line. The hours wasted to the line have to then be counted as a negative in the tally and that makes that option arguably worse than the blind lotto and certainly worse than the auction.

[matwood]

To really create the scarcity the scalper must continue to buy all of the items that come out. That is not going to happen, because they never created the scarcity in the first place. Nintendo released too few items to start, and possibly charged too low of price.

The customer is also not forced to pay anything. There is typically a short timeframe where the items are out of stock.

I personally find tons of value in scalping. I've done it myself with tickets, and bought tickets in the same manner. It lets me trade time (waiting at a website or in line) for money.

[witty_username]

If it were easy to scalp, people would do it themselves, so it is nontrivial.

Scalpers also make it easier to buy the product; without scalping one can not be sure whether one will get the product or not.