I'm....not really talking about people like you. I honestly don't care when it's so little profit. I should've used another example like the one I saw last week of someone selling an Apple smart keyboard for $550. That's just ridiculous . Whoever pays that deserves to get ripped off
Do you think they're a bit douchey for trying to make extra money off selling something that's in short supply? Or is it just the free market and who cares?
Personally I think it's a bit douchey. If I bought a pencil or a keyboard and decided I didn't want them, I would feel lucky to just sell them for what I bought them for. But to actually charge more for them than I even paid? Why the heck would I do that? The thought would never even occur to me. I don't know. Just thinking out loud here
It's scalping, and I hate scalping more than just about anything. Just because you were lucky enough to find something others are looking for doesn't give you the right to make money off of your luck.
Yeah, because it's all about "luck".It's scalping, and I hate scalping more than just about anything. Just because you were lucky enough to find something others are looking for doesn't give you the right to make money off of your luck.
It's scalping, and I hate scalping more than just about anything. Just because you were lucky enough to find something others are looking for doesn't give you the right to make money off of your luck.
Meh. I don't feel too strongly about all this. But one has to admit that scalpers are parasites.
In the supply chain, everyone has something to contribute--the design, the manufacturing, the distribution, the retail. Every step has value added.
Except for the scalper, who takes a disproportionately large piece of the pie, and adds absolutely nothing of value.
Of course these are not life saving drugs or staple crops, so who cares. No one really needs an Apple Pencil to live.
If this (bolded) were the case, then why does anyone buy scalped tickets? In a free economy, I only buy something if I feel like it's better than my alternatives; that is, if buying that particular item makes me better off than any other option I'm aware of. The calculus is the same for sellers of a good. Indeed, the only way a trade ever takes place is if the well-being of everyone involved is improved. That's value created.
What the scalper does -- the target of a lot of ill-informed hate -- is equalize supply and demand, reallocating, say, baseball game tickets from low-valued uses to higher-valued uses. You may be willing to pay a $20 premium to watch your favorite team play, but there is a lot more value created if the person, only in town for one night and willing to pay a $500 premium, would get a ticket. Indeed, the scalper's operation can only be profitable if the current ticket price isn't sustainable -- that is, if there are far more people willing to buy tickets at the stated price than there are tickets to sell.
That's been my take on this for a while.I have no problem with it.
Free market and all that.
What did the resellers do to earn any money? They took a product that was available to (almost) no one and made it available to everyone! Imagine a world where scalping is highly illegal, and say the punishment is so severe (execution, entire family killed) that no one ever does it. Apple, in the interest of marketability, has to set prices far in advance. So, faced with the recent supply issues we are very aware of, who gets the $100 Pencil? They can't be resold, so the lucky few that get them are the first, say, 15 people that show up to the Apple Store on the first day. This is not ideal, as there are a lot more people than these 15 that would buy a Pencil for $100 on the first day -- to the extent that we can't even reasonably expect these first 15 people to be the specific 15 people that valued having a Pencil the most (graphic designers, note takers, etc.). To make matters worse, the people that actually want a Pencil badly can't even buy one through the lucky 15 that happened to get one on the first day!What did the resellers do to earn ANY extra money? They took stock that could've been sold to someone else and put someone in a position where their only option was to either pay insane price to them or wait. When they wouldn't have had to wait otherwise. There was a bunch of phones in stock right before they walked in. You could say "well they can be patient and just wait" but why should they have had to when there were some product in stock?
How would you feel if you made a product to sell to customers but before a real customer could buy them, someone came in and bought your product from you and offered your customers that same product at a higher price?
I'm gonna say not illegal...but very douchey
Right, what's being discussed here is scalping. This isn't about buying something, deciding you don't like it, and then reselling it for a profit. This is about buying up a bunch of something, creating scarcity, and then selling it for a marked up price.its called "scalping" - where an individual who is not a retailer buys something up that's in short supply to then try and sell it for a massive profit - its really extortion and holding the average consumers to ransom in a way - I really hope governments make laws to prevent it and those who engage in it are prosecuted - it is a devious exploitation of the general consumer.
normal retailers make their profit from buying at wholesale prices and usually selling close to the RRP, which is the same as the official store, so the consumer is not being exploited. People who buy things up in short supply, like tickets, apple pencil, with no intention of using them, only to try and make massive profits above the RRP need to get an honest job.
They're upselling to people who cannot wait to buy it. If you wait, you can buy it from apple. So again, its not really a huge deal, unless you're willing to spend 10x the purchase price to be one of the first to own a given apple product.Right, what's being discussed here is scalping. This isn't about buying something, deciding you don't like it, and then reselling it for a profit. This is about buying up a bunch of something, creating scarcity, and then selling it for a marked up price.
So you are deciding what are noble reasons for purchasing a product and which reasons are not? Do tell.Right, what's being discussed here is scalping. This isn't about buying something, deciding you don't like it, and then reselling it for a profit. This is about buying up a bunch of something, creating scarcity, and then selling it for a marked up price.
It's not just "douchey," it's malignant. Even if you ignore the fact that these people are profiting off of doing nothing and forcing everyone else to either pay a higher price or wait longer, they have nothing to lose. We had a guy on these forums asking if we all thought it was a good idea for him to get into scalping when a new iPad was going to be released. His plan, if he couldn't get the price that he wanted? Return them to the Apple store. That would waste some of Apple's resources and possibly force them to sell the device as "refurbished," at a reduced cost.
If you say "yeah, but Apple is rich enough" then you're missing the point. And this isn't about a free market. This is market manipulation, and inserting yourself into the loop. It's parasitic. I don't know that there's a way to make it illegal, but I applaud companies that try to make these types of practices more difficult.
Right, what's being discussed here is scalping. This isn't about buying something, deciding you don't like it, and then reselling it for a profit. This is about buying up a bunch of something, creating scarcity, and then selling it for a marked up price.