The subjects of this story, Matt Colvin and Noah Colvin, spent days driving from store to store, buying up all of the antiseptic supplies the stores had. Then they ordered pallets more online wherever they could. Everywhere they bought, they tried to completely clean out the supplier's stock.
Then of course they started selling their hoard online for multiples of their purchase price.
I don't say this lightly: Fuck these assholes. If this article is accurate, then these guys are true pieces of human shit. Amazon and Ebay should be applauded for shutting them down.
Some rise in prices is natural and expected; the only alternative is enforced rationing. But what these guys do is different; they're trying to create privation and desperation in the market so they can profit from it.
It's difficult -- maybe impossible -- to make this activity illegal in a way that doesn't critically threaten the legitimate free market, and that's an important aspect of the evil that these people do.
The amount of rationalization on their part makes me want to vomit. That Dollar General in Kentucky was there and provisioned for the needs of it's local market.
Them jumping in and clearing things out completely blows the hell out of what is a carefully optimized logistics network tuned via competition to keep prices down, and doubling down on resource expenditure to get product from manufacturer to end user at the cheapest cost possible by inflating the number of miles it has to physically travel all in the name of maybe being able to get away with massive price markups.
This behavior is why we can't ever seem to have nice things. Fuck these people and their reckless chicanery. May their reputations follow them for the foreseeable future.
If these griefers blew out your "carefully optimized logistics network tuned via competition to keep prices down", then maybe there's a problem with it, and its ability to react to crisis or manipulation.
What specific rules of the free market did they break? Are you suggesting we should have anti-hoarding regulations imposed against the free market to keep these individuals out of it?
I'm saying, when the ship is sinking, it is probably the absolute worst time to go and try to collect all of the life vests on the ship and preach the virtues of the Free Market while trying to fleece people right and left out of whatever you can.
If you happen to be in a fleet of sinking ships, it's an even worse idea to go to other ships, hoard their life vests, and try to sell them back at a markup.
The message here should not be difficult to understand. Those that use the Market to bite the hand that makes the Market possible would be wise to note what happens to the dog that bites the hand that feeds it.
Hell, maybe you're more of a visual person. Obligatory XKCD.
If you can't understand these basic, generally universal tenets of human existence, I really don't know what else to tell you than to tread cautiously, and don't complain when you end up suffering the consequences for your actions.
If you still don't get it, then I can only assume Mr. Sinclair's nugget is in play.
"It is difficult to get a person to understand something when their salary depends upon them not understanding it."
They weren't taking advantage of those prices in the sense of getting access to something needed they couldn't otherwise afford. They were exploiting arbitrage opportunities to inflate prices in order to decrease overall access to a universally needed resource.
That represents scarcity inducement via supply chain disruption due to supply that is generally sufficient for a particular area's needs getting diverted to parts undisclosed without the tight feedback chain created by integration of distributor's inventory/purchasing systems. Those are the important signals. Not some idiot chucking things around Willy nilly through Amazon.
> Mr. Colvin does not believe he was price gouging. While he charged $20 on Amazon for two bottles of Purell that retail for $1 each, he said people forget that his price includes his labor, Amazon’s fees and about $10 in shipping. (Alcohol-based sanitizer is pricey to ship because officials consider it a hazardous material.)
If it's FBA, he only has to pay to ship the items in bulk to Amazon. If it's FBM, Amazon actually gives you a shipping credit (though when I was doing it years ago, it often wouldn't cover the full cost to ship it).
Mr. Colvin does not believe he was price gouging. While he charged $20 on Amazon for two bottles of Purell that retail for $1 each, he said people forget that his price includes his labor, Amazon’s fees and about $10 in shipping. (Alcohol-based sanitizer is pricey to ship because officials consider it a hazardous material.
This is bollocks. Anybody wrongly offended, should try to figure out which one is wrong, the word or the concept of feeding on misery. This person is price gouging.
Slightly offtopic, but should you need sanitizer and your local stores are out of stock — perhaps due to people like the subjects of this article — you can make your own based on this guide from the WHO:
https://www.who.int/gpsc/5may/Guide_to_Local_Production.pdf
My local grocery store was out of hand sanitizer mid week. When I went this morning there were two shopping carts full of it by the front door, being sold at the regular price. Didn't look like anyone was buying any. The store likely was out mid week because of people like Mr. Colvin. They thought they could corner the market and know nothing about the ability of the US logistics system to resupply in face of a small increase in demand likely caused by speculators rather than a huge spike in demand.
> I’m not looking to be in a situation where I make the front page of the news for being that guy who hoarded 20,000 bottles of sanitizer that I’m selling for 20 times what they cost me.
Why do you immediately jump to the assumption that he's going to engage in tax fraud? Or are you wishing for extrajudicial punishment when someone does a "bad" thing that's not illegal?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22574688