[klintcho]

A simple "pre-ordering"-queue seems it would decrease scalper interest as well (?) as it would be much more risky to order a bunch, hope you get early in the queue and sell to people who might get their machine just little time later.

Let people put up a small deposit as well for getting a place in the queue, and it'll be deducted whenever you buy the machine. Keep the deposit if you cancel your place in line. Would incentivize less manipulation as well.

I've been trying to get a PS5 for 2 years now, and I refuse to pay some scalper 200USD more than market price, out of principle. (But I guess that is also why I still don't have one :) )

[grepfru_it]

I wrote a quick bash/jq script that would query target's redsky API to find out when an xbox series was available at my local target. I dropped this script into Rundeck and set it to notify me on success (success being an available xbox). One random Tuesday I got an alert but it was also dinner time. I saw ~230 available and thought enough time for me to eat dinner and place an order. Well 15 minutes later it was sold out. Fast forward two weeks later, i'm hanging out on a Saturday and get another alert. ~300 available this time. I spent 5 minutes trying to download the target app and then realized i had to make an account and by that time the available count dropped to ~180. I grabbed my wife's phone (she lives at target) and immediately placed a pickup order for the Xbox. I picked it up one hour later.

Don't pay scalpers, just use technology as your friend :) An old coworker did something similar but he wrote a chrome extension to do the same.

I'm sorry if someone uses this knowledge to scalp nextgen systems.

[somethoughts]

>> Let people put up a small deposit as well for getting a place in the queue

Pre-ordering with a deposit is definitely a very creative/smart accounting hack that Tesla (and Amazon) has used pretty effectively. It creates a negative cash conversion cycle (get the money upfront from your customer before you have to pay your suppliers) - which is highly profitable - especially when there is known demand.

[chii]

and psychologically, a person who have put up a deposit would more likely imagine they'd like the product (a form of loss aversion).

[orangecat]

I've been trying to get a PS5 for 2 years now, and I refuse to pay some scalper 200USD more than market price

Assuming the scalpers are able to sell their supply, what they're charging is the market price.

(But I guess that is also why I still don't have one :) )

Yup.

[dahart]

> Assuming the scalpers are able to sell their supply, what they’re charging is the market price.

Are you trying to suggest the situation is somehow optimal? Market prices in short supply situations cause market inefficiencies, and this is one of them. The old platitude is that this inefficiency is only less bad than what would happen otherwise. Of course that thinking is rarely put forth with careful thinking about the alternatives, nor admissions of the many times in history that preventing inefficiencies actually worked.

Wouldn’t it be better if Sony received the market value themselves, and invested the money in the PS6? Wouldn’t it be better if we were not encouraging people who add negative value to the system to create artificial scarcity merely for the purposes of extracting extra dollars? The problem with your argument is that for markets to be free, customers need both choice and access to information, and supply needs to be able to meet demand. Scalpers hoarding are effectively an anti-free-market force on top of inducing inefficiency for profit. It’s a schadenfreudey bonus when scalpers get stuck with supply because they overestimated demand, but that doesn’t actually amount to a market correction, it just adds even more inefficiency, money wasted on top of money wasted.

[orangecat]

Wouldn’t it be better if Sony received the market value themselves, and invested the money in the PS6?

Of course. The best outcome would have been for them to start with something like a cosmetically different "founders edition" that's more expensive and then to release the normal version when supply becomes available. But they decided not do to that, probably because the same people screaming about scalpers would vilify them for "price gouging" (which for nonessential products is a silly concept).

Wouldn’t it be better if we were not encouraging people who add negative value to the system to create artificial scarcity

The scarcity isn't artificial. There are more people who want to buy a PS5 at MSRP than there are PS5s. Scalpers are only adding to scarcity if they're sitting on inventory they're not selling, which there's no incentive for them to do.

The problem with your argument is that for markets to be free, customers need both choice and access to information

What choice or information do customers lack? If you want a PS5 your choices are to pay market price to a scalper, or spend a lot of time watching stores or running bots and trying to get lucky. This is all widely known.

Are you trying to suggest the situation is somehow optimal?

Obviously the optimal situation is for the shortage to be eliminated. The next best is for Sony to charge the market-clearing price. With both of those off the table, then probably the current situation is the best available. Do you have a better solution?

[jterrys]

Oh stop. That's not the market price. Don't try to bring in juvenile community college intro to econ classes into this.

[charcircuit]

How is it not the market price? Even if you subtracted platform fees that doesn't really change his point.

[samk_]

something something price gouging.

[charcircuit]

>I've been trying to get a PS5 for 2 years now, and I refuse to pay some scalper 200USD more than market price

If it's been 2 years I think you have been underestimating the market price of a ps5.